‘OK. Shoot. If it’s a bullet to the heart, I can take it.’
‘No, that’s not it.’ Diana was now turning rather pink. ‘You made a huge impression on me at the Dower House. I asked my brother heaps of questions about you after dinner. He was –’ she hesitated – ‘well, to say “complimentary” would be an understatement. And he told me the truth about why you’d come to stay with us.’
‘The truth?’
‘Yes. He said that story about your parents being in Canada was nonsense, and that in fact your mother used to be in service and your father was her employer and took advantage of her. When he realised she was expecting you, he threw her out. Is that true, James?’
He took his time, drawing on his cigarette and staring out at the big, wet flakes driving against the window. Then he turned to her.
‘Well now, this was something else I hadn’t planned on discussing tonight. But yes, it’s true. And it doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t signify at all. My mother gave me a good upbringing and I’ve made my own way. It’s irrelevant who my father is. I’m sorry I deceived your parents – and you – but I’ve found that when I do tell people the truth about my parentage, they usually give me strange looks. They think I’m a liar, or a self-deluding fool, or a bit touched. I find it better to ration the truth. But as I say, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to start our . . . friendship . . . with a lie.’
In her own turn, Diana reached for James’s hand. ‘You haven’t,’ she told him firmly. ‘I asked you something and you told me the truth.’
She smiled at him. ‘I’d call this a very good start.’
21
Diana’s portable alarm clock went off just before eight o’clock the next morning, as it always did. The Arnold family habit of waking up to the radio news had been transplanted to her Cambridge bedroom. Diana hadn’t missed the first BBC bulletin of the day since war began more than seven months earlier. Not that there was usually much to report, thus far. But still, you never knew.
With a small jolt, she remembered she was not alone in her college bedsit. Over on the little chintz sofa lay James Blackwell, tangled in her spare blankets with his blue RAF greatcoat spread across the top. His feet poked out from under the coat and covers and way over the sofa’s edge. He looked extremely uncomfortable. But he was sleeping.
Diana switched on her bedside radio, a battery-powered Roberts the size of a small loaf of bread. While it warmed up, she took her dressing-gown from the chair next to the bed, slipped it over her shoulders and went across to the kitchenette and put the kettle on. Then she drew the curtains above the sink.
The overnight snow had stopped; already a thaw was setting in. Indeed, as she watched, a slab of wet snow slid from the roof of the dormitory opposite and thudded to the ground, scattering a small family of starlings drinking from a partly defrosted bird-bath underneath the eaves. James had been right. Spring was arriving, at last.
It had been quite impossible for him to drive back to Upminster the previous night; in fact, they’d had to abandon his car halfway from The Eagle and walk the rest of the way through the snow to Girton. The porter was asleep when they reached the college so there was no difficulty in smuggling James back to her room. She’d wondered if he might try to kiss her – she rather hoped he would, and perhaps go even further than that – but his behaviour had been exemplary. He’d turned his back while she undressed and climbed into bed, and then had insisted she do the same while he disrobed, solemnly warning her that ‘the flames of passion may otherwise consume you, Diana, and you would pounce on me without shame or compunction’.
She had gone to sleep laughing under her breath.
Now, pouring boiling water into her small teapot and hurrying back to bed to listen to the news, she decided she was glad nothing had happened last night. That might have made his little speech about ‘speeding things up’ seem self-serving and cynical. Clearly, he was better than that.
Two minutes later, she was shaking him awake.
‘James . . . James . . . wake up. You have to listen to this. It’s on the news. Germany’s invaded Denmark and Norway. It’s started.’
He rolled off the sofa in a single movement and crouched by the little radio. Diana noticed that he hadn’t quite taken all his clothes off the night before: he was still wearing a rather frayed vest and long-johns. Thank God for small mercies, she thought to herself. Oh . . . perhaps not so small. She averted her eyes.
‘You’re bloody right,’ James said after a minute. ‘This is most definitely it. Damn. I should have tried to get back to base last night, after all.’
‘Don’t be silly, James, you’d have ended up in a ditch after the first two miles. Anyway, it’s thawing now. Get dressed and I’ll walk with you to the car.’
Twenty minutes later, after strolling insouciantly past an outraged porter on the gate, Diana and James were standing in the slush next to the MG.
‘That porter isn’t going to get you into trouble, I hope?’ James asked her.
‘Not him,’ Diana laughed. ‘He’s got a soft spot for me. I’ll be fine.’
James hesitated. ‘Look . . . I’d hoped we’d at least have lunch before I had to go back,’ he said to her. ‘Every time I think we have a bit of time to get to know each other, the bloody war sticks its nose in. I’m sick of it.’
She put scarlet-gloved hands on both sides of his face. ‘Me too. But we have got to know each other. We did last night at The Eagle. In fact, we got to know much more about each other than we ever would’ve done without this stupid war; at least, I did about you. You were so honest and open.’
He pulled her to him. ‘I should have done this last night.’
That first kiss, an astonished Diana realised later, was the point at which, for the first time in her life, all her disparate parts dimly recognised each other. Her yearnings for a sense of purpose, for love, for a child, for passion, were, for a few dizzying moments, almost unified.
Then James Blackwell was stepping back from her, smiling.
‘Diana, I don’t know when we’ll be able to see each other again,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone; I’ll write. It may be difficult, I may be in France or, God knows, Norway. But I’ll come back to you, just as soon as I can. I promise.’
Then he was swinging into the bucket seat of the little car, the engine coughed into life, and he swerved and skidded away through the melting snow.
It was, he thought to himself as he crunched up a gear and joined the main road south, one of his more effective exits.
22
‘No, Dad, I don’t think any Spits are going to Norway, not that I’ve heard, anyway.’ John paused to sip his beer and shifted the mess phone to his other ear.
‘Well, there’s a limit to what I can say, obviously,’ he went on. ‘Careless talk costs lives, and all that. But according to the papers, an aircraft carrier’s gone over stuffed with Gladiators and Swordfish, although how those old bi-planes will manage against Hitler’s fast fighters is anyone’s guess. There’s talk about maybe sending some Hurricanes too, which would even up the odds a bit. But we’ve had no orders. I think the general feeling is that Norway’s just “opening and beginners”, and the real scrap will start, like last time, in France and Belgium. But we’re ready for him, Dad. In fact, James and I were saying last night that we wish it would kick off so we can get it over with. Everyone here’s had quite enough of this endless stooging around.’
Mr Arnold, listening intentely on the other end of the line in his office in Holborn, knew exactly what his son meant. A quarter of a century ago, he too had fretted in a reserve division stationed just behind the Western Front, desperate to go into action. Anything was better than living on jangling nerves, waiting for something to happen. Or at least, that’s what they had all believed before they were marched up to the front line that first time. Things took on a very different perspective when you stood on the firing step in a flooded trench, waiting for the whistle to blow to send you over the top and on your merry way. V
ery different indeed.
‘I understand, John,’ he said. ‘But it’ll start soon enough, believe you me. Do you think you might get some leave any time soon? No? I didn’t really think so. Well, good luck, old son. Your mother and I think about you all the time. Yes . . . yes, I know you do. Bye for now, then . . . Yes, bye.’
He put the telephone carefully back on its receiver and stared out of the window towards the best view from his chambers, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. But, as so often these days, Wren’s soot-blackened masterpiece failed to register in the smallest way. All he could see was his only son (still a boy, for all his carefully posed urbanity and hard-won professionalism) strapping himself into his cockpit, pulling on his oxygen mask and taking off to do battle with the enemy. To die? Why not? War takes the skilled along with the stupid and those in between. He knew that from the Somme.
Mr Arnold’s hands trembled slightly as he lit a cigarette. He could scarcely believe it had come to this, after the sacrifice and suffering last time: ‘the war to end all wars’. What a pathetic joke that had turned out to be. All his darkest doubts and fears, which had made their first stealthy approach to him two summers before up on the Weald, were turning into the bleakest of realities. He felt a wave of despair and hopelessness wash over him.
He found himself wishing his son suffered from poor sight, or deafness, or mathematical ineptness: anything to keep him from being chosen to fly in a front-line fighter squadron. John had confided in his father, one evening when Gwen had gone to bed, that although the Spitfire was a remarkable aircraft, so were some of the enemy’s.
‘I’ll be honest with you,’ he said over a late-night brandy, ‘the new German fighters are as fast as ours and some of us think they’re better armed. They have cannon; we’ve only got machine-guns. And their pilots have operational experience from the Spanish Civil War. We’re going to have to work bloody hard not to be caught on the hop. Not a word to Mum or Diana, though.’
Mr Arnold glanced down at the evening paper his secretary had placed on the desk during the phone conversation with John. A large picture of Hitler dominated the front page and Mr Arnold experienced an unexpected surge of loathing. It shook him: until now he’d mostly felt cold contempt for the man. This hot, violent hatred was new, almost animal in its intensity. If he could have conjured the Nazi leader into existence before him he would have choked the life out of him with his bare hands then and there, without a solitary word or a moment’s compunction. The blood sang in his ears.
This was no good. He needed to walk; he needed air. Mr Arnold called to his secretary in the outer office, ‘Laura, I’m going out for half an hour,’ and he could hear the tremor in his voice. He walked quickly down the stairs and out onto a side street through a fire-door. His first thought as he headed towards St Paul’s, surrounded by its defending family of gently bobbing barrage balloons, was of his daughter.
At least Diana was safe. Nothing, and no one, could touch her.
23
As Mr Arnold was grappling with unusually dark thoughts – unusual for him – James Blackwell was back at the Upminster aerodrome, also indulging in some rare introspection. He almost never allowed himself the luxury of self-analysis. You were what you did, and what you did made you what you were. What was the point of trying to work out why? It wouldn’t change the past and he was perfectly happy with his plans for the future; he always had been.
But in recent days something had begun to puzzle him, and now he lay smoking cigarette after cigarette on his bed in the small wooden hut that was part of the officers’ quarters, trying to work through the conundrum.
Why wasn’t he afraid?
John was afraid, he’d admitted it to him a few days ago. So had some of the others, however obliquely. Even those who claimed they weren’t frightened of what was coming clearly were, too. You could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, and their weak jokes.
But he – James Blackwell Esquire, of Whitechapel – wasn’t frightened at all. Not the slightest, tiniest bit. It wasn’t that he was unable to grasp the sheer enormity of what was about to happen to them all. He knew perfectly well that he was shortly going to be asked to do something extraordinarily dangerous. The fact that he was one of the most skilled pilots in the squadron gave him no extra sense of security.
Yes, he was undoubtedly what his instructors had called ‘a natural’ – someone who had an instinctive feel for an aircraft. Sometimes it almost seemed to him that his Spitfire was an extension of himself; his arms and hands creeping and spreading into the curved wings on either side of him; his legs and feet somehow merging into and becoming part of the flaps and controls that dictated the little plane’s height and direction.
But that was pure flying, not fighting. If he was ‘bounced’ by two or three enemy fighters at once, or even a single German pilot more skilled than himself, he’d be lucky to get out of it alive. He knew that perfectly well.
But the prospect held no terrors for him. Neither did any of the other scenarios of doom that unwound like spools of film inside his head. Why?
Thinking about it, he asked himself, had he ever been afraid of anything? Not that he could remember. It occurred to him, for the first time in his life, that he had always seen himself remotely from the outside and never from within.
James began to get excited. This nascent self-awareness was a completely new sensation to him and he felt a sudden conviction that if he could grasp the elusive truth about himself, whatever it was, he might become even stronger.
He found himself thinking back to that evening with Diana in Cambridge, and his perfectly judged exit the following morning. And those last moments with Jane in the dress-shop in Upminster.
Then there was the final dénouement with his headmaster.
How he’d silently applauded himself after every scene! What did they remind him of? Something to do with his past. Dammit, he was so close! It was . . . it was . . . and then it burst through into his consciousness like a sudden flash of sunlight from behind a swift-passing cloud.
Of course. The films his mother had let him watch at the Odeon, from as early as he could recall. The films that had formed his emerging view of the world. The solitary small boy had watched the characters on the screen with an intensity that the tittering, whispering, chocolate-gobbling audiences surrounding him never did. But because the shades flickering before him were not real – he had always known that, hadn’t he, even when he was what, four? – he had never cared about their pain, or their joy, or their fear. He had watched them dispassionately. But never disinterestedly.
Sometimes he had seen the same film five or six times in a single week. Then he had come to feel he was following the characters as closely as their own shadows, and, because he knew exactly what was about to befall them, it was almost as if he was controlling them, nudging them toward their destinies. It didn’t matter whether they were heroes or villains; all that counted was how their inner characters and outward actions dictated their fate. Glamorous; ruthless; successful . . . James had never cared about what defined them. Even if they were ultimately doomed, it was their unfolding stories that counted above everything else.
‘That’s what I do now,’ he whispered to the empty hut. ‘I direct. I’m the sodding director of my own life and everyone else who’s part of it. Of course I’m not afraid. Why would a director be afraid for one of his actors? And that’s me too. I’m an actor in my own life-story. And I’m the lead. I can do what I want. Bloody hell.’
He lit another cigarette from the glowing stump of the last one and stared, amazed, at the ceiling. James Blackwell spoke aloud only once more, and when he did, it was in a voice full of pride and awe.
‘Fuck me.’
24
And then, in a shattering instant, it came: the ferocious eruption of total war. The country woke, stunned to find that the long stalemate had evaporated in a single night, in the smoke and fury of an enemy assault so savage, so overwhelming, that a
ll foolish hopes that catastrophe might yet be averted vanished as though they had never been.
Some heard the news from their radios as they tapped spoons on boiled eggs or shook open innocent newspapers that had gone to press a few hours before the convulsion. Others were telephoned by friends or family. Some were woken by bleary-eyed neighbours, still in dressing-gowns and slippers as they knocked on friends’ doors.
Oliver and Gwen were in bed drinking tea brought to them by Lucy when they heard the phone ringing in the hall below. They turned to each other. ‘Who the hell is that, at half-past seven in the morning?’ Mr Arnold grumbled.
Gwen gripped his hand. ‘Let it not be something’s happened to John. Please God, let it not be that.’
Her husband stroked the hand that clutched his. ‘I spoke to him yesterday, I told you. His squadron’s still waiting for orders. John is perfectly fine, darling.’
Downstairs, the phone had stopped ringing and they heard Lucy’s muffled voice. Then her feet were on the stairs and she was tapping at the door. ‘Excuse me, sir, ma’am, but it’s Mr John. He says sorry to wake you, but the war’s started good and proper.’
Mr Arnold slammed his teacup down on its saucer and kicked the bedclothes aside. ‘I’m coming down!’
He overtook the maid at the foot of the stairs and skidded to the telephone on its little oak table. ‘John! What’s happening?’
‘Armageddon, Dad, the Four Horses of the Apocalypse are riding. The gods of war are—’
‘Stop that! What’s happening?’
‘Sorry, Dad – everything that you said would, and then some. The Germans invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland at dawn, and they’ve smashed the French positions too. They’re moving like a hot knife through butter, apparently.’
‘What? But what about the Maginot Line? The French say their border defences against Germany are impregnable!’
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