‘I didn’t say I did think it.’
‘Then what? For God’s sake, what?’
‘I think she’s right to want to tell the truth but that’s less important than what happens afterwards.’
‘Afterwards? I told you—she’s going to ask Andy for a divorce, and then marry Stevie who is already getting one. He and Monica split up eighteen months ago. That was how it all began.’
‘It doesn’t matter a damn how it began,’ Maureen said obstinately, ‘it’s how it ends. She’s got to tell Andy the full truth and leave it to him.’
‘But won’t that amount to the same thing?’
‘Not if Stevie backs out. It’s him you’ll have to work on. You were quite right to keep it from Paul and if you take my advice you’ll always keep it from him. But I wish you had had the sense to confide in me before. As it is you’re pretty well on deadline, although there might still be time if you put your skates on.’
‘What do you mean? What more can I do at this stage?’
‘Where is Stevie right now?’
‘Serving on a station outside York.’
‘Then go and talk to him. Go tomorrow. Make some excuse, any excuse, but go there, and don’t come back until you’re sure in your own mind that he won’t marry Margaret, no matter what kind of pressure she puts on him. That’s the least you can do, girl.’
‘What about the child itself?’
‘The child will have to take its chance like the rest of us,’ Maureen said, savagely. ‘Right now, with half an arm and half a face missing, she’s got to give Andy a straight choice. She’s got to take everything coming to her, until he adjusts to his handicap. That’s not an old-fashioned notion, it’s common humanity. You’d owe that much compassion to a dog, never mind a husband. You see that, don’t you?’
Claire saw it clearly enough. Perhaps she had seen it when Margaret, wooden and matter-of-fact, had told her what had happened after Stevie went to her for help and found she needed help far more desperately than he did, but given the essential Tightness and urgency of what was expected of her Claire saw little prospect of achieving it, or not without Paul finding out.
She had reckoned, however, without Maureen’s long experience in the art of hoodwinking males. When she came down to breakfast next morning, and found Paul and Maureen gossiping over their second cup of coffee, she only just avoided giving herself away when Paul said casually, ‘Maureen has been telling me about you envying her trip to town. If you’d really like a change then why not go along with her, as she suggests. Do you good, old girl. You haven’t been out of the Valley in more than a year and you were always more taken with that Bedlam than me. Not that you’ll recognise much of it from all I hear, or find any brighter lights up there than you will in Coombe Bay. They have a blackout there the same as anywhere else.’
‘They’ve a better organised black market too,’ said Maureen.
‘I doubt it,’ said Paul, ‘in nylons and fancy goods maybe, but certainly not in food. However, if your son’s friends really can put you in the way of doing a bit of under-the-counter shopping, good luck to the pair of you. There’s never any bombing they tell me. We get it hotter than they do nowadays.’
It was easy as that, and when they were settled in the crowded London train, recovering their breath after unchivalrous competition with bumping kit bags, rifles and respirators, Maureen said, ‘He always was the easiest husband to diddle in all England. I suppose it’s because he’s so certain that you’ve never looked at another man in forty years.’ Claire admitted that this was almost true but not quite and was so relieved by her escape that she told Maureen of a wartime flirtation with an officer at the camp, something she had never admitted to a soul. It amused Maureen, who knew them both so well, and she chuckled all the way to Yeovil.
II
Maureen saw her as far as Euston, giving her an address to call at on her return. ‘I can stall for about three days,’ she said, ‘but it shouldn’t take you that long and don’t look to me for a briefing! From now on you’re on your own. After all, you gave birth to the boy and it’s time you took your duties as mother seriously. The only two of the seven you ever bothered your head about was Young Claire, and that poor, demented Grace Lovell’s boy, Simon.’
And this, thought Claire, as an even more crowded train clanked out of Euston, was about the truth and she was now, she supposed, paying the price for having expended nine-tenths of her nervous energy on Paul in preference to the family. ‘All the same,’ she told herself, ‘I don’t regret it, and if I had my time over again I’d do just the same. God knows, one man is one woman’s work. She can’t be expected to do a good job on half-a-dozen.’
It was the first time the war had appeared to her as a global rather than a local event. Two things impressed her at once, the skeletal ruins of the suburbs that looked more like a series of rubbish-tips than the approaches to a capital city, and the presence of so many hard-bitten youngsters in uniform. Evidence of large-scale bombing was depressing enough but what was more, in Claire’s eyes, was the fatalistic glumness of the passengers. In the crowded corridor outside stood Dutchmen, Rhodesians and West Indians, forlorn strays identified by their shoulder flashes and all monstrously encumbered by the ugly accoutrements of war. Youth and gaiety seemed to have emigrated to another planet. The air in the compartment reeked of cheap tobacco and damp cloth, imperfectly dyed. The luggage racks sagged under the kit these youngsters seemed condemned to drag from one end of the country to the other and in the faces of even the British she fancied she could read strain and unutterable boredom, so that she forgot her own troubles and found herself thinking back to that other war when you would never have witnessed a uniformed young woman inhaling a cigarette like a man in a billiards saloon. Some of the girls, she thought, still looked pretty, even with their hair bundled under those awful caps, and all of them used make-up. In her young days only street-walkers carmined their lips and war had been almost exclusively a man’s concern. Now, it seemed, every living person was sucked into the vortex, participating in its dangers and shortages, its slang and its stale, unprofitable atmosphere. She listened, half-heartedly, to a desultory conversation between a bombardier and a sallow little W.A.A.F. but could make very little of it. So many of the words and sentiments were strange to her. The bombardier, it seemed, was returning to an outpost in the Hebrides, the W.A.A.F. to a bomber station like the one she herself was visiting. Both, it appeared, resented their lot but accepted it as a kind of purgatory separating their youth and whatever the future had in store for them. They talked laconically, like a couple of mercenaries reminiscing after a spell of sacking cities on the Continent. The bombardier had been in the Desert and said he was already regretting his home posting. ‘Too much bullshit back here,’ he complained, ‘even on a ruddy little rock doing Sweet F.A. most of the time!’ The girl had troubles of her own. ‘Our section officer is a bitch—give me men officers all the time! Girl in my billet was engaged to an R.G. who bought it. Went on parade the day after hearing with hair showing under her cap. Had a strip torn off her—don’t know where they find cows like that. Who did they chase from A to B before the war? Their skivvies I daresay, at five bob a week and keep!’
The bombardier murmured his sympathy but added, with a grin, ‘Well, you know what they say. Shouldn’t have joined!’ to which the girl replied promptly, ‘What do you take me for? I was pushed. Not quick enough off the mark, that’s my trouble. Got a kid sister making eight–ten a week in a Wimpey factory …!’ and so on, all the way to a stop that Claire could not identify for all the place names had been removed from the platforms as a precaution against an invasion threat now three years old.
As the long journey wore on she tried to rehearse what she would say to Stevie when she got there but nothing plausible suggested itself and she decided that she would have to play it by ear. The countryside grew more pastoral but the train became more
and more crowded so that the acrid atmosphere of the compartment made her eyes smart. It was impossible to move along the corridor to the lavatory and someone who had managed it earlier told her there was no water in the taps. At another stop the bombardier unexpectedly produced a cup of tea for the W.A.A.F. and another for her and she sipped it gratefully, although it had the flavour of boiled swedes laced with soap. After that she was able, to some extent, to join in the conversation and asked the W.A.A.F. if she knew Stevie’s station.
‘Bomber Command dump? There’s lashings of them up there. Is he operational?’ and when Claire said he flew Lancasters the girl’s approach softened to a mixture of interest and sympathy.
‘How far is he on with his tour of ops.?’ she asked, and Claire said she had no idea, for he wasn’t much of a one for writing.
‘He wouldn’t say, anyway,’ the girl said, making Claire feel that their ages were reversed and that she was being gently patronised by her grandmother, ‘they live it up between trips and forget it when they’re not flying,’ and when Claire mentioned that, earlier in the war he had been with Fighter Command, the girl volunteered more information, saying, ‘He’ll have changed, I daresay. You can spot the difference right away. Bomber pilots are mostly—well, more serious if you know what I mean, and usually nicer. I’ve been in both Commands, as well as T.T.—Technical Training—but I’d sooner serve on a bombing station.’ Then, with a frankness that made Claire smile, ‘Is he married?’
Claire settled for saying he was not and the girl seemed surprised. ‘They mostly are,’ she said, ‘or they soon get married to one of us, or one of the ack-ack A.T.S. or a WREN maybe. Friend of mine has been married twice and is now a widow again at twenty-two. That takes some beating …’ and then, suddenly recollecting herself, she actually blushed and mumbled, ‘Sorry. I was a clot to say that to someone with a son still on ops. Think I’ll have another shot at fighting my way down the corridor,’ and she left very abruptly.
The bombardier said, grinning, ‘That’s what they call a clanger, ma’am,’ and for the next hour Claire pondered the girl’s gaffe and wished she could reassure her. Nothing much would happen to Stevie. Like Andy he was indestructible—his sort always were. It was the Simons of this world who ‘bought it’ as they said, in their quaint, callous slang.
The interminable journey continued and presently, mercifully, she dropped off and snored gently, her head resting on the shoulder of the tolerant bombardier.
III
Berlin, Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, Hamburg, on overnight ‘bus stop to Turin, Leipzig, Dresden: Stevie had ploughed his way to and from them all but the one they feared and hated most was Essen, where the flak was vicious and the nightfighters had X-ray eyes. Once, a month or so back, he had been caught in a searchlight beam over Essen and had floundered about the sky like a singed moth, convinced that this was it, but it wasn’t, for here he was with bombs gone circling over Essen once more, the cockpit lit by intermittent flashes winking from all quarters of the compass, and his tongue as dry as a dead stick. Over in the east pencils of searchlight beams wavered, sometimes striking the underside of clouds so that they suddenly turned into the over-filled ice cream comets he had once bought for a penny a cone at High Wood tuckshop. Then, far to the north and below him, he saw the soft orange ball of a burning kite that went skittering down the sky and was lost in the great belt of darkness beyond the winking landscape of the tormented city. He said over the intercom, ‘Who’s for home then?’ and Wiley, the only member of his original crew, said, ‘Me for one, Skip, and don’t stop for hitch-hikers.’
Wiley, he reflected, was another Andy, someone who would glide in and out of trouble all his life and emerge, jostled and bruised perhaps but emotionally intact, not because he was hearty and unimaginative but because he had learned how to discard the apparatus of successive phases or professions and focus the whole of his attention on something new. Right now he was a radio operator in a Lancaster, and a very good one at that, but before transferring to the R.A.F. he had been a gunner in a territorial unit, and before that a garage operative, a salesman of leather goods, a gas-fitter, and a grocer’s assistant in a country town in the North Riding. He was twenty-eight and had somehow got through his life without a serious attachment to anyone, and would probably stay single until he was in his mid-thirties when he would start looking for someone with a fat stocking. After that, Stevie supposed, he would settle down and grow a paunch at the local, and forget all about moments like these hauls into the south-east, and longer hauls back to a cheerless airfield where the dawn wind cut you in two.
He got a fix from Gibbins, his navigator and began to climb, settling down to make another attempt to isolate himself and fly by a complicated assortment of reflexes. He had made rare progress in this respect, telling himself that it was high time he did, for this was the seventeenth operation of his second tour.
Lately, ever since the autumn, he saw himself as a kind of steel filing orbiting a central point that was Margaret, and Margaret’s improbable little cottage, ‘Ty-Bach’, and it seemed to him that he circled on three separate planes that remained permanently equidistant from one another.
The outer circuit was his flying, regular sweeps that carried him into the endless vistas of space and were not, looking back, very exciting in themselves. The inner circuit was a very tight one, as tight as a pre-war fighter’s turn, and its core was the thickening woman who waddled out to greet him whenever he drove along under the old woods to the sagging fence, announcing his arrival by a toot of the horn. It was more than a fortnight since he had withdrawn into this inner circuit and it seemed much longer, for the child she was expecting was overdue according to her and there was no means of contacting her other than by letter. She had told him over and over again not to worry, that she was booked in at a nursing home in Criccieth and had made arrangements to go there in advance and stay in a hotel until the doctor told her it was time to go. He had, in fact, checked these arrangements himself and was satisfied that they were adequate, but somehow he could not see her voluntarily turning her back on ‘Ty-Bach’ and locking the door on the place that had been their lair and refuge, not only from everyone else in their lives but from their own thoughts.
Here, through the late spring and summer, they had been unbelievably safe and happy. From his airfield in Shropshire he had been able to get over almost every weekend and once or twice for odd days, but their meetings became less frequent when he moved back to Yorkshire and began his second tour. He had tried, without success, to get a telephone installed at ‘Ty-Bach’ and had been obliged to be satisfied with jotting down the number of Jones the Milk on his identity card, Jones the Milk being their nearest neighbour who thought of them as man and wife.
Tonight, now that they were on their home run, he settled for his outer circuit, thinking of the trip and how near their cookie had dropped to the target, of other Lancasters throbbing through the darkness above and below him, and what the men who flew them thought about, and whether their lives on the ground were as complicated as his own. From time to time he exchanged a word or two with his crew and when their voices reached him over the intercom he visualised them individually, as a man wrecked on a desert island might itemise his few possessions. The Lancaster was rather like an island, with seven castaways thrown up by the breakers of the offensive. There was Wiley, the extrovert, who sometimes talked cock on the way home, and there was Gibbins, the worrier, who gave information grudgingly, as though it was small change and he was living on a fixed pension. There were the three sergeants, Gooding, Kitson and Awkwright, all married, two of them with kids. Gooding and Kitson had flown with him on every trip of the tour but Awkwright was a survivor from another crew and Stevie had a suspicion that his nerve was almost used up. Remembering this he called him up, making a facetious remark and getting a facetious answer.
So far so good. They were well on their way now. To starboard he saw a long strip of
light and veered off to port. If it was the German night-fighter flarepath at Gilze-Rijen he was going to give it as wide a berth as possible, and the possibility of night-fighters made him remember Young Pidgeon in the rear-turret, whose nineteenth birthday they had celebrated by getting uproariously drunk—all but the sober Gibbins that is—in the Turk’s Head. Pidgeon had had to be given a fireman’s lift back to camp and had come to outside the guard-hut and started singing ‘Roll me over, in the clover.’ Then, gravely, and with a certain dignity, he had been sick.
He called the rear-turret: ‘How’s tricks back there, Kiddo?’ and Pidgeon said, ‘Cold as a frog on an ice-bound pond, colder than charity—that’s bloody chilly …’ Stevie knew the ditty. It used up every low-temperature simile in the book and finished, ‘Colder than all is poor little Willie’. It was the sort of chestnut any nineteen-year-old would use to an older man to assert devil-may-care masculinity and help to bridge the gap.
They flew on, endlessly it seemed, Stevie’s thoughts switching to a central circuit that took him back to places like the Valley, and old Franz Zorndorff’s festering scrapyard south of the Thames. He remembered little things about Franz, his white, Habsburg-type whiskers tinged brown by the nicotine of his cigars, his wheezing laugh, and the amiable contempt he had for Paul as a man with a horror of cities, all cities …’ As if a man could get rich anywhere else!’ Franz would say, when his father tried over and over again to launch The Pair on agricultural careers.
Then the circle of his thoughts contracted and he found himself on the inner circuit, usually closed when he was flying and he could contemplate Margaret, not as he had last seen her, with swollen belly and legs that carried her clumsily from dresser to fireplace, but as she had been the second time they met at the Smith Street flat, a woman who could be kissed into a frenzy. She had frightened him on that occasion and must have realised it because, later on, their love-making had adjusted to the rhythm of an affectionate married couple, particularly after they had moved into ‘Ty-Bach’, where the seasons never hurried and seemed reluctant to give way to one another. He found he could contemplate ‘Ty-Bach’ in a way he had never learned to contemplate inanimate things, its stones, its low ceilings, its pokey little kitchen-scullery that smelled of bran, soap and ancient woodwork, a smell he would always associate with Wales.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 23