They sang a hymn as they walked in, not one he was familiar with, but then he hadn’t gone to church in years outside the occasional obligatory Air Force event. He didn’t really bother singing, his attention was elsewhere anyway, but she was concentrating, her eyes on her hymnbook or straight ahead, and didn’t seem to notice him. He couldn’t distinguish her voice from the others as they reached the junction of the aisles and turned away from him towards the altar, and the choir stalls.
The service was long and dull, the priest had a voice like a sheep, and there was a lot of mumbled archaic language that passed Spencer right by. Besides which he had difficulty following the proceedings – the kneeling and standing and intoning, and the arbitrary leaving out of some things, the interminable length of others. He joined in with the Lord’s Prayer, but stood silently through the Creed, having just enough respect for the Almighty not to lie outright. They sang – or the choir did, the congregation stumbled along in their wake – a couple of things in the middle that had no tune, but simply went on and on. The organist was a little bent old lady who started off each piece slowly, and got slower, so the longer it was the slower they got. All in all it wasn’t an uplifting experience. He found himself thinking that if this was God’s house and He’d been at home to begin with, He’d probably long since gone out till it was over.
But then they were told to sit down while the choir sang the anthem. The choir rose, turning very slightly towards the body of the church. The anthem was old-sounding and quite pretty, and halfway through Rosemary sang a few lines on her own. He was spellbound. Freed from the constraints of unison she released a voice of such rich, earthy power that it filled the church. For the first time there was something happening that was worthy of God, but oh, boy, thought Spencer, awestruck, did it ever speak to man! There was a throaty, gutsy edge to her voice that was the opposite of spiritual. He knew now exactly what Davey had meant when he’d said his aunt’s voice was loud. It was a big voice but under control, you could tell she probably had the same again in reserve. And when she brought it down soft – the words were something about peace – it made the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
Then her little solo was over, and the others joined in again until the end of the anthem, when the padre said ‘Let us pray’. He came down and stood in the aisle for this part, droning on and on about the king, and war and forgiveness, and Spencer had to shuffle along a bit in order to see Rosemary. She was on the end of a row and to begin with she looked prettily devout, with her hands clasped and her eyes closed. But after a couple of minutes or so she rested her chin in her hand, and her eyes and her attention wandered. At one moment her dreamy look slipped right over him like gauze, but if she spotted him she gave no sign of it.
They sang ‘O, God, Our Help in Ages Past’ – he knew that one, but was embarrassed to be caught with no cash on him when the plate came round – and then the padre delivered a sermon which seemed to be part propaganda, part religion, about hating the sin and not the sinner, but it was so full of long, reflective pauses and holy-joe cadences that Spencer lost concentration and just gazed at Rosemary.
During the last hymn the choir processed back down the aisle, and this time there was no doubt she’d seen him. He saw it in her eyes, and the tightening of the corners of her mouth – the smile she’d have given him if she’d been able. And he caught, too, the sexy swell of her incredible voice among the other voices, like an underground river.
After the blessing he didn’t wait, though. He was out of the church door and on his way before the padre even came back out to shake hands. As a spiritual experience the service had left Spencer unmoved. As a carnal one it had been an epiphany.
That same afternoon he went to tea again, and this time after the table was cleared they sat round and played a kids’ card game called Old Maid. Ellen sat on her mother’s knee and selected a card from Spencer’s hand when it was her turn. It was tranquil, he felt as if he’d always been there. He remembered with pride Davey’s observation that he’d rather have him than his own father. The cottage door was left open to the sunny street and he took this as a mark of acceptance, that they wanted him there and didn’t mind who knew it.
Over the cards, he said to Rosemary: ‘I heard you sing in church this morning.’
‘From the base?’ asked Davey cheekily. ‘Told you she was loud.’
Janet told him not to be rude. Spencer ignored him. ‘I was in church.’
‘I know, I saw you.’
‘That is an incredible voice you have there.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You should do something with it.’ He feared he sounded pompous, and added: ‘Not that my opinion’s worth a hill of beans.’ He turned to Janet. ‘What do you think?’
‘It would be wonderful if she could.’
Rosie put down another pair of cards. ‘But I start at the stocking factory in two weeks, so unless I get my big break before then I’ll never see my name in lights.’
When the card game was finished, he asked if there were any jobs he could do around the place, to make himself useful, repay their hospitality. To get asked back was what he hoped.
‘I don’t know,’ said Janet, ‘but I’m sure I can think of some.’
‘He could fix the pushchair,’ suggested Rosie.
‘I sure could,’ he agreed eagerly. ‘I grew up doing that kind of thing. Tractors, bicycles . . . I’m a whizz with an oily rag.’
Janet smiled. ‘And yet you’re a pilot not an engineer.’
‘I kept quiet about it. I guess we all want to do something more exciting than what we’re cut out for.’
‘Telling me,’ said Rosie with feeling.
The cottage had a tiny strip of garden between the front wall and the pavement; and it was planted with vegetables so close together that they looked like rows of knitting. Because they were on the end of the terrace there was a similarly small patch at the side, and this was where they grew the sweet peas in a wayward, fragrant wigwam. At the back was a small fenced yard with some balding, scrubby grass, a lean-to containing bikes and a few tools, a scattering of Ellen’s toys and the dilapidated grey stroller.
It looked worse than it was, the seat had come adrift and one of the side shafts was buckled so the screw had sheared off. Davey kept him company while Ellen made a bed for her shock-haired doll and Janet watched through the kitchen window. Rosie stayed in the front room with the wireless on. Spencer was as happy as he’d been in years.
He couldn’t do much about the shaft, because they didn’t have any screws in the house, but he said he’d be back to do it next week. Janet said, ‘I hope so.’ He was sure she meant that she hoped he’d come back, not just that he’d fix the stroller.
Along with the adrenalin and the exhilaration, there was beauty – the sights they believed then that no one else was ever going to see in quite the same way . . . Moments – fractions of a second, no more – when you could see the curvature of the earth, and the cloud formations sitting on it like distant hills, all shot through with light. And other times when it was as if all of them, friend and foe, ally and enemy, were part of some great aerial ballet, criss-crossing each other like swallows, executing feints and passes and hurtling leaps, of which death was not the point and sole product, but a mere accessory, another move in the dance.
And since Spencer had met the two women, the dance had changed. Its focus was altered, it moved to the rhythm of a different drum. Another element had entered his life. He remembered a story his mother used to tell him. It was called ‘The Snow Queen’, and in it the boy got a splinter of ice in his heart that made him see the world differently. Only in Spencer’s case it was no splinter of ice but the warm, sweet scent of a country flower.
He was bewitched.
On the Tuesday following the church service they flew a daylight-combat mission escorting the bombers over a munitions site just south of Bremen. After a week of showers, wind and mud, that morning broke with a pristine brilliance which was peculia
rly English – the kind of glistening perfection that you only got when the summer weather was, for protracted periods, shitty.
There was no waiting. Briefing, equipment room, jeep to the hardstands . . . it was like setting off for a church picnic. The gradual homing in on Crazy Horse was like seeing a glamorous woman’s make-up secrets under a harsh light – the plane was still a thing of beauty, but up close you could make out the black fuel streaks, the scabs of new paint and the metallic abrasions of the old, the cross-hatching of fine scratches on the Plexiglass hood, the stigmata of shared experience which only made Spencer love her more . . . That sensitive, touchy exchange with the crew chief handing over his beautiful baby like a father giving away his daughter to another man. He had done all this, created this perfect thing, knew every inch and working of her, had struggled with her difficulties and cured her complaints and sat up all night with her when times were hard for precious little reward. And now along comes this cocky young fellow out of left field who can make her do anything he wants, and gets the best out of her every time. Like father and bridegroom, they both loved the same thing: but unlike them, there pre-existed between engineer and pilot a solid bond of mutual respect.
They customarily gave the bombers a two-hour start, and in these perfect conditions allowed rather more, so that they could really give the P–5is their heads and pelt away over south-east England and the Channel to catch up with their Big Friends just before the Dutch coast. Once they were with the forts they had to rein in and perform a steady zig-zag weaving motion, similar to that en route to the runway before takeoff, to enable them to keep their own pace down to a level where they could maintain contact. It was like Rosie, he thought, with her voice: the sweet, hot power of the Mustang was so great that half the time you couldn’t unleash it. It was hover, weave, watch, hold steady. And then every so often there was the opportunity to let her do what she was capable of and the sky was a different place. When they first joined the bombers their massive, droning bodies and brown-painted wings made them seem like great furry moths blundering along, while all around the ritzy little fighters hummed like hover-flies, ready to zoom in and sting at the first sign of trouble.
Today Spencer was a liability. He sort of knew it, but the knowledge made no difference because he felt so great he must be invincible, and that was the trouble. Oftentimes he’d cursed Si Santucci for arrogantly peeling off in Fast ’n’ Loose on his own little seekand-destroy missions instead of sticking with the task of looking out for the bombers; but if Santucci’s problem was too much focus, then today Spencer’s was not enough.
Swinging back and forth through the thin, blue sunshine, it was like that stage of a night out, after maybe two or three drinks, when you just knew you were the funniest, smartest, sexiest goddam’ guy in town – while in fact you were tipping over into being an amiable drunk. Every dial, switch, knob and wire in the narrow cockpit of Crazy Horse was as familiar to him as his own features in the shaving mirror each morning. He knew what to do. His head was crammed with more information than he’d ever have thought it possible to retain before the war; and was constantly, automatically, reshuffling the data according to circumstances, bringing the right stuff to the top, highlighting the options, zooming in on the best one, listening out for Frank Steyner, maintaining a cat’s-whisker awareness of the movements of the rest of Blue Flight and their charges. Sometimes he could scarcely believe that, oh, wow! it was him. Spencer McColl from Moose Draw, Wyoming, who was up here in charge of all this highly charged metal and machinery.
But it was, and Spencer was still only young. And this day he could have thrown the whole thing away, and his life and the lives of others, because of a grass widow and her kid sister in a shabby cottage in England.
Today the only hint of cloud in the universe was a whisper of circus, floating like a snowy feather on the blue distance. The bombers and their escort described a fabulous, complex castle of steel, air and sound, drifting massively far above the French coast. You could just make out the movement of the surf like a throbbing silver vein between the sea and the sand.
And then in the distance they could see the first white arcs of anti-aircraft fire, neatly stitched with flak. And as they got closer they were in amongst the puffs of exploding shells, blooming like big black flowers and releasing their deadly sharp seeds, then withering, leaving dark tendrils in the air like blood in water. A brilliant sliver hit on one of the bombers, and a second. Then stuttering broken hues of tracer fire. A jabber of voices in his ears, sharp with tension.
The MEs, when they came, were choice targets, bulky and slow by comparison with the P–5is, but huge as they closed, like great black buds bearing down on the Mustangs. One passed so close to Spencer that he could see the two men in its cockpit. He went into a half-roll to dive on the row of three beneath him, and as he did so the one he’d just passed caught a row of bullets from Santucci on his wing, and he saw the many-paned canopy of the ME frost over, the bullet holes stark as black spiders in the web of white cracks.
And all the time the bombers were advancing on their target, rumbling stoically, trustingly, towards the Hades of the box barrage, the pilot of each one now no more than a chauffeur as the bombardier took charge. Another act of faith. The firestorm had to be gone through, and Crazy Horse and the other Little Friends were left to skirmish with the MEs like kids playing in the backyard as the adults got serious.
That day it was like play to Spencer. He hit nothing, didn’t get hit. It was like he was invisible, or the bird was made of some pliable substance, not metal. On the homeward journey the MEs snapped at their heels and caught one of the forts, the leader in the Purple Heart position, fair and square. Smelling blood, they peppered it with fire, then took off. Once wounded, the big plane stood no chance. It sank with the slow, tragic inevitability of a bull in the corrida, listing, breaking up, rolling over with a massive, heartbreaking dignity. The crew baled out, first plummeting, then floating beneath their chutes like pods from a laburnum tree into the green-grey Channel. When the bomber hit the sea the water seemed to give under its weight, rise and fold around it, and then throw it back up for an instant, like a child bouncing on a feather bed before finally swallowing it up.
All the way back it was fine. England dreamed, snug in the afternoon sun. Mission accomplished, no losses to the fighter group. Church Norton basked in the heat, barely stirred as the P–5is came back, howling their triumph. Ajax just managed to raise his head from where he lay, slit-eyed and panting, sides palpitating, in the short grass near the hardstands. Mo was full of grudging admiration.
‘Congratulations, not a mark on her. What is it with you, you trying to lose me my job?’
It was only the next day, over breakfast, that Spencer thought of the bomber’s pilot plastered to his seat by centrifugal force, devoted to duty, dead as a doornail.
* * * * *
But for Spencer that summer was about life. He visited the cottage whenever he could, lived for those visits. The tiny interior filled his head; it was, to him, bigger and more vividly real than anything else – the base, his friends, his own home, the war itself – and he dreamed about Rosie.
He could not remember ever wanting anything so much as he wanted to have her. Her unsettling combination of youth and knowingness, of naive simplicity and cute sophistication, was a mixture that had gone straight to his head, and his loins. He had had little or no experience of the sweet toxicity of girls in their teens, having gone straight from fearful ignorance to the older and all-embracing Trudel. He seemed to be on a carousel, being carried round and round and up and down, the view changing every second. The smallness of the cottage meant he was always close to her. Janet had a way of closing the air around herself, she could come into the tiny front room and leave the space undisturbed. When Rosie was there she filled it, so completely that Spencer could scarcely breathe. One moment she was fooling around on the floor with her nephew, whooping and laughing and not caring if her underpants sho
wed; the next she was lying on the couch like a surly young lioness, her arm resting on the upturned curve of her hip, fingers tapping to music, her red hair shielding her face as she read a movie magazine with get-lost concentration.
Sometimes she lay on a rug in the back yard with her skirt tucked up, sunbathing, and he had to stop himself from staring at her pale, rounded thighs and the freckles that were scattered like a treasure-trail down between the buttons of her cotton blouse. Ten minutes later and she’d be lying on her stomach with the dirty soles of her feet waving in the air, making elephant noises for Ellen with a blade of couch grass between her thumbs.
She was dangerously flirtatious, with her ‘lootenant’, and her sardonic pretence that he and Janet were engaged in some sort of conspiracy against her. If she asked him anything at all about his job she did so with a slightly challenging air that told him he showed off at his peril. It was no surprise that she had no boyfriend, he thought she must have terrified boys of her own age half to death, and yet the idea that some sweaty old supervisor or manager at the stocking factory might get his hands on her filled Spencer with horror. She was already so savvy, so sensual, so playful and witty and animal – it set him jangling just to touch her hand (the most he had ever touched), and the thought of a kiss, let alone anything more, set his senses reeling.
But of course it was out of the question. Her youth, his friendship with Davey, his privileged position in the household, placed her completely out of reach. And then her own status was unclear. Because of the age difference between the sisters, Janet treated her sometimes as an equal, sometimes not, though she was never anything less than moderate. As he went about the business of mending latches and shelves, and fixing up the back yard, and putting a door on the lean-to and cleaning the bikes, he found himself in awe of Janet. She was a little like his mother, holding the household together but never seeming to break sweat. He told her of the resemblance – in more elegant terms – one evening when Davey and Ellen were in bed and Rosie at choir practice. She claimed to be flattered.
The Grass Memorial Page 28