‘No trouble at all.’
She ushered him into a dark, high-ceilinged hall, and told him to put his coat, cap and scarf on a chair. There was a long mirror next to the chair. Its glass was slightly flawed, so that as he checked his reflection he seemed to waver and distort like a ghost.
She introduced herself as Mrs Brock, and when he returned the compliment, asked: ‘Where are you from, Lieutenant? I mean, where are you stationed?’ When he told her, she commented: ‘That’s a chilly part of the world, you must miss the sunshine.’
He decided against telling her about the annual five months of snow in Moose Draw, the way every little hair on your body froze when you went outdoors, including the ones in your nose so you could hardly breathe.
‘It’s kind of bleak,’ he agreed. ‘But airfields are pretty bleak places, whichever way you look at it.’
‘My son’s in the Merchant Navy,’ she said with a note of pride in her voice. ‘Those boys are out in all weathers.’
Spencer detected the usual very slight inter-service edge, sharpened by his being a Yank. ‘They do a great job.’
‘Well.’ She took off her apron. ‘Shall I give you the guided tour? The house won’t have changed since your mother was here.’
The rooms were comfortable and homely, furnished with inexpensive, well-cared for things, and full of ornaments. Each wall had a picture or a mirror as a centrepiece, and the windows at the front of the house were all covered by immaculately laundered nets. The kitchen had a grey metal range and there was a comforting smell of gravy, and hot cloth.
‘I do tea at five-thirty,’ she said, partly explaining the smell and partly he suspected from the long ingrained habit of showing lodgers round.
‘How many guests do you have?’ he asked politely as she led the way up the stairs.
‘Two at present. We can take three, so there’s a spare at the moment.’
‘I suppose there’s no shortage of takers in a university town?’
‘No, but we have mainly business people, single people, you know. I’ll show you Mr Hebditch’s room, it’s the nicest. He’s neat as a pin, he won’t mind.’
Spencer felt slightly embarrassed at having this stranger’s home displayed to him, but the room’s spartan bareness gave nothing away. Only a hairbrush on the chest of drawers, a whiskery brown robe on the back of the door and the twin heels of plaid slippers protruding from under the bedside table betrayed Mr Hebditch’s occupancy. A faded rose-red eiderdown provided the sole splash of colour. The window overlooked the back garden with its obligatory rows of winter ‘veg’ (rather more flourishing. Spencer noticed, than Janet’s) and beyond that the sports field, where a group of men were now kicking a ball around.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Brock as though he’d asked something, ‘this used to be our son’s room, and the other two on this floor are to let as well. I’ll show you the vacancy.’
He gazed politely round another, smaller room, even more monastic than the last. He seemed to be seeing a house from which every trace of individuality and atmosphere had been assiduously drained. He mumbled something about her running a nice place.
‘We do our best, and it’s a few more pennies.’
‘What does your husband do?’
‘He’s in public works at the Town Hall.’ This was an answer which might have been in a foreign language for all the sense it made to Spencer, and she must have noticed, because she added: ‘Drains and sewage and highways, and all those things that make the world go round. And he’s the local ARP warden as well.’
‘Sounds like the town would fall apart without him,’ said Spencer and was rewarded with a laugh. She was a nice woman, slightly on her mettle.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised! This is the ablutions . . .’ She opened a door on a surprisingly large black and white bathroom with an anaconda-like convolution of pipes just beneath the ceiling, a gas geyser, and a cork bathmat propped against the bath. ‘This isn’t quite what your mother would remember, and we’ve made the toilet separate as well.’
‘Great.’ He thought, This is a waste of time for both of us, none of this means anything to me. And felt a little claustrophobic. Mrs Brock clearly wished to fill her vacancy.
‘We’re up on the top floor these days, I’ll show you, it’s even less changed now I come to think of it.’
‘Thanks, I’d like that. Then I should be hitting the road . . .’
‘You’re never going back tonight?’
‘That’s the general idea. It’s not my car for one thing, and there are some friends I’d kind of like to see.’ It sounded lame, but he wanted to get away.
‘Good heavens,’ she declared, ‘you shouldn’t do that, it’s miles. You could spend the night here.’ She started up the stairs ahead of him. This flight was steeper than the previous one and she made heavy weather of it, trudging, leading with the right foot each time and catching up with the left, one hand on her thigh. She couldn’t be much older than his own mother, but had crossed the invisible line into stiff, sexless old age – then again, it was two years since he’d seen Caroline. Strange to think that while he was in the place where his mother had lived as a child, back in Moose Draw she might by now have become an old lady too.
The moment they reached the second floor, he was aware of a difference. The ceilings up here were low, and sloped away to the left, and the wood floor was not dark-stained. Probably because this was the one part of the house that the Brocks had to themselves, it had a less scrubbed-up air. The rugs on the floor were threadbare, their fringing wispy, and the parchment shade on the overhead bulb had a crack in it so that when Mrs Brock switched it on it shed an uneven light as if there were an invisible window somewhere.
The Brocks’ bedroom was the same shape as the landing, with two small windows, one overlooking the sports ground, the other – a low dormer window – facing south along the line of the terrace. There was a frilly nightdress cover on the pillow of the double bed, books on the bedside tables – a wireless on one of them – a dressing table with a surprising number of bottles and jars and a triptych mirror which showed the two of them as they entered, flanked by queasily transposed and foreshortened views of the room.
‘This was probably the maid’s room when your mother was here,’ said Mrs Brock, going over to the larger window, tweaking and smoothing the curtains in an absent-minded, houseproud way. ‘Even ordinary houses like this had a maid before the last war.’
‘She never mentioned it,’ said Spencer. And then realised that, of course, she had. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she used to come up here sometimes, I think it wasn’t allowed.’
‘Ooh, no, mixing with the servants? That would never have done!’ Mrs Brock’s tone implied that she was of a much more democratic turn of mind.
‘I think they were good friends. She said the – the other girl used to talk about her home in the country.’
‘So you’ll have to go and see that as well.’
He smiled wryly. ‘Next trip maybe.’
She went to the smaller window. ‘There’s still a bit of a view from here.’ She stood aside for him to look.
Surprisingly, Mrs Brock was right. Number fourteen was sufficiently higher than its neighbour that you could see across the rooftops to the park. Only you couldn’t see the park itself, just the tops of the trees like black wrought iron against the reddening afternoon sky, and beyond them a glint of flat silver water. In that instant, Spencer felt that he was looking into the past, was inside the head of that little girl who became his mother and her friend Cissy, the maid, the homesick country girl, who gazed out with her over the rooftops, the woods and the water . . . not so very wide, but still an unbridgeable space between this drab world and another.
He turned to Mrs Brock. ‘What’s the water that we can see from here?’
‘Water?’ She leaned her head alongside his, peering. ‘I don’t believe there is any now.’
‘Surely . . .’ He turned back, ready to make his poin
t, but she was right. There was no water, only a glimpse of road shining in the setting sun. ‘Son of a gun . . . my mistake.’
‘Funny you should say that, though,’ said Mrs Brock. ‘Because I believe there used to be a big natural dewpond there, in the wood, when it was a wood. But of course when they began to build around here they filled it in. They had a real problem as I understand it draining that bit for the road.’
The sun went down moments after that, he watched it sink below the trees, and the soft cold darkness seep up like water over the roofs of Waverley Road. Mrs Brock caught his mood, touched his hand gently and said: ‘You come on down when you’re ready.’
When he went back downstairs she was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘since you have the vacancy . . . Maybe I could stay the night?’
She nodded. ‘I think that would be a very good idea.’ She had a comforting natural tact. ‘Bed’s all made up.’
‘You don’t need to feed me, Mrs Brock, I’ll go out.’
‘Tea’s always for three,’ she said, ‘so it makes no difference.’
‘Then thank you.’
At five-thirty Spencer sat in the dining room with Mr Hebditch – the other guest Miss Mawes was away – and ate a mutton stew that contained very little meat, and a pink cornflour mould scattered with coloured granules. Afterwards he went out to the movies and saw Gary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in ‘Bringing Up Baby’. Mrs Brock had given him a key, but he was back well before her ten o’clock curfew, and went straight up to bed.
He and his toothbrush scarcely filled the vacancy. But he was glad to be spending the night in this house where his mother had lived. It was like a rite, a sacrament. The clean, cold emptiness of the room was calming. Once he’d turned the light out he threw back the curtains and the black outs, and lay between the chilly, fiercely laundered sheets watching his breath smoke slightly, and looking out at the night sky through the window opposite. Round about midnight the wind got up again, stirring the branches of the trees with a sound like water, surging round the walls.
Next day he left early, before breakfast, pleading a long drive and uncertain weather. As she saw him off, Mrs Brock asked: ‘What was your mother’s family name?’
‘She was Caroline Wells.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything to me, but I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.’
In the event the day was bright and clear, but there was black ice on the roads and he had to drive slowly. Once he was out of town he pulled up and consulted the map. It was only about ten miles to the village where Cissy had lived – crazy to be down in this neighbourhood and not take a look.
But he struck an obstacle in the form of a huge British Army training depot, even bigger than the base at Church Norton. Quonsett huts littered the fields on both sides of the road, and there was a barrier across it at which he had to present his identity and pass cards to the MP on duty.
‘Where are you trying to go?’
He pointed to Fort Mayden on the map. ‘Here?’
The MP shook his head and pointed back the way he’d come. ‘Can’t get through this way at the moment. You need to get back up where you were, head towards town, then come out along the south road.’
‘Forget it, it was kind of a snap decision anyway.’
‘Sorry, chum.’
He drove back to the main road and turned for home. In the distance to his left he could make out some sort of strange white markings on the side of a hill. He guessed they must be something to do with the depot, or perhaps an orientation point for fliers. Funny, because as the road curved round and he got a better view, the markings were like the outline of a huge animal leaping across the ground.
That evening in the Ramrod Club he joined Frank and Si at the bar. Frank asked him: ‘So how was it? Did you find the family seat of the McColls?’
‘The Wells – my mother’s side. It’s a rooming house these days. I spent the night there.’
‘A la recherche du temps perdu . . .’
‘If you say so.’
‘And was it as your mother described?’
‘Pretty much. It’s nothing special – old, kinda dark, the same as all the other houses on the street. But there was a view from one of the windows, on the top floor, that my mother told me about – that was the same.’ ‘So you slept there as a salute to the past?’ This time Frank had put his finger on it. ‘That’s right.’ Si pulled a face. ‘What a way to spend a thirty-six – sleeping alone in some half-assed boarding house.’
‘It was the object of the exercise. And it was kind of interesting.’
‘I’ll take your word for it!’
‘I did see one thing you don’t see every day.’
Si whistled. ‘Amaze us,’ said Frank.
‘There was a little park at the end of the road, where there used to be a wood. There was a whale’s jawbone over one of the paths.’
‘A what?’ Si’s face was already creasing with incredulous laughter.
‘The jawbone of a blue whale. Given to the park by the man who killed it.’
‘Well!’ They were both laughing now. ‘I bet the locals were just tickled to death.’
‘The sheer size – it’s astonishing.’
Si leaned towards him. ‘This rooming house . . . run by a lonely lady of a certain age with a soft spot for Yanks?’ Spencer smiled good-naturedly. ‘Married lady, with a son in the Merchant Navy.’ ‘Only we know you’re one hell of a dog with those older women . . .’ Frank pushed his glass over. ‘Leave the man alone, Si, and go get the next round.’
* * * * *
They were put on stand-by for the following day, but as was so often the case after a clear cold night the whole of southern England woke to a morning closed down by thick, dank fog which lasted into the afternoon. To the pilots sitting round in the ready room with greyness pressing on the windows and the lights on, it was as though dawn simply hadn’t happened; the only event that broke the tedium and marked the time of day was lunch.
Morale remained fragile, too. A second winter away from home, the feeling that following the big push in June the war should be over and wasn’t, the inevitable attrition of losses, all, told on the nerves. Some people – Frank was one – had always seemed to be slightly outside the herd and therefore less subject to communal changes of mood. Others, Spencer among them, coped by means of a sort of mental hibernation, withdrawing into themselves, consciously lowering their emotional temperature and husbanding their resources. A mercurial few, those with more energy than judgement, the ones you wanted on your side in the air, became big trouble.
Si Santucci was typical of this group. During that long, dingy morning he got gradually more jumpy. He started up conversations with the express intention of needling the other guy, he whistled and fidgeted and swore, and bounced his ball on the ground until he was told to stop, when he immediately began rocking his chair on one leg, twisting back and forth so the leg made a rubbery sound on the lino. It was bad enough for the pilots but Ajax couldn’t stand the sound either. It seemed to hurt his ears and he started to whine and howl, driving them all crazy.
When it got to three o’clock the sun finally broke through and the fog began rapidly to burn away in tatters like train smoke. But by that time it was clear there would be no mission that day. Si and a couple of the other rowdies ran outside like kids let out of school. Ajax came out from under Frank’s chair and stood in front of him, grinning hopefully, tail wagging.
‘You want a walk? All right, you got it.’ Frank rose to his feet, and looked down at Spencer. ‘Spence, you want to stretch your legs?’
There was nothing else to do, so they set off round the perimeter, the dog trotting along next to them with his jaunty, rolling gait. They were on the south side, a little below the level of the hardstands, when they heard the ragged roar of an engine revving for take-off. It was Si’s Fast ’n’ Loose. They could see the hourglass red-head spilling out of her little waitress
outfit on the nose.
‘Oh, no . . .’ Frank shook his head. ‘Idiot! What does he think he’s doing?’
‘He’s been building up a head of steam all day.’
‘Yes, but taking her up for a joyride? He’ll get a roasting for this.’ They watched as Fast ’n’ Loose thundered along the runway and rose over the trees and the church tower into the pale blue winter sky. ‘Doesn’t he know a fellow can get killed pulling those stunts?’
The plane circled wide, banked to the north over Church Norton, executed a slow arrogant spiral and climbed higher before screaming down into a half roll and buzzing the main runway. There was no doubt that Si now had what he wanted: an audience. Men on buildings maintenance, and ground crew around the dispersals and hardstands, were gazing up at the impromptu aerobatics, and there were others outside the control tower, the mess huts and ready rooms doing the same thing. The last traces of fog were still hanging around the shallow depressions to north and south, glowing pink as the sun got low. It turned the base into a picturesque backdrop for whatever stunt Si intended to pull.
There were a couple of men, the two guys Si had gone outside with, capering around on the grass in the middle of the runways. From the air this area looked a little like a baseball diamond, and the men were throwing a ball around. One of them had a catcher’s mitt. Suddenly Spencer knew what Si was going to do, right now while everyone was watching after the long boredom of the abortive stand-to.
Frank said it for him. ‘He’s going to try and catch the damn’ thing again.’
Fast ’n’ Loose was momentarily out of sight, they could just make out the engine noise somewhere beyond the mist, gathering itself. The two men in the centre were turning, looking up, shielding their eyes, waiting for the big entrance. Then suddenly there he was, coming down from the north, in over the church tower so low he almost clipped the flag, air ducts howling. The man wearing the mitt rocked back, took aim, pitched. The plane was coming straight for him, the thin winter grass streamed flat as it drew closer, and swallowed the ball as both men fell to the ground beneath it – it was that or be decapitated. Up to then it was as near perfect as such a thing could be – clean, controlled, and taken at such speed it made the hair rise on your neck. No matter how damn-fool you thought it was, you had to admire the sheer ballsy skill of the thing.
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