by Phillip Rock
“And what does he do?”
“He’s in the army at the moment. A captain of Tirailleurs.”
“French?”
“Yes … from Tours. His family is in the wine business.”
“What’s he like?”
She shrugged and drank some of her cognac. “Handsome. Very Gallic—also weak and family dominated. Qualities I ignored when he was rushing me off my feet in Cannes one winter. I was just eighteen and rather dotty with love and failed to notice the little flaws in his character. He must be quite useless in the army. His father was a great admirer of Franco and Hitler. Raymond dotes on his father’s every word, so I imagine he shares some of his views, although he never expressed them to me.”
“What made you leave him?”
“Something quite simple, actually. We lived in Paris. I was out shopping one day and stopped by his office. He’d neglected to lock the door and I found him naked with a woman. He became very angry with me. Said it was not a wife’s business and that I had no right to drop by like that. I left him that evening and came to England … three months after my wedding.”
“And took the king’s shilling.”
“Not at first. I stayed with my father and studied piano at the Royal Conservatory, but after I turned twenty it was becoming obvious to me that I would never be anything more than competent. When the war started I chucked it in—and here, dear Fat Chap, I am.”
And for that he felt a gratitude he could neither explain nor express.
THE TWO COLORADOS returned at sunset after an eight-hour patrol over the North Sea. Unlike previous patrols, this one had contained a few moments of excitement. They had shadowed a strongly escorted German convoy crossing the Skagerrak in the direction of Stavanger and had been fired on by one of the warships—the shells exploding uncomfortably close to Allison’s plane. Then, later in the day, as they were turning for home off Sunnhordland, they had witnessed the sinking of two German cargo ships and a patrol boat by a British destroyer.
“Jolly good for our side!” Allison had cried over the R.T., as though cheering a goal in football. Colin had stared down at one of the burning ships so far below. Men, tiny as ants, leaping into the freezing water in the mouth of the fjord. Most of them would be dead before they ever reached the barren shore.
They touched down in the broad, shallow waters of Thurne Mere, tied up at the buoys, and waited for the motor launch to take them ashore. Colin watched the squadron leader climb onto the wing of his plane and walk slowly along it as though looking for something he had dropped.
“Find anything out there?” he asked as the boat chugged toward the dock.
Allison nodded. “Thought I’d heard a twang or two. Some bits of shrapnel went through the skin. Learn through experience, old chum. Stay well away from Jerry cruisers in future.”
After debriefing and a mug of tea, Colin went to his quarters, took a tepid bath, and opened a letter from Kate. She wrote to him frequently—bright, cheerful letters. This one made him sit bolt upright in the tub and he read it through twice. When Allison and two other officers came into the hut later to ask if he cared to join them for a booze-up in Ormesby, he said: “She’s taken a flat in Norwich. She decided to put off going to Oxford until Michaelmas term and enrolled in some courses at a special school in Norwich.”
“Who is she,” Allison asked.
“Her name’s Kate. I thought I’d mentioned her.”
“Not to me.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of her,” one of the officers said.
“The privileged few. How old is she?”
“Eighteen,” Colin said.
“Pretty?”
“I think she is.”
“Is she in Norwich now?”
“Apparently. Number Seven, Finch Grove. Flat D. She didn’t give a phone number. Guess she doesn’t have one.”
Allison set his cap at an even more rakish angle than usual. “Ormesby is closer but Norwich is better. What say, chums? Shall we pass judgment on Mr. Ross’s taste in women?”
“Oh, no,” Colin said. “I’m not having half the squadron dropping in on her.”
“Trot along by yourself, chum. But do try to bring her around for a drink. We’ll be at the Sword of Nelson—as usual.”
It was fifteen miles along a good, flat road. Colin had borrowed the duty officer’s battered Austin and he drove as fast as he dared, considering the condition of the car and the pitch darkness of the road. It took him half an hour of groping through the blacked-out maze of Norwich streets to find Finch Grove—a narrow, dead-end street flanking the river. Number Seven was a three-story Victorian structure. Flat D was one flight up and in the rear of the building. She answered to his ring and opened the door, standing there looking beautiful in a simple skirt and blouse, her nose smudged and her hair messed.
“I was cleaning up,” she said, sounding apologetic. “I don’t think the previous tenant had ever heard of a dust rag or broom.”
He leaned against the doorjamb and slowly shook his head. “What do you think you’re up to, Kate?”
“Up to? Nothing. Are you coming in or not? This place is chilly enough as it is without leaving the door open.”
He stepped in and closed it. “What’s all this nonsense about not going to Oxford?”
She was on the defensive and it showed in her face. “My tutor thought it would be for the best. A few months’ preparation here before plunging into university.”
“This is the only school in England, I suppose.”
“He thought it was the best … for what I need.”
“He did, did he?” He stood in the middle of the small room and looked around. It was sparsely furnished. He could see part of a bedroom beyond a curtained alcove. “Not exactly the Ritz.”
“I’ll make it cozy. You’ll see.”
“What do your mother and Jenny think about this?”
She gave him a straight, unwavering look. “They consider me mature enough to do what I think best.”
“Yeah, I guess you are at that.”
“You’re not happy to see me, are you?”
He was, terribly, and yet there was a gnawing doubt. “Sure I am, Kate.” He put his arms around her in a brotherly fashion, but she clung to him fiercely, passionately, her lips warm, parted against his own.
“Oh, Colin,” she whispered. “I just had to be near you … to see you once in a while. I won’t interfere. I’m taking two very hard courses and I’ll be studying most of the time. But I’ll be here, just a few miles from you … and we can be together sometimes. Is it so wrong?”
“No,” he said, smiling down at her strained, anxious face. He stroked her hair. “Heck, you’re my girl.”
She was happy to go out and meet his friends and spent half an hour putting on a little makeup, brushing her long brown hair, and selecting the right dress. He sat waiting patiently and thought, when she at last stepped from the curtained alcove, that the wait had been worth it.
“You look … a vision.”
“Do I?” she asked anxiously. “The dress is all right?”
“Perfect. I think I’m an idiot to take you within a mile of that bunch.”
SQUADRON LEADER ALLISON completed the briefing by seven thirty and the crews collected their chutes and walked in the morning chill toward the dock and the waiting launches. Five aircraft were going out today, each assigned a sector ranging from the southern tip of Norway to the Frisian Islands.
Allison, biting on an unlit pipe, fell into step with Colin. “Your Kate’s a smasher, old chum.”
“A nice girl.”
“I have no doubt of it. What my ancient parent would call a pippin. I envy you, Ross.” He turned his back to the wind and lit the pipe with a match. “Engaged, are you?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Nothing like that. We enjoy each other’s company.”
“I see. Better that way, actually.”
Colin’s plane had the southernmost sector and flew low, no more than te
n feet above the waves, so as to avoid detection by the German Freya radar on Wangerooge Island. Shortly before noon they spotted a strong German convoy heading out of Cuxhaven bound for Norway. They radioed back that information and then turned onto a course that would take them out over the North Sea, following the route taken by the bomber boys when they returned from their nightly leaflet raids over Germany. They stayed at seven thousand feet on this leg of the patrol to increase their range of observation.
“I think I’ve spotted something, Skipper,” one of the gunner-observers in the waist called over the intercom. “Bearing six-o … five miles … small dot. Could be a U-boat’s conning tower.”
Porpoise more than likely, Colin was thinking as he altered course and flicked the safety catch from the bomb-release handle. Sergeant Pilot O’Conner in the second seat had his powerful binoculars out and was scanning the sea ahead.
“I see it, Skipper. Dead ahead … in a slight trough now … rising up … not a sub. Debris of some kind. No, by God … a rubber dinghy!”
Colin’s heart gave a leap. “See anyone in it?”
“Hard to tell. Bring her lower and a bit to the left.”
Colin dropped the nose sharply. He could see the speck of yellow on the sea now, rising and falling slowly in the swell. He leveled off at two hundred feet and circled it, banking steeply so that the men in the waist and Sergeant O’Conner could get a good look at it.
“Bomber’s round raft … five men in it!”
The crew of a Wellington or Whitley. All had gotten out, so the bomber had probably not been attacked by fighters or hit by flak. A good many of the bombers sent as far as Berlin to drop their loads of propaganda leaflets simply ran out of gas bucking the westerlies on the long flight home to Norfolk or Lincolnshire. Going down in the small hours of the morning with a bone-weary crew. Down to a pancake landing on the cold, dark sea.
“Anyone waving?”
“Might be too done in for that.”
“How does the sea look, Billy?”
“Swells, running north to south … two-footers, I’d say. Piece of cake.”
He touched down, landing on the sea from west to east in the slight hollow of a trough, and then gunned his engines and taxied over the waves toward the raft, the hull bouncing and pitching and spray kicking up onto the windshield. He eased off on the throttles as they came close, the men in the waist sliding back the plastic blister and unstrapping the ten-foot boathook. The raft and its human cargo bobbed in the shadow of the left wing.
“Hold her steady, Billy. I’m going back and take a look.”
He headed aft, noticing that the radioman and the navigator had left their cubicles and were now standing in the waist with the two gunners. The gunners had the rubber raft secured with the hook.
“Get ’em inside,” he snapped.
The navigator gave him a dull stare and shook his head. “No point to it, Skip.”
Colin pushed past him and leaned out of the side opening. The raft twisted on the end of the hook in the propwash. Five men in flying clothes sat huddled tightly together, arms about each other. They were all dead, salt-leathered faces turned to the sky, mummified lips pulled tautly over stark white teeth. Gulls had pecked out their eyes, leaving black sockets in the skulls. Through a rent in the heavily padded Irvin suit of one man he could see blue cloth … the weather-faded embroidery of RAF wings.
“Get ’em in,” he said, his voice sounding alien. A terrible strangeness. “We’re flying them home.” The men stared at him, their faces the color of wax. He grabbed the boathook from the gunners and pulled the raft against the side of the plane. “In, I said! Goddamn it! In!”
SQUADRON LEADER ALLISON lit his pipe and tilted back in his chair. A hint of sun still tinted the windows of the Nissen hut.
“Twenty-four hours’ leave, chum. For you and your crew.”
“We don’t need it,” Colin said.
“I am in command here, Pilot Officer Ross. Kindly bear that in mind.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Sure.”
“Bomber Command was grateful for what you did. The chums were from a Whitley squadron at Swinderby. A paper drop in February. Don’t be haunted by their eyes, Ross. Saw it once or twice on Western Approaches. The gulls never come until after they’re dead.”
“Thanks for telling me. I mean that, Allison.”
“Now go on. You can borrow my car if you’d like. It’s more reliable and comfortable than Taunton’s old bus. Have a good booze-up. Get it out of your mind.”
KATE WAS SURPRISED to see Colin when she opened the door. She was wearing a robe, her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon. There was a way to reach her by telephone, but it meant calling the caretaker’s flat. He had not wanted to do that.
“Sorry I disturbed you,” he said.
“That’s all right. I don’t mind. You didn’t tell me you got off every night.”
She held the door open for him and he walked into the room and sat stiffly on the edge of a chair, twirling his cap in restless hands. “We can leave the base after patrols. Usually we just dash into Ormesby for a pint or two at the local. Special occasions bring us here. Like last night.”
“What occasion was that?”
“Meeting you. Everyone thought you were swell.”
“I liked them.” She sat on the sofa opposite him and hugged her heavy robe about her. “Did you eat? I can make an omelet on the hot plate.”
“I’m not very hungry. I have a twenty-four-hour leave. I wondered if you’d like to go into London.”
“I have to register for my courses in the morning. I’m sorry, Colin.”
“That’s okay. I didn’t want to go anyway. How about dinner at the Sword of Nelson … shepherd’s pie and a shandy?”
“I’d like that.”
“Okay. Get dressed.”
She continued to sit, watching. She detected a change in him. A distant look in the eyes. A peculiar hardening of the mouth. “Is anything the matter, Colin?”
He shook his head and forced a grin. “Not a darn thing—now.”
They walked to the pub, crossing a bridge into Westwick Street, moonlight shimmering on the little river. A full moon and a dappled sky. The bombers would be out tonight, he was thinking, holding her hand tightly, heading out across the North Sea and over Germany bearing their bundles of leaflets. There was a paper shortage in Germany. They were probably grateful for the shower of printed material fluttering down from the night sky. Grateful or not, it didn’t stop them from aiming their flak guns or sending up the night fighters. Good training for the crews. There was a joke going the rounds:
RAF interrogation officer to bomber pilot: “You scattered your leaflets over Berlin very quickly.”
“Oh, we didn’t scatter them, sir, just tossed the bundles out.”
“Good God, man! You might have hurt someone.”
Not all the crews were flying. There were quite a few men in the pub from the Bomber Command field at Newton Heath, playing darts and making a large dent in the beer supply. There had been some bitter grumbling from some of the locals who resented the RAF taking over their favorite drinking spots. One of the small prices to be paid in the war.
If most of the men kept glancing at Kate, Colin kept glancing at them. His age, most of them … a few veterans with weathered faces and thick mustaches. He had lifted the first body out of the raft himself, expecting dead weight, shocked by the lightness—just bones and mummified flesh in the bulky flying clothes. Dead from the cold, the icy winds of February howling down from the Arctic. He wondered if they had watched the keening gulls before they died. Circling … knowing.
“You were very quiet,” Kate said as they walked slowly back across the bridge to Finch Grove.
“Was I? Just thinking, I guess.”
“Penny for your thoughts.”
He pressed her hand tightly. “I was thinking of you. That’s worth a thousand bucks.”
“I wouldn’t sell my thoughts about
you for any price.”
She asked him in and made coffee on the hot plate while he slouched on the sofa and leafed through one of her biology books. Glancing at him, she could tell that he was staring through it, not seeing anything printed there.
“You have an expressive face, Colin.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Eloquent. You’d make a terrible liar. I know something’s wrong. I can see it.”
“And what do you see … or think you see?”
“Oh, pain, anger … a gamut of emotions. When we were in the pub I watched your face while those chaps were playing darts. You had a haunted look in your eyes.”
“Pretty smart, aren’t you?” He closed the book and dropped it on the floor.
“Care to tell me? I’m a good listener.”
“Okay.” He sat forward, hands clasped between his knees. “We picked up some dead men this afternoon … a bomber crew that had ditched two months ago. All we should have done when we saw they were beyond saving was to take their identity disks if possible and get the hell back in the air. I had them loaded aboard. Took time … hauling them out of the raft … stowing them in the stern. God protects fools, I guess. If a Jerry floatplane had been on the prowl we would all have been dead men. Allison should have chewed my butt off, but he didn’t say a word—not yet, anyway.”
“I think you did the right thing. You couldn’t just leave them.”
“Could—and should. The dead have no priority. We were a sitting duck for damn near twenty minutes.”
She sat beside him and rested a hand on his arm. “How do you feel about it, Collie?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, seeing the eyeless masks in the raft … the pink, smiling faces in the pub. A crew at rest … a crew at play. “I had to bring them home, Kate. I just wasn’t tough enough to take off and leave them there.”
Her hand touched his face and he turned to her and held her fiercely, face pressed against her breasts.
“Stay with me,” she whispered. “Let me hold you.”
“Sleep on the couch,” he said. “So … damn tired.”
She smiled and stroked the back of his head. “Have to take your legs off to make you fit. We can share the bed. And one day we’ll share each other … for ever and ever.”