by Andrew Greig
I watched him, his tanned arm moving rhythmically back and forward, at once frowning and smiling into the stretch of water off to the side. Serious play, I thought. He’s playing but taking it seriously, as a child does. The way we make love. It’s a game and we can smile and laugh, but we don’t take it casually. That would be insulting. There’s things to be learned here.
He rowed in close to the bank and we drifted along it in the light breeze. I lay back, smoked a cigarette and looked at the sky, the few white clouds puffed up like pigeons’ breasts. I heard him grunt, then his arm whipped back and forward again. I sat up in time to see his wrist strike back, saw his whole face flare as the rod bent.
He played it in, I had the net ready. A big one, I could see that. I was praying for his sake it wouldn’t drop off the hook. I decided if the hook stayed in and we got this fish, he’d survive.
It got closer and closer to the boat, then pulled away again. He worked it back in, looking tense now. I stretched out as far as I could, had a couple of passes with the landing net but missed. The rod was bent at a ridiculous angle. He brought the fish in close again, I leant and swooped, got the net under it and lifted it on board.
A big one, absolutely beautiful. I had such mixed feelings as it flapped round my ankles. Then he caught it and bashed it just before I had time and wit to ask him not to, to tell him that in some way the fish’s fate was bound up with his. Silly idea. He washed the blood off his hands and looked up at me.
‘Thought we might have lunch on one of the islands,’ he said.
‘A fine and private place,’ I said and smiled to myself, knowing he wouldn’t get the quotation, then felt bad for my cheap superiority. Did he feel superior because he could catch a fish like this but I couldn’t? I cursed my vanity or insecurity, whichever it was.
He grinned back at me, full of youth and openness. ‘Too bad I forgot the French letters,’ he said. ‘Still we can be Adam and Eve behind those trees.’
‘We can be more than that,’ I said, then felt around in my coat and produced the packet I’d lifted from the bedside table.
*
We lay naked on our clothes in the broken shade. I idly stroked the few black hairs around his nipples, he flicked away the flies that tried to land on me. I thought this was as perfect and far away as we could get.
Then he murmured, ‘I wonder how the lads are doing.’
I lay very still, wondering at the stab of anger I felt. Something close to jealousy.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m so pleased to be here but I can’t help wondering.’
‘Wonder to yourself,’ I said. ‘No, that’s not fair.’
‘It reminds me of school summer holidays,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want it to end but at the same time I sometimes used to look forward to getting back and catching up with everyone again. Being part of it.’
‘I didn’t realize you felt part of it,’ I said.
‘Nor did I.’
I propped myself upon an elbow and studied him. Long straight nose, wide mouth, eyebrows arched high like he was permanently surprised. Brown eyes with flecks of hazel. My man. A complete stranger. Beside me and 150 miles away.
‘Len, what are you doing this for?’
He frowned slightly and seemed to give it serious consideration.
‘Sex,’ he said. ‘The sex is terrific.’
I thumped his chest.
‘No, stupid! The RAF, this whole fighter pilot bit. You didn’t have to do it. It’s much too … dangerous. And don’t make a joke about it or I’ll squeeze your bad hand.’
He grinned and took away his bandaged hand, put it away behind his head.
‘The flying,’ he said. ‘I love flying – did I forget to mention that? There’s nothing like it, the moment you feel yourself lifting into the air. Or when I’m cruising at ten thousand, looking down on cloud mountains and canyons, or way down onto hedges and rivers and houses and fields. It’s calm and yet exciting. I feel so … The world from up there looks …’ He paused then shrugged. ‘Well anyway, it’s kept me out of the trenches.’
‘But there are no trenches in this war.’
He giggled. ‘I know, my dad got that wrong. He thought this war would be like the last one – completely pointless and bogged down in trenches.’
‘But it isn’t, is it?’
A long pause lay between us, the sunny afternoon suddenly grown serious.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t, is it. It has to be done and we can’t duck it.’
He sat up and looked around.
‘What, no applause?’ he said. ‘I thought we were Olympic standard! Let’s go in for a swim.’
‘Like this?’
‘Why not? There’s no one around. Even if there was, as my mother used to say, you’ll never see them again.’
‘I wish my mother would say things like that.’
Then as I swam in smooth circles round his thrashing and splashing, I thought again of what he’d said about flying. How it was calm and exciting at once. And I thought of my childhood fantasy of the cave behind the waterfall. If that’s what flying was for him, little wonder his voice changed when he talked of it. Little wonder he was reluctant to speak of it at all. I could understand it – one doesn’t wish to spoil something special by talking tosh about it.
Still, we hadn’t got to the bottom of it. After all, if he’d wanted to stay out of the Army, he could have volunteered for RAF ground crew. And if I’d wanted security, I could have stayed with Evelyn.
I blew all the air out of my lungs, took a last look around and jack-knifed then swam down, and with my outstretched arm briefly touched the bottom, soft oozy mud, before striking up again for the surface and the light of day.
Light on water, water on light, I wished I could stay and stare at them for days. But, ridiculously, I was aching to be back. Back at the dispersal hut with the merrie men, however irritating they were. Back with the card games, playing ‘Up the River’ for penny stakes, back in the Mess eating burned bacon and hardened eggs with loads of bread and butter while the light broke outside, back with the silly jokes and edgy remarks and stomach jumping when the Tannoy clicked.
I wondered what was wrong with me, that only the promise of death and killing and sex could excite me now. I’d been at it too long and it had scarcely begun. That’s why I wanted the fishing, to get back to an innocence. And it worked, for a while. But once I’d caught the fish and we’d made love, the restlessness rose up again.
Absurd, because at the same time I knew myself dreading the prospect of being back at the airfield again, and I would have stayed there with her for ever.
*
Mr Mannion’s Wolseley came as we were hauling the boat back up to the shed. For a moment his stout figure was caught against the falling sun and he stood charred and wavering against the glare like it was eating him.
I shook my head to chase it away, shook hands and got in.
We didn’t say much on the drive back, both sleepy with air and sunshine and light on water. He dropped us off at the top of the lane. We waved goodbye to the water bailiff we’d never see again, and wandered down the lane to the now familiar cottage.
The key under the plant pot, the smell of wood smoke, the dripping tap in the back kitchen. Upstairs we lay on the narrow bed and fell asleep for a while. I woke abruptly, looking up at the wallpaper, at the blue birds frozen in flight. The light was starting to go. Stella’s head was turned away and she was whiffling in her sleep.
I put my hand on her breathing ribs, felt the rise and fall beneath her shirt. The birds were perfect, unmoving, but we were imperfect and alive. And I was hungry. I slipped away to prepare the fish and left her to sleep awhile though it was the last evening of our leave and like as not we’d never come this way again.
The train back took most of the day, crawling along with long delays, packed out. At least this time we had seats. We read the Thurber together and laughed at men and women going through rid
iculous but recognizable rituals.
His hand was itching under the new light dressing I’d put on that morning. A good sign, I reckoned. Sign of healing. He flexed his fingers, they seemed in full working order. Good enough to make love. Good enough to fly and press the red killing button.
He fell asleep, head on my shoulder, in a siding by a bombed bridge. I looked out at it, the arch into thin air. It didn’t look possible.
I turned more pages of my book, but my attention was gone. The seat was uncomfortable, the train was packed, mostly with soldiers. Sometimes it seems the whole country is on the move, I thought. Nothing will be the same again. The War isn’t something fought by somebody else. It’s ours now – the Home Guard, the air-raid wardens, the people running this train and working the armaments factories and farming the land.
I looked round the train at the weary faces, the pale and the sunburned, the sleeping, the waiting and the animated. Land Girls, evacuees, troops and administrators. It was then I saw there had surely been too much upheaval for everyone to return to their places once it was over. Up till now I’d thought of the War as an interruption of normal life. But it wouldn’t resume the same.
Some kind of landslide was going on; it destroyed some things and created others. It was, if nothing else, an eventful time.
Len’s head slid down my shoulder. He grunted, his head came up and eyes opened, completely blank. Then he saw me, and smiled as if it was good what he saw, then went back to sleep again.
How can we love anyone in wartime? I thought. It’s too stupid. Then I looked round the train again and saw that everyone on it was going to die, sooner or later. How can we love in the face of that? Then again, how can we not?
Wartime is like real life but more so.
I got back to barracks late and dog-tired. I came into the Mess and saw the bar was busy and Sniff Burton was playing rags on the battered piano. But no other face did I recognize, not even the ones shouting around the ping-pong table. There were lots of them and they were mostly young. It had happened: the airfield had been taken over by strangers.
‘Hi, Lenny,’ Sniff said. He looked older, tired. ‘It’s been a wild time since you’ve been gone.’
My heart thumped up into my neck.
‘Tad OK?’ I asked.
‘Tad? Sure,’ Sniff said. He paused, rubbed his nose on his sleeve. ‘But most of the old guard have gone west and we’ve been bombed to hell three times. Have a good time?’
I looked over at all the new fresh faces messing around at the bar. At that moment I couldn’t picture Stella at all; they got in the way.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had that.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mid-August
Shaken awake in the dark, mug of tea, sign the chit. Wool, cotton, sheepskin, leather – I pull on animal layers, feeling mechanical. Breakfast, the truck, first light, mist below the tips of trees, grass glittering with wet. Cold metal, dew-streaked under my bandaged hand. The world grey as me, entering the machine.
Whiff of oxygen to wake up as we climb – me, Tim Baker, and a Sergeant Mackay, one of the new boys. Three weeks training since he soloed. It was a year in my time. The boy’s struggling to fly this thing at all. At least Tim is fairly casual about formation and we fly in a loose Vic of three as we gain height.
Standing patrol over the estuary, protecting the ports and forward airfields. As my kite slides about in thin air I think of Stella sleeping. What use is thought? It can’t touch. Touch is what we need, I have learned that much.
Lord, it’s cold up here. Everything glazed, nothing doing, patrolling the coast at 15,000 feet. See the sunlight start to spread over the water below. How come the sun keeps rising through slaughter? Goes to show we’re not much, which is just as well. If the world were batted round by the likes of us, it would bounce like a ping-pong ball between heaven and hell till it was cracked as we are.
I’d got a brief update last night. The enemy had changed tactics and stepped up several notches while I was gone, were attacking the sector airfields in numbers. The whole atmosphere on the base had changed, darkened. All the joshing was gone and it felt like our crisis was coming.
The CO was dead, also Johnny Staples. And aristocratic St John, who I’d come to like though we never talked that much about anything that mattered, killed taking off in an air raid that also did for cheery Fred Tate and four other ground crew. That hurt, I’d felt a warmth for Fred who’d never harmed anyone. Then Shortarse bought it over Portsmouth, same day as Bo Bateson near Dover. I know now how the survivors of France felt – old, isolated, surrounded by people who never knew the faces that have gone.
We’ve been looking and looking and trying to instruct Mackay in the basics, but we’ve met with nothing but light. And now throttle down over familiar trees, thinking of bacon as the appetite finally awakes. Touching down, the earth reaches up and murmurs beneath me, like Stella when I returned to bed two mornings and a thousand years ago. I feel myself lit up, confirmed, as I slide from the cockpit to the ground.
The screen that morning was crowded with blips, dipping and falling and rising again like green mobile stalactites. I was slow and clumsy at first, as though I’d forgotten it all in a few days. Then it became automatic, mechanical. Bearing, range, height, number, Tizzy angle for interception.
I read them off and heard in my ear the controller sending them up, knowing full well from Len that the pilots would always add on a couple of thousand feet if they could. There’d been high-level arguments about that because controllers liked to be in control, they didn’t like pilots making decisions for themselves.
I was glad not to be covering Len’s sector. I definitely didn’t want to follow my lover’s blip across the screen. It was bad enough hearing the pilots’ voices (their language in battle was hair-raising), getting higher, shouting then screaming Look out! Look out! and then the scream, cut off suddenly, mercifully, as the IFF blip vanished from the screen.
The controller had asked us if we’d like to be relieved during battle so we didn’t have to hear the language. Language! I thought. We hear much worse than language. We hear screams. We said: no need. We’d heard it all before.
‘If we were ever sensitive plants,’ I muttered to Jessie Walker beside me, ‘we’re not any more.’
*
I took my mid-morning changeover, and smoked a cigarette sitting outside the hut in the morning sunshine. I thought about Len, wanting and not wanting to picture what he might be doing at that time. Almost certainly he’d be fighting today: the skies were very busy. He could be dead already and I’d not know it till the evening when the phone went in Mrs Mackenzie’s and by arrangement one of his friends gave me the news.
I shook myself and drew more deeply on the cigarette. I made myself picture an island in a lake, lying naked in the hot sun, or the shock of cool water on my skin everywhere as I went in. And I smiled, because they couldn’t take that away from me. I’d had that, and nothing would ever make me regret it.
I stubbed out the cigarette on the concrete and went back inside into the dim. Jean Finlay showed me the blips as she slid out of the chair: very close, due to pass virtually overhead. Then we’d lose them, for the RDF masts only pointed forward. Jean went outside for a smoke and a call came in from the Observation post – a group of Me110 bombers plus Stukas with fighter escort were heading this way. Unusual, I thought. Enemy aircraft didn’t normally use this as a flight path.
Then we heard the rumble of engines. Major Henley wheeled in his chair, head cocked, eyebrows raised, listening. Then a curious howling wail. Then the screen went blank, the floor rose and the walls leaned in and I was already sliding under the table. I saw the Major lift from the ground and fly across the room. Then the air imploded and I was deaf and soundlessly saw the room turn grey with smoke and dust. I felt another thud in my chest like a great fist thumping, the table rocked. Then I was pushed across the floor and banged my head on a metal cabinet. It was really sore. I crawl
ed back under the table and clung to a leg. The room rocked again and my head squeezed till it felt as if my eyes would pop out.
Then silence. The dust settled as the smoke began to drift out the missing wall. Someone was kneeling over the crumpled shape of Major Henley. It was Jessie and she was weeping.
I crawled from under the table then pushed myself onto my knees. I stood up and went slowly to where the door had been, stepped into the dazzling sunlight. I tripped and nearly fell, then looked down. Saw the WAAF uniform, the long splayed black hair of Jean Finlay. Her legs were lying on the other side of the road. I blinked, then turned away but I’d already seen. Figures were climbing from the slit trenches, somewhere there was sobbing and near by someone cursed fiercely, continuously.
‘What’s the matter?’ I heard someone say. ‘Haven’t you seen a dead body before?’
I do not have to see this, I thought. I know about it, but I don’t have to see it.
I sat down on the ground and took out a cigarette. There were running feet and people moving about, coming out of the slit trench by the masts, tearing at the caved-in walls of No. 3 hut. I’d better help, I thought. At least check my screen. Can’t have any more of the bastards getting through.
I threw away the cigarette and got to my feet.
We were stood down for a couple of hours after the morning patrol. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, so walked across the airstrip and in under the trees. I took out my penknife and began to carefully carve my name on a large beech tree. Under the grey bark was pale green then off-white, the colour of the bandage on my hand. The new CO had apologized for putting me straight onto active service.
‘You can see how it is, Len. We’re scraping the barrel here now they’re onto our RDF.’