by Andrew Greig
I’ve told Maddy so it’s official: I’m very late. I doubt I’ve ever been this late. Len and I had been a bit careless, which is crazy for intelligent people. We’re trying so hard not to conceive, but at the same time another part of us is devilling away trying to upset all our plans and make more life.
Maybe that’s what all this wartime fornication is about. People have not just much more opportunity, but also more motivation. In the midst of this destruction, we want to make life.
But that’s not part of my plans. I veer between panic and a kind of silly pride, a vision of growing large and round as if I were the world itself, round and whole. I think of telling Len but I fear his response, whatever it might be, and then I think no point worrying him unnecessarily. So I wake early each morning, looking for that familiar ache but it’s not there. Instead I lie confronting that other ache. I miss my dad so much, in a way I never did while he was alive.
So what would it be like to suffer the loss of someone you know you love while they’re alive, and miss while they’re still there to be missed? Under the bedclothes, I shiver and feel myself withdraw a little. I’m not very brave.
*
I get up and dress for work in the early light. Hands on his hips, jacket open and a big grin on his face, from his photo my father looks out at the world like it was a lark. As if there was a song or a joke somewhere just out of sight but he could hear it. On mornings like this, I don’t hear it.
Len’s letter is waiting on the mat. I read it quickly and feel ashamed. Ashamed at my own invisible withdrawal. Then I am angry – what gives him the right to be so candid and open? It’s not fair for I’m not like that. I veer like a weather-hen. I love and I don’t. I want a child and I’m terrified of it. At times I think of Evelyn, who asks so much less of me. And way behind that, I think of Roger Whitticombe, smarty-pants, intolerably good-looking, wit and cynic, my first lover, at this moment ploughing the grey seas somewhere in the Atlantic.
Then Len says he’s being withdrawn and tears come to my eyes. Tears of relief, I hope, and not that I’m not going to see him for however long. Grant me one unselfish thought. I picture him sliding on his back at a hundred miles an hour with only the cockpit hood sheltering him from a quick but horrid death and the idea makes a twist right down in my stomach, a sharp pain that makes me think after all we are connected or that my period has come.
Which it has. I’m not going to add to the world’s population. Ninety per cent relief and ten per cent disappointment. We must, must be more careful.
Then I cycle to work down the back roads, feeling all kinds of mixed things, contemplating seeing my slightly loopy darling tonight and my mum at the weekend to help fill the dreadful silence of that house. I notice the leaves are turning floppy, dark and dusty. Not even wars halt seasons, and that helps shrink this calamity.
I prop my bike up against the hut in the broken shadow of the transmission masts. Inside they’re taking bets whether we’ll get bombed today. Fact is we’re stretched to snapping point. The Chain Home and Chain High networks have both been holed several times, though already repaired. It looks like they’re targeting us and the airfields that are meant to protect us, especially the sector airfields that direct operations.
It looks very bad but I briefly notice the morning is beautiful even as I sit down inside the hut. If the War wasn’t on we could enjoy it, but then again we wouldn’t notice as much. We wouldn’t ache so.
I can’t square all these things, but am comforted to feel the rustle of his letter as I loosen my uniform jacket and lean in towards the screen.
So we had one more night of kissing on the bed, waiting for the moment when she’d look down on me with her face soft and pupils all enlarged, and she’d smile, sit up on the edge of the bed and start to unbutton her blouse. And I’d lie there feeling like heaven’s gate was opening.
No one has ever been that good to me. It makes me quite tearful, this tearing feeling in my chest as I try to give her what she gives me.
And she reaches out, lifts the needle once again from the inside of the record back to the outside again, and then the crackle and the opening and we return to our own melody.
Even when this war is over and we’re sitting after supper in the sleepiness of another evening of married life, the kids finally in bed and asleep, I know I’ll never be able to hear that clarinet concerto and not see it all again. The night is warm, so is the little room, so even with the window open we easily lie naked on the bed. And all the while as our hands move and then I move, slowly and gently so as to give no sound to Mrs Mackenzie downstairs, our mouths keep whispering goodnesses to each other as the music unwinds – melancholy, joyous and unstoppable.
*
There was just time to bury Sniff before our squadron left. I was among the ones who carried him. When we lifted the coffin onto our shoulders, we staggered a moment. It was heavy, very heavy. But Sniff Burton has been a light, wiry man. As I stared straight ahead and we tried to walk a straight line from the church to the grave, I heard a faint rattle through the wood pressed to my ear.
It dawned on me. There must have been so little of him left in the burnt-out wreck. So they’d added stones so we’d feel we were carrying more than some charred bone and teeth, and someone had overdone it. Another fake, like the game of Ludo becoming chess. And I felt sick because it made me picture what was really in the box we were carrying.
Lies and fakes have that effect – they make the truth grimmer.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Early September
I got off the country bus, hoisted the kitbag over my shoulder and walked down the lane between the fences, noticing the little signs – a fence sagging here, verges run wild there, too many rabbits running about. According to Mum, even with the Land Girls the estate was still short-handed. It was short of cash and the slide had started in the Great War when two of the sons died and old man Wycliffe lost heart. From the windows of the bus I’d seen the empty cottages and the ones stuffed with evacuees.
I crossed the little footbridge over the stream, shifted my bag to the other shoulder and came up the back way through the trees. A fair breeze was blowing and it flipped the poplar leaves from green to silver over the rusting swing where my sister used to sit for hours in a yellow dress, not letting me have a go. Washing was blowing on the line but there was no sign of Mum out and about, so I put down my bag and sat carefully on the swing seat. It creaked but held.
I pushed with my feet and swung gently. There was a squeaking, groaning sound. These days Lily lived near the workshop where they assembled RDF and R/T sets. She was working all the hours God sends according to Mum and was too busy to write. I’d had a card from a weekend she’d spent in Brighton with her Joe (‘my Joe’, she wrote several times, and I wondered if she was as possessive about him as she had been with the swing).
I let the swing come to a halt and sat there with my feet trailing the ground, feeling low and lost and as if everything was broken. My childhood seemed very far off, as if nothing good had replaced it except Stella, who was far away. My head still ached dully. I wanted to sleep for an awfully long time. Already the palms of my hands were stained with rust and flakes of green paint.
‘Leonard! What are you doing there?’
And here comes my mother, small and round, smiling and tired-looking, hurrying towards me past the currant bushes with her apron flapping. She hugs me and for a moment something is restored, something feels secure and unchanging, then I notice the grey as I bend to kiss the top of her head.
*
I’d forgotten the smell of the house, and it almost made me weep. The medic had warned me of mood swings and told me not to take them too seriously. The pantry and the kitchen both had the same smell. Under the cooking and furniture polish was that damp whiff of countryside. It was something I’d longed to escape from yet yearned to return to.
For a moment I’d a flash of living with Stella in the new suburbs, coming home from the
draughtsman’s office in the evening, putting on old trousers and going out into the garden. That’s what I wanted, wide acres of normality but our normality, not my parents’. Something newer, with more said. We’d have more honesty, more obvious love. That’s what I wanted for our children. That, to be honest, is what I wanted for myself.
I asked about Dad. Apparently he was still asleep in the back room, making up sleep on his one day off a week. There was another rush job on at the factory, there always was. Did I know he’d switched to aeroplane parts? Then he came in, yawning and unshaven in his old pyjamas. We shook hands, one brief clasp and then release. He turned aside as if embarrassed, put the kettle on the stove.
I sat down. He sat down. We didn’t know what to say. He was my father, we had so much to talk about and I didn’t know how to start.
‘So,’ he said, ‘how’s the flying going?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Pretty busy, you know. Shot down another bomber last week.’
For a moment, our eyes met. His were pale blue. I don’t know what he saw. I saw my father in late middle age. I couldn’t see him any other way. I couldn’t see him as a young man going into the Army, into the trenches, shit scared or full of patriotic fervour. I couldn’t see him not knowing who he was going to marry or where he’d live or how many children he’d have or that I’d be one of them. That was the young man I needed to know about and I couldn’t make myself start. Not in the dim kitchen as he scratched his chin and yawned over his tea and my mother fussed about and made him toast.
‘So you’re enjoying yourself,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘It’s great fun. Wizard. Time of my life.’
He looked away then and there was a pause before my mother broke in to tell me how the strawberries had been early this year but the currants and everything else were small with lack of water. And then the conversation moved on to small catchings-up until we had lunch outside, waving wasps off the salad as we talked about local news and nothings either changed or unaltered by the War.
*
In the evening Mum sent us both down to the pub. We went on Dad’s motorbike that he used for getting in to work. At first I clung on to his jacket, then he yelled to put my arms round his waist. Which I did, feeling pleased and awkward. But it was fun, leaning together into the corners through the late light, feeling the flies and insects ping off my hands and jacket. The sudden warmth as we went by a stone wall, the moist coolness as we went past trees.
He pulled up in the courtyard and switched off. He glanced at me, nodded, almost smiled then averted his head and we went in.
*
We talked cricket and footballers, then crops and weather. I went to get the second pints. He looked up as I came back.
‘Your mother tells me you’ve got a new girl,’ he said.
I nodded eagerly, wanting to tell him all about Stella.
‘That’s right, Dad. She’s–’
‘Saw Christine the other day. She’s still working for the Council. She didn’t seem very happy to see me and she didn’t ask about you. Pity, I thought, she’s a good ‘un.’
I lowered my head and drank off the top of my beer.
That’s what he did. Every time there was a chance of us actually talking, he found a way of heading it off. At last I got fed up with it and made a head-on attempt.
‘Dad. You know when you were in the trenches–’
‘Right waste of time,’ he said abruptly. ‘We did all that and twenty-odd years later you’re having to do it all over again. Only difference is, everyone’s in it this time.’
His voice was thickened and bitter. He was talking as much to himself as me.
‘But surely the cause is good,’ I protested.
‘That’s what we thought then and all,’ he said. He kept staring down at the table. ‘A lot of people died, son,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s best not thinking about it. Best just get on with it.’
So we got on with it. We had three pints, which left him one up, as usual. Perhaps he’s right, I thought. Perhaps we should just get on with it and not want to think or talk much about it. That’s what that generation did.
I hope if I have a son we’ll do it differently but like as not we won’t. I briefly pictured myself at Dad’s age, sitting here sipping beer alongside my boy with the War, my war, coming between us. I realized how hard it would be for me all those years later to say anything useful about it. By that time it would be a distant, unlikely experience, though it had set up everything that followed. Maybe I should just give him my diary and let him know how it was, though even it doubtless had dodges and half-truths in it. If I was anything like my dad, I’d only let him have the journal after I was dead and it was too late to say anything of the love that was between us.
I snickered to myself, to the imagined offspring sitting on the bench beside us. Doubtless the beer was having its effect. Doubtless I should accept my father as he was. If he didn’t want to talk about it, what right had I to make him? Because I’m his son and he’s my dad, part of me silently insisted. I thought of Stella and her dad, all the things she regretted having not said or asked. I opened my mouth.
‘Right!’ he said. ‘Best be off, then.’
He stood up and looked down at me.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘OK, Dad. On our bike, eh?’
I lay on the bed in my childhood bedroom. My mother was in her room next door with the radio on for company, and through the wall came the steady muttering of the announcer. At least, I thought, she’s had some practice, with Dad being away a lot over the years. In the old days Mum used to play music, now she just listens to the friendly voices. I think she’s shocked at how much she misses him. I am. There’s a difference between someone being away a lot and them being dead.
I crossed my arms across my chest and looked up at the ceiling. At times like this, missing someone isn’t a sweet ache. It’s devouring.
I traced the fine lines of cracks on the ceiling and watched my thoughts branch and spread. I imagine Len being gone for ever, then I recoil from it, get angry. Nothing should hurt me like this. I must learn to live, as my mother is learning, for myself again. I can go off into my own little bubble, to that cave behind the waterfall where no one can find me. Then I don’t have to think about him. Sometimes on the phone I’ve nothing much to say, he complains I sound distant. Well, I am, and I really can’t help it.
At other times I can see him so clearly it’s as though he’s present and we’re connected again.
I put my hands behind my head, rolled my head to loosen my neck. After all these years of being much the same, my mother had changed. I didn’t know if it was because of the War or Dad’s death. But earlier that evening I’d been talking, cautiously, about myself and Len. I’d been hinting we were doing it, having sexual intercourse.
‘You must do what you think is right, dear,’ she’d said. Not the usual line about what the neighbours might think, what other people do. I was astonished. One of these days, if things went on like this, Mum wouldn’t vote Conservative.
I smoked a cigarette leaning out the window, watching my breath rise and vanish in the cool night air, wondering where Len was right at that moment, and if he’d spoken with his parents as he’d said he wished to. I hoped so. After all, I thought as I exhaled into the night, you only have two of them, and I miss one of mine more than I ever thought likely or possible. I miss Len too, when my heart is open enough to allow it, as it does now. Trouble is, I can forewarn and guide him but I can’t protect him. The best we can do is look out for each other.
I stubbed the cigarette out into the pebble-dash, hid the butt in among the ivy, but stayed leaning on the windowsill, looking out at nothing visible till the shivers rose along my arms and I came back in.
Another medic checked me out, shone lights in my eyes till I was half blind. Then said I could rejoin the squadron but I shouldn’t fly just yet. So I said goodbye to Mum and Dad – or at least Mum, Dad being already off to
work in the components factory – and caught a series of trains north.
The journey took two days, the trains packed and stopping lots. On the second day the rumour went round that the invasion had started. So each train delay made everyone very jumpy, and the lady beside me kept looking anxiously at the sky for paratroopers. I’d noticed that rumour, along with death, is the principal product of war. It was impossible to know what to believe, so mostly we believed nothing except what was right before us. I saw a pair of eagles near Carnoustie but no paratroopers, and that was good enough for me.
I arrived at our new station north of Aberdeen on the evening of the second day. Our CO, George Davies, now known as Uncle George because we’d decided he was all right really, picked me up in his car at the station. He told me through his pipe-reek that, yes, in places the expected invasion had been signalled, there’d been bonfires lit by the Home Guard, and church bells rung all over the country to warn us. But nothing had turned up yet. London had taken a pasting, in retaliation for our bombers’ raid on Berlin. Bombed all day and most of the night, docklands on fire, big show, hell of a mess. And more today. Huge numbers of bombers.
But Fighter Command were in seventh heaven and even Stuffy Dowding himself had raised a smile, because the RDF stations and our sector airfields were being left alone just at the point they were about to break. If the enemy kept hitting London, we could remain operational and do our best. The units Dowding had held back were being thrown into it now, another Polish and a Czech squadron were operational and running up the scores. The question was: could the city take it? Exciting times, and we were missing it. Uncle George seemed genuinely regretful. Can’t say I was.
It was near dark as he turned up a drive and stopped outside a big Victorian pile. Loads of turrets and twiddly bits.