Outside, darkness had fallen and the slush in the road was beginning to freeze. Wisia had annoyed me. It wasn’t just her lapse into God-Fatherland national cliché, dismaying as I had found it. It was that she seemed to have joined the ring of people, mostly women, who reproached me for being a drifter who didn’t know what he wanted. Perhaps that had once been true. But now, surely, I had changed. I had given up my selfish detachment, thrown out my illusions about cause and country, narrowed my focus. All I wanted to be was a soldier in a war with an enemy and a job to finish. No space for other entanglements.
Was that so hard to grasp? When the Glasgow bus came, I sat in the back and brooded with a cigarette. Wisia, for one, clearly hadn’t grasped it. Helen, if I ever saw her again, would be sceptical; she didn’t think people changed. That singer at the dance – Tibbie – she obviously thought I needed salving. Commandant le Gallois, Johnston Melville and probably several different intelligence services all had plans to ensnare me in their own schemes.
Le Gallois, though, had been right when he told me to find a good war far away from Scotland. How long till the night when that Liberator burdened with extra fuel tanks would begin its long take-off run? Then, heaving itself over the tree tops at the end of the runway, it would bank away eastwards, carrying me towards Polish stars. I was impatient for that night.
18
In the middle of that winter, Tadek and I limped in from a five-mile speed march to find two pale-blue envelopes waiting for us. We threw off our muddy denims, took a shower and sat on our bunks in our underclothes to open the letters. They contained invitation cards. Lady Margaret Beaton-Campbell was asking us to lunch at Balbrudie Castle. The words ‘Sir James and...’ had been carefully scored out.
The invitation came at the right moment. Tadek and I were packing our kit for yet another course, this time at Ringway airfield near Manchester. This was to be our final test before we were dropped into Poland, and we had reason to dread it.
At Ringway, squads of ten men learned to jump together. Not all of them were fully trained. And not all the British dispatchers in the aircraft checked the safety gear or dropped our boys in the right place. Two friends of ours had already died: one when his parachute failed to open, another when he fell into a mud-pond and drowned. Others had broken legs or crushed vertebrae. After Ringway, we told each other, we had nothing to fear from the Germans.
Seeing Margaret in her castle would take our minds off it. An army lorry going north to Montrose carried us up to Forfar and then to the end of her drive. As we walked up between snow-loaded rhododendrons, I expected to see one of those grim Scottish tower-houses, another black keep with arrow slits and crow steps. But then, rounding a bend, we faced a palace in miniature. Balbrudie reminded me of some of our own petty manors at home, a tiny classical mansion which from a distance looked elegant. Only as we approached the outside staircase did I notice the uncut, knee-high grass, the stains on the walls left by choked rone-pipes, the broken slates on the ground under boarded-up windows.
The front door opened to a push. ‘Come on down to the kitchen!’ shouted Margaret from somewhere in the dimness. ‘It’s the only place it’s half warm.’
She jumped up from the kitchen table and gave Tadek a quick, loud kiss on each cheek. When she turned to me, I clapped my heels together and kissed her hand. After all, I was in uniform. And she was an odd sight herself. She was wearing a rust-brown boiler suit, over a blue cardigan and a string of pearls. Two dogs, golden retrievers, slapped hopeful tails against our legs. Margaret gestured around her. ‘Do forgive. We’re pigging it, don’t you know.’
There was a reek of hot meat and frying onions, and a rattle of running water from the sink where a young woman in a headscarf was scouring a basin. When she turned round, wiping her hands on her apron, I saw it was the singer from Kirkton.
‘You remember the Major, Tibbie.’
‘Aye, I mind him.’ She studied me. Tibbie was bigger than I had remembered. She held herself very straight, but when she walked across the kitchen towards me, her body swayed as if she were moving to music. A slight smile, warm as a pie. ‘God,’ I thought, ‘why don’t I marry a woman like this?’
‘Is that right, you’re a policewoman now?’
‘Well, aye, but it’s no the real polis stuff. The chiefie in Liberton says thief-catching’s no for girls. So I sit in the back office and I type and I put on weight and I read books.’
‘Which books, Tibbie?’
‘Whiles I feel like skeerie stuff – Dennis Wheatley, Yankee murder stories. Whiles it’s poetry, for what I’m to study in college after the war. Hear this!’
She held out her hands before her like a priestess, cleared her throat and began to chant:
Like the Idalian Queen,
Her hair about her eyne,
With neck and breast’s ripe apples to be seen...
‘Good heavens, Tibbie, should you really be learning that sort of thing?’ Margaret sounded severe, but I saw that her hand was on Tadek’s shoulder. Tibbie laughed. ‘It’s no coorse. It’s Drummond of Hawthornden wrote that.’ She went on:
In Cyprus’ gardens gathering those fair flow’rs
Which of her blood were born,
I saw, but fainting saw, my paramours.
The Graces naked danc’d about the place...
‘Tibbie, that’s enough, stop it! Whatever’s happening to you? It’s time we had something to eat or it’ll get cold.’ But I could see that she was delighted, even proud, as if this broad-shouldered Tib had been her own daughter. And as we sat down and started on a huge pan of venison stew, I was aware that social frontiers, the fine dividing lines drawn on that British caste chart which I would never be able to read, had rearranged themselves.
Tibbie, it turned out, had been on weekend leave with her mother when Margaret asked her to come over and help with the meal and the washing-up. A call from the Lady in the Big House. And she would do some cleaning next day – and be paid something for it. But here she was sitting at the Lady’s lunch party, even if it was at the kitchen table, placid in her right to be there. Was it because I was a guest, and the Lady had a private scheme to converge Tibbie and me? Or because of the war? Or because Scotland had never been like what I knew about top-hatted, upstairs-downstairs England – or thought I knew from reading P. G. Wodehouse?
‘Hey, Margaret, whit did ye have to dae to get yon?’ She pointed at the steaming roe-deer venison.
‘Curiosity killed the cat, Tibbie. And cat meat’s not rationed.’
I didn’t think the joke was so great. But they all laughed wildly. Even Tadek, though I suspected he hadn’t really understood it.
After lunch, we all had to go for a walk. Tadek, who was in civilian clothes, protested that his shoes would leak in the snow. ‘Gumboots! No shortage of gumboots here,’ said Margaret. She took us to an alcove by the main door, where a pair of black, man-sized Wellington boots stood empty. Tadek picked them up. Out of each boot he pulled a thick woollen stocking, with a name-tape in red. He glanced at me, but I was too far off to read the name. Margaret had turned her back and was selecting a walking-stick.
We went through an overgrown orchard and then out on to the hill and up a track to the crest of a ridge. There were two standing stones on the skyline, leaning a little towards each other.
I was walking with Tibbie, and put my arm through hers. She was wearing the same coat with the big buttons and a blue beret. At the stones, she pulled me away from the track so that she could touch them.
‘Did you ever read Sunset Song?’
‘Another book, Tibbie?’
‘There’s standing stones in it. Like the dead watching over the living, ken? And for once the story’s no about high-heid folk like you and herself. It’s about normal people, a book about me and Mother. About ma grannie, that hired herself out as a bondager to the big farmers every season. About lairds that flung my two uncles off their ain land, out their ain homes. That’s how it’s aye bee
n for us. And I doubt it’s no better in Poland.’
‘Why are you telling me all this? A political speech?’
‘I heard you once. Now you can hear me. There’s a new world coming, son, when this war is over and away. Wait till you see.’
‘They say you are a bookworm. In the new world, will you change into a book-butterfly?’
She laughed and tucked her arm back under mine. We walked on, and it began to snow.
The short day was ending when we got back to the house, and Margaret brought out whisky. We talked and told jokes and stories. Tadek went out to the shed and came back with more coal to stoke the range, his hair white with the falling snow. Tea was made, and then it was more whisky for Tadek and me, and more still. ‘You two had better stay the night.’
‘Sing, Tibbie, sing!’ So she gave us a sad one, Mary Queen of Scots’ lament, and then the merry song I remembered from that night at Kirkton – the tailor who fell through the bed. How I longed to possess Tibbie – not just her wide, smooth body and her bold soul, but the brown hills and stubborn land which seemed to me to be part of her! I wanted Tibbie and Scotland to be part of me. I wanted to devour them, as a savage devours a lion’s heart, to take their strength.
‘Dance with me, Tibbie!’
‘Major Mike, sir, you’re three parts blootered. And it’s time I was away to my mother doonby.’
But Margaret had jumped up and gone to a table at the other end of the kitchen, where a sheaf of bills and letters lay weighted down by a wedge of old Christmas cake.
‘Dance,’ she said. ‘Yes!’
From the stack, she pulled out a letter of several pages, with diagrams inked in between the handwriting. She brought it across the room. I thought at first it was a set of chemical formulae.
‘All the way from Germany!’ She frowned. ‘You see, James’s friends... well, after he died, the others at St Valéry were all taken prisoner. All the officers and men of the 51st. And they have been in the camps for nearly four years now. And d’you know what they have invented to keep themselves warm, to keep themselves sane? They’ve invented a dance.’
‘You mean, a Scottish dance?’
‘It’s a reel. Quite complicated. They sent it home to their wives, but the diagram’s a bit different in each letter that got through. Anyway, Kirsty Caithness lent me hers, such a kind, kind thought. Let’s try it.’
We followed her upstairs, into a big hall with drawn curtains. Our breath condensed into steam clouds on first puff. Margaret seemed not to notice the cold; she switched on a light and began to roll back the carpet.
‘Tibbie, give us a hand! Tadek, Tadzio, you know how to wind up the gramophone, be a love.’
The floorboards revealed under the carpet were stained and uneven. In one place, someone had drawn a rough double circle in chalk. ‘Don’t tread there, it’s dry rot or wet rot or something. No, Tadek, I know where the records are.’
She squinted at the diagram. ‘God, we need six people for a set! No, never mind. I know.’ She ran to the mantelpiece and lifted down a large stuffed wildcat. Tadek went downstairs and returned with a wooden statue of a Highland soldier, which had once stood guard outside an Inverness tobacconist’s. We faced each other in line: three soldiers, one scowling; three Scottish females, one snarling.
The cold was making me drunker. We walked through the movements, not unfamiliar to Tadek and me after a few village hall dances, but – I thought – too much bowing and pacing before one got to the turning and whooping. Those poor lonely males, in their huts under Teutonic pines, had too much time on their hands, no bright-eyed girls waiting impatiently to be whirled and spun.
The music suddenly roared up from the gramophone. Off we went, Tadek and Margaret first, then me and Tibbie, and in no time the wild cat was on her back and the wooden sergeant was on his nose. We didn’t care. We improvised. We turned the reel into a rapid, heavenly pattern of four human beings weaving an interlace of physical trust, every step the happy answer to a question, every partner-spin a proof of union.
So it seemed to me. Could this be what I had been looking for? I was setting to Margaret, then to Tibbie, and they were smiling as if they had been only waiting for me to understand. Soon I’d drop through the night and land among those pines – if only I could take Tibbie, Big Tibs, down with me instead of the heavy radio. If only I could find those lonely men in their huts behind the cruel wire, and tell them: You don’t have to grieve, you are home already – for home isn’t Scotland or Poland, home is a dance.
I was swinging Tibbie a bit clumsily, bumping into Tadek. So I danced her out across the room, then flung her round and round with our arms locked back to back. Now I’ll kiss her. Now...
Margaret’s face was above me, spinning like a wheel. As the wheel slowed, I saw that she looked worried. Why was I on my back? Somebody was lugging at my shoulders. ‘Don’t pull, wait till I free his foot!’ I tried to get up, but my right leg was caught in something, in a black rent among rotten planks and splinters. I tried again, and the jag of pain up my ankle made me swear.
‘Sorry for the language!’
‘Don’t worry, it was our language,’ said Tadek’s voice from behind me. They manoeuvred my foot out of the hole, and helped me, my arms round the shoulders of Tadek and Tibbie, to hop to a sofa. The reel music blared on and then died into scratchy hissing until somebody lifted the needle off.
‘That bloody floor. I did warn you, but...’
Tibbie sat down next to me. ‘It’s yer ain fault, Major. See the way ye was stottin and skriechin like a daft cave-man! And now see!’ She leaned down to unlace my shoe, then roll down the sock.
‘He’ll have raxed his ankle.’
‘Worse than that,’ said Margaret, inspecting. And it was worse, already bloated and dirty crimson. Tibbie gently moved my foot. ‘Is that sore?’ I said more words in Polish.
‘Do we need a doctor?’
I said it was okay, the medics at Polmont would see to it the next day. Maybe it would be better in the morning. I started to apologise, but Margaret cut me off. ‘There’s beds made up for you both. Meanwhile, whisky is what you need – we all need.’
Down in the kitchen again, we sat round the table and Margaret poured out what was left in the bottle. Tibbie politely refused, and pulled on her coat to go. She borrowed a torch for the road, and leaned over to give me a kiss. I fingered the big coat buttons. My leg was hurting like hell now.
‘Take care, Major. You’ll never get home if you carry on treating yourself this way. But that’ll be you excused boots for a wee while now!’
When she had gone, Margaret lit a cigarette, which I hadn’t seen her do before. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘that’s a fine reel. I do think it will catch on. When the boys come home. We can’t really do it without the boys.’
Upstairs, Tadek helped me into a frosty spare bedroom and took off my shoes. I guessed his own bedroom wouldn’t be a spare one, and he wouldn’t lie alone in it. The thought cheered me. Tadek was a fine fellow, the finest of fellows, who deserved happiness.
He stood looking down at me. ‘You lucky sod. You won’t have to go to Ringway now. And that’s the last course for our group. So they’ll have to find another posting for you. Lucky sod! Mind, you were always meant to do something better than parachuting. I wish I had your brains.’
Tadek paused. I was sliding away into coma. He added: ‘I’ll give your love to Poland.’
‘Happy landings, Tadzio.’ How fatuous! But it was all my vanishing mind could find to say to him.
Next day, the truck from Montrose took us back to Polmont. My ankle turned out to be broken, in a way not easy to set. I was taken off the ‘silent-shadowy’ course and transferred to a military hospital near Edinburgh.
In a few days I was up to hobbling with a stick. But my future now looked different. An officer from General Maczek’s staff came down to the hospital and told me that I would be assigned to intelligence, at the headquarters of his new First Arm
oured Division. He told me what I already assumed: that the Allied landing in France was only months away. Meanwhile, I could take two weeks’ sick leave.
Tadek left Polmont the day after we returned. He handed me a leather satchel containing letters, papers, some British money, a ring, a spare watch, ‘in case things go wrong’. I didn’t see him again after that. He passed the Ringway ordeal. Then he went south to an airfield in the English Midlands, and from there he was flown across the North Sea and the Baltic and dropped somewhere in eastern Poland.
Much later, in the autumn, I heard that Tadek was missing. He had sent one radio message reporting a safe landing, somewhere near the Lithuanian border, but then there was silence. It was an area which had already been occupied by Soviet troops. Polish partisans emerging from the forests had expected to join them as they drove back the Nazis, but instead they were faced with the choice of joining the Red Army or arrest. The NKVD were treating the parachutists from London as imperialist agents; those they caught were shot as spies or sent eastwards to the Gulag.
I lost contact with Margaret after I left Polmont. Later, a friend told me that she had been summoned to London to work with British intelligence, in liaison with the Polish government-in-exile.
She was right about the reel. After the war, the Scottish Country Dance Association – with some reluctance, for they disapproved of new inventions and found some of the steps incorrect – accepted it into the canon.
If I find myself at a party when the accordion sounds the first chords of the Reel of the 51st and the dancers cheer, I stay in my seat against the wall. Not just because I am so old – I can still get round the floor. But because, after all those years, something in my ankle still hurts.
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 17