Izzy's War

by Isla Dewar

  This turned out to be a good thing. Cook, an ample woman, red of cheek, kind of heart, gave Elspeth a sandwich with a slab of warm roast beef spread with mustard, a slice of fruit cake and a plate of small almond pastries.

  ‘Where did you get all this?’ said Elspeth. ‘Don’t they ration the upper classes?’

  Cook said that there was them as has and gets and them as don’t and that’s how it is and how it always has been. And made Elspeth a second sandwich. The kitchen was large and warm, heated by a cooking range. Cook bustled, asked after Elspeth’s health, said it must be cold up in them forests in winter and if ever Elspeth needed a little something extra to eat, just to come to her. ‘Use the tradesmen’s door, of course.’

  Sustained by the rush of sudden protein, Elspeth played well in the second part of the recital. Bach, Mozart and Schubert poured into the room, and she hit only a few wrong notes. Nobody noticed.

  When she’d finished, people exclaimed in wonder at her talent. A few wished they’d stuck in at their piano lessons and some thought it such a waste that someone so musically gifted should work all day chopping down trees. ‘Surely there must be other things she could do. Entertain the troops, for example.’

  But Elspeth said she loved the outdoor life. Which wasn’t true.

  At ten o’clock, Lady McKenzie thanked Elspeth and led her to the front door. Duncan followed. As they stood on the front step, Lady McKenzie shook Elspeth’s hand and said they must do it all again sometime soon. Elspeth didn’t think so, and wondered when she would get her five pounds.

  ‘Duncan,’ said Lady McKenzie, shaking his hand. ‘We are all deeply grateful to you for allowing Elspeth to play and for bringing her along.’ She took two envelopes from the pocket of her silk jacket. ‘One for the musician. And the other is what’s due for the fertiliser.’

  They drove home, Elspeth still wondering when she was going to get her money. Duncan stopped the truck at the end of the track leading to the camp. He turned off the engine, turned to Elspeth, put his hand on her knee and told her she was a lovely-looking woman. ‘And gifted, too.’

  Elspeth thanked him, removed the hand and said, ‘Can I have my money now?’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘My money. I was told I’d get five pounds for playing at the recital.’

  He tapped his pocket. ‘It’s here.’

  She held out her hand.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I arranged it. I drove you there.’

  ‘I played the piano,’ said Elspeth.

  He admitted that was true. Took out one of the envelopes and gave Elspeth two pounds.

  ‘I was told I’d get five.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ asked Duncan.

  ‘You.’

  ‘I said there was a five-pound fee. I didn’t say that was what you’d get. I’ve got my cut, you’ve got yours.’

  Elspeth called him a bastard. ‘You’ve cheated me.’

  Climbing out of the truck in a fury, she remembered the fertiliser fee. ‘Is that for the dung?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘I trundle dung for miles every Friday night and you sell it?’

  He said nothing, scratched his cheek.

  ‘Don’t you think you could slip the stable people a pound now and then? We do all the graft, shovelling and such.’

  He said, ‘And the horses do all the shitting and I don’t pay them, either.’ That was the way of things. He was head forester, he took the decisions, he had all the responsibilities and when a little something extra came his way it was only what he deserved.

  Elspeth slammed the truck door and stumped up the track, cursing.

  In the morning, she was still furious. She stamped about the stable, raged as she heaved muck outside. ‘He cheated me. He bloody stole my money.’ She was standing, one hand on her shovel, the other on her hip.

  ‘He’s awful fond of you,’ said Frazer.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Elspeth. ‘I’d hate to see how he treats people he’s not awful fond of.’

  Frazer said, ‘Duncan’s getting old.’

  Elspeth said, ‘So?’

  ‘So he’ll have to retire. He’ll lose his house, everything. He’ll need all the money he can get.’

  ‘Including my money. I need all the money I can get, too. And I’m getting old. So are you, come to think of it.’

  ‘Yes, but the cottage where I live has been in the family for generations. My grandfather and great-grandfather lived there. When Duncan retires, he’ll have nowhere to go.’

  ‘That’s still no reason for taking other people’s money. It’s just not fair.’

  Frazer asked where she’d got the notion that anything was fair. ‘Nothing’s fair. If it was, you’d be spending time getting pampered at that big house, and bloody Lady McKenzie would be here shovelling shit. He wagged his finger at her. ‘Get fair out of your head. It doesn’t exist.’

  ‘So Duncan gets away with cheating me. Taking my money.’

  ‘Ah now,’ said Frazer. ‘I may not believe in fair, but I do believe in justice. We all get what we deserve in the end. What Duncan really wants is you. You sitting by his fireside, you cooking his tea, you in his bed.’

  Elspeth said, ‘Yuck.’

  ‘See, he’s never going to get what he wants.’

  ‘Too bloody right he’s not,’ said Elspeth. ‘Bloody bastard. I bloody hate him and I’ll bloody get even with him.’

  Without even turning to look at her, he said, ‘No you won’t. Just leave him alone to dig his own grave. He’ll get what’s coming to him. One way or another, we all get what we deserve.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Tears Later

  HIDDLINGTON HALL SURPRISED Izzy. The drive was long, tree-lined, rutted. The car juddered and jolted over it. The house was huge and shabby, outside and in. The rugs were threadbare, the leather sofa in the drawing room was leaking horsehair, paint peeled from the doors. A huge dresser by the main door was draped in coats, newspapers and unopened mail. Portraits were askew. At the far end of the drawing room a large, worryingly shaky heap of logs smouldered in an ornate fireplace.

  People were standing around in quiet groups, sipping drinks and speaking about Diane. ‘Great lady, wonderful pilot. Can’t believe she’s gone.’ Some told horror stories about gruesome things that had happened to them when a thousand feet up, instead. Things people had seen, things that had happened to them – filled the room. There were stories about windscreens covered with oil, undercarriages that wouldn’t come down, leaking fuel pipes. Someone remembered brakes failing as she scudded along a runway at over a hundred miles per hour, someone else told of having to fly for miles and miles after the bottom of their plane fell off. Another said she’d once sheared off the wing of her plane when she’d hit the wire of a barrage balloon. ‘Fell out of the sky, plane completely broken, and I walked away with hardly a bruise.’

  ‘Let’s not line shoot,’ said Julia. ‘Not today.’

  ‘It was a beautiful service,’ said Claire.

  They’d sung ‘For Those in Peril in the Air’. The CO had delivered a moving eulogy. The church had been alive with flowers.

  ‘Who sent the roses?’ asked Claire. ‘So lovely. There wasn’t a note with them.’

  ‘Do you suppose Diane had a secret admirer?’ asked Julia.

  ‘Gal like Diane?’ said Dolores. ‘You bet she had.’ She had offered to let the mourners from the funeral gather at her house after the service. It was close to the base, and most of the people who’d come to say goodbye to Diane worked there.

  Dolores was touring the room with a tray of drinks. But most people opted for tea. They’d been given a couple of hours off to attend the funeral and soon would have to go back to work. And, the CO was standing in the corner – watching. This didn’t bother Dolores. She continued her tour, thrusting the tray at her guests.

  Izzy was on the sofa. She sipped tea, surveyed the room over the rim of her cup. Everyone was here –
Julia, Claire, Edith, Fiona the adjutant.

  She noticed Jacob on the edge of the crowd. He’d driven Edith and Fiona here and was meant to wait outside. But he hadn’t. He took a glass of sherry and leaned against the wall, watching the goings-on.

  Dolores put down her tray and lit up a Lucky Strike. She’d been given several packets at an American base for helping to cool the beer. She’d packed several cases into the plane she was picking up, done several circuits at fifteen hundred feet and come down again. ‘Cold up there.’

  Alfie was by her side. Izzy hadn’t met him before. She’d imagined an overweight county-type, tweed jacket, waistcoat, cravat and thick walrus moustache. But he was thin, elegant, Brylcreemed and had only a sliver of hair on his upper lip.

  People flitted from group to group. Every time anyone walked past the giant fireplace, clouds of smoke wafted out. Izzy’s eyes nipped and her cup shook, rattled in its saucer.

  And all the while, images from that afternoon were stuck in her head. She kept seeing the wrecked plane, the heap of metal and wood, the huge scar it had left as it ploughed across the airfield, tangled, scorched metal scattered. After she’d be hauled free, and after she’d stopped fighting to get back to help Diane get free, she’d been transfixed staring at the plane, thinking, Diane’s still in there. Diane crushed and burned. There, in her mind, was a young ground engineer holding up the bag, knitting intact, which had been thrown clear. She could see the fire engine and the ambulance – the blood tub, Diane called it. The noise, the smell, everything was imprinted behind Izzy’s eyes. It was a vision that kept visiting her, unwanted, uninvited and unwelcome. She could be at the cottage in her bath, making her porridge, listening to the radio, sitting at the kitchen table writing to her mother or Elspeth, and there it would be – that vision. The roar and heat of a plane consumed with flames and Diane inside it.

  Ever since the accident, Izzy had felt numb. She was in a tunnel. It was as if the entire world was carrying on, everyone going through normal routines, but she had stopped. She was on the brink of screaming, but couldn’t quite let go and do it. Tears were always a breath away.

  She put her cup on the table and went outside to sit on the steps, heaving in air and shivering. She wanted to go home. Not home to the cottage, but all the way home to the manse. She wanted her mother to tuck her up in bed with a hot-water bottle, stroke her brow and say the magic words of comfort, ‘There, there.’

  She had been on the step for about half an hour, numb and staring at the pitted driveway and the neglected lawns, when she became aware of someone by her side.

  Carlton Willoughby, the CO, was next to her, head bowed, quizzical expression. ‘How are you doing, Izzy?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  ‘You’re coping?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am.’

  ‘Jolly good.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Take your time.’

  Izzy asked what he meant.

  ‘Take your time to get better. Don’t come back to work till you’re ready. We don’t want to see you till your up to flying again.’

  ‘I’m up to flying now,’ said Izzy. ‘I’m always up to it.’

  ‘Give it a week, then we’ll see.’

  Izzy sighed.

  ‘It’ll take a while before the pictures in your head fade away. Truth is, they’ll never go completely. They’ll just fade a bit.’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I flew in the first war. Saw some horrors. You can’t go through life without some horror happening to you.’ Then he smiled. ‘You’ll miss Diane.’

  ‘I already do. Can’t believe she’s gone.’

  He asked what she’d been like ‘at the end’.

  ‘Cool, calm. Making jokes. I swore and she said, “That’s the ticket. Swear.” The whole time it was happening, she hardly turned a hair. She kept flying. She was wonderful.’

  He said that indeed she was.

  His agreement seemed mild to Izzy. Heated, she said, ‘Diane was the most wonderful, wise woman I’ve ever met. I loved her.’

  He stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I know. So did I.’

  Izzy stared up at him. ‘It was you, she wouldn’t say.’

  ‘Wouldn’t say what?’

  ‘We were telling each other our secrets. She said she had a lover but wouldn’t tell me who it was.’

  ‘And now you won’t tell anyone who it was. Don’t want my wife finding out about it.’ He leaned down, took her arm. ‘C’mon. I’ll get Jacob to drive you home.’

  Ten minutes later, Izzy was in her kitchen, sitting as the watching Jacob put on the kettle. ‘Tea, I think. Then bed.’

  ‘I don’t need to go to bed. I’m fine.’

  ‘You need to sleep. You’re in shock,’ he said.

  Izzy didn’t reply. He said he’d fill a hot-water bottle. ‘Where is it?’

  She pointed to the cupboard. He fetched it. Filled it.

  ‘So when the accident comes to mind you chase it away. You think about good things. Bring happy memories into your head. I have seen many, many bad things. I have seen children being shot. When that comes to me, I think about my wife lying beside me in bed, or my wife laughing. Or, I think about when I was a child staying with my grandparents and we walked over the fields to collect honey from their beehives. I make the sun shine in my mind. You must do that.’ Then, he said, ‘Drink your tea. I’ll put this hot-water bottle in your bed.’ He asked which room was hers.

  She told him it was the second on the left upstairs.

  It was a good room, he thought. Small, sloping ceiling and a window that looked out across the fields. Izzy’s dressing gown hung behind the door. There was a framed photograph on the dresser – a woman in a straw hat standing beside a wind-up gramophone in a garden. Jacob wondered who it was. She looked nothing like Izzy, so not a relative. A friend, he decided.

  He put the hot-water bottle in the bed, then looked round. In the top left-hand drawer of the dresser, under Izzy’s knickers and bras, he found a thick pile of notes. Several hundred pounds, he guessed. Silly girl, she should use a bank. He didn’t take anything, but it was handy to know where there was a stash of cash should he ever need some in a hurry.

  Downstairs again, he told Izzy to go to bed. ‘Sleep is what you need. Sleep and happy thoughts.’

  He waited while she climbed the stairs and went into her room and, a few moments later, heard the creak of her bedsprings as she slipped under the blankets. He stood a moment, surveying the room.

  He didn’t want to take anything that would be missed. The pen, he now thought, had been a mistake. Izzy was bound to have missed it, and she’d have guessed he took it.

  He looked in drawers, found a watch he was sure belonged to Julia. It was too precious, she wore it often at work. She’d make a fuss if she couldn’t find it. There were a few coins on the mantelpiece. He took a shilling. He pocketed a packet of needles from Claire’s sewing box along with a reel of black thread. He went through to the kitchen and helped himself to a packet of tea and a tin of Spam from the cupboard. He thought a small vegetable knife might come in handy. On the window-sill, behind the sink, he found a cameo brooch that he put in his pocket. It looked neglected, as if it had been lying there for a while and had been forgotten. That was enough for now.

  He let himself out and walked up the path to the car. He had to get back to the funeral gathering to collect the people he’d driven there and take them back to the base. Work went on. But he was pleased with his little haul. Small things were what he wanted. Easy to carry, and good to barter for food and transport when he was making his way back to Poland, and home.

  Chapter Thirty

  Twenty to two

  IZZY WAS OFF work for a week. She spent a lot of that time in bed. Julia and Claire put their heads round the door every morning before they left and again in the evening when they got back, asked how she was doing and if she wanted anything. They brought her magazines. But Izzy didn’t read them
. She slept.

  One morning Julia said, ‘Your boyfriend phoned when you were sleeping, and I told him you had almost been bumped orff. Nearly burned to a crisp.’ She was orff to London for a few days, darling. ‘See you when I get back.’

  Dolores cruised in one evening and told her she’d missed one hell of a party. The original celebration had been cancelled after Diane’s death. But last Saturday it had gone ahead. ‘Well, actually, it wasn’t much of a party. We were all a bit shocked and drunk. Very drunk. I passed out and didn’t do the consummating I’d planned. Still, made up for it soon enough.’

  Izzy said, ‘That’s the ticket.’ Remembered Diane, and felt a rush of grief.

  Someone sent flowers. ‘My,’ said Mrs Brent, ‘you’re popular. A secret admirer, no less.’ She gave Izzy the card. ‘Get well soon and keep thinking happy thoughts.’

  ‘Any idea who they’re from?’

  Izzy said she hadn’t a clue. She examined the note, suspected it had been written with her tortoiseshell pen. Bloody Jacob.

  She allowed Mrs Brent to make a fuss of her, covering her knees with a blanket when she sat on the sofa in the afternoon, plumping her pillows and bringing her beef tea – ‘Cures everything.’ Izzy moved into the realms of pleasantness. Listening to the world outside – children going to school, the postman coming up the path, the milk lady calling, ‘Milko!’

  In the mornings, she was content to lie in bed and hear comforting kitchen sounds drifting up from downstairs. Mrs Brent preparing food. Mrs Brent bustling. She’d bring up a tray heavy with toast or scones and tea. She’d pat Izzy’s arm. ‘Eat up, get your strength back. Can’t have you feeling poorly.’

  Izzy said she wasn’t poorly, ‘just shocked’.

  On Friday morning Izzy was well enough to feel a little bored. She’d eaten breakfast, bathed and was now back in bed staring out the window at the sky. She was contemplating getting up and going for a walk. ‘Bit of fresh air wouldn’t go amiss,’ Mrs Brent had said. ‘Good for you, fresh air.’