Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  The man Marian had brought with her, the Spitfire pilot who had never shot anyone down, watched thoughtfully. I hated him. I hated him for what I saw as possession. He owned some part of her. I wondered if he kissed her, did things with her. And all this time Marian stood, poised above everyone with one leg raised, looking, I suppose, statuesque. She wore the same green skirt as before, but now a red shirt. I remember that colour combination, complementary colours bold and decisive among the pastels of the other females. And the poise, pose, held for what seemed like an age.

  And then she moved. It was sudden, brilliant and somehow unexpected, all over before I had drawn breath. She ran four rapid strides, skipped sideways and cartwheeled, Catherine-wheeled, whirled through the air with her skirt billowing and her legs describing a beautiful arc. There was a tantalising flash of stocking tops and suspenders, white thigh and whiter cotton, before she rotated onto her feet once more and turned for applause. Her face was flushed. Up to then her complexion had been pale, but now I saw blood in her cheeks. And there were other things I had seen – knickers and legs – that needed thought and contemplation; but there was noise all around me and I couldn’t concentrate. ‘Encore!’ the Spitfire pilot was calling. ‘Bravo!’ cried another. And then I realised that among the laughter Marian was suggesting that I attempt the same feat.

  Delighted to have been noticed by her, I was mortified to be put on the spot. ‘I can’t,’ I protested. Cannot. Am not able. Not, am shy, am bashful, am reluctant to show myself up, but rather I cannot do a bloody cartwheel.

  Marian herself persuaded me to my feet and promised to show me how, holding out her hands for me to take and leading me, victim to the slaughter, to the centre of the lawn. Could I do a handstand at least? I attempted one, approximately. Behind us people cheered. I wanted to run away but was seduced by her proximity, the heady warmth of her presence. ‘You just do a handstand sideways,’ she said, ‘leading with your stronger leg and going onto one hand then the other.’ She stood behind me and held my arms, guiding me, laughing in my ear, enveloping me in her scent. I was, what, twelve years old? A child swept up in devotion to an adult. I raised my left leg, prancing like a horse, and launching myself forward as no horse has ever done. Then I planted my left hand in the grass and threw my rear parts upwards.

  I never heard the snap. I believe there was one, but I never heard it. Inside the box of my head any sound was masked by pain and I heard the pain well enough, exploding through my shoulder and my brain like a great pulse of electrical charge. I crumpled into an ungainly heap. I remember the smell of grass in my nose. I remember trying not to cry but crying just the same – not tears but a scream, the dry scream of agony.

  There was a moment of dramatic stasis. The adults circled haphazardly, not wanting to touch the screaming creature lest they only made things worse. Marian cried, ‘Oh mon Dieu!’ and ran to me. She felt she was to blame. I suppose that was the positive side of the whole affair. She touched my face, she supported my arm, held me carefully as I sat up, came with me to the hospital, insisting on coming, holding me as gently as any mother so that I seemed to have two mothers as I reached the casualty department, my own mother ordering doctors and nurses around – ‘It’s a fractured clavicle,’ she told them. ‘Nothing to get excited about’ – while Marian stroked my cheek and explained to me how sorry she was, how very, very sorry. It was quite therapeutic for her, she told me long afterwards, to have someone to worry about other than herself. ‘This’ll help make it better,’ she said. And she kissed me, a gentle touch of her lips on my cheek.

  Guest Night

  I can follow her through the alleyways of memory and recollection, tail her through the streets and the parks, through the obstacle course that those peacetime weeks and months had become. Much of my knowledge is second hand, gleaned from things overheard, or memories of moments captured and interpreted, or simply invented; but don’t knock invention. Invention is what has got us human beings where we are. It helps us understand the workings of the universe. Maybe it can help me understand Marian. So I invent a telephone ringing in the hallway of the house on the Banbury Road and her lifting the receiver and saying, ‘It’s Marian Sutro here.’

  Marian Sutro here. Not the hysterical young woman running out of the cinema, weeping and gasping, but the calm and collected one, the one who was trying to puzzle out who this man on the other end of the line might be.

  ‘This is Alan.’

  Try and observe your reactions objectively, the psychiatrist had advised her. Try and objectify yourself. So she did, and discovered a small grip of anticipation there inside her, like a hand tightening round her heart and throat. A strange sensation. ‘Alan.’

  ‘The very same. Look, we’re having a ladies guest night at the Mess in two weeks’ time. It’s a bit of a formal thing but should be great fun as well. I was wondering whether you would do me the honour of being my guest.’

  Do me the honour. Her mind stumbled over what he had said and what she might reply, over meanings and implications, all the hidden connotations in the code of ordinary language. ‘Formal, you say?’

  ‘Dressy. Mess kit, ladies in evening dress, speeches. Maybe it’s not quite what you’d like …’

  Confront your demons. Who had told her to do that? Both the psychiatrist and Alan Walcott himself. ‘Will there be other guests? Women, I mean, other women.’

  ‘Of course. Some wives, girlfriends.’

  ‘Perhaps …’

  ‘I’d quite understand if you didn’t—’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Affirmatives tripped over negatives. ‘Yes. Yes, I’d like to.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’ It was so difficult to read voices over the phone, so hard to make out emotion when you couldn’t see the face, but it seemed to her, standing there in the hallway looking through a narrow window at the gravel drive, that there was real relief in his voice. He even admitted it. ‘I had to summon up the courage to phone you,’ he told her. ‘You seemed rather offhand the last time. And then the business with that child, you rushing off to hospital …’

  ‘Offhand?’

  ‘I didn’t really know if you wanted me to get in touch again …’

  ‘I did,’ she assured him. ‘I did.’

  ‘That’s marvellous. Look, it’ll be a pretty late do and everything, so I’ll book a room for you at the George in Wallingford, if that’s all right. I don’t know if you know it. Old coaching inn, very quaint. You’d be my guest, of course. It means that we wouldn’t have to drive all the way back to Oxford the same evening. Would that be OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it would. Only …’

  ‘Is it a problem? Please, if it’s a problem …’

  ‘No, no problem at all.’ Only, I’ve not stayed in a hotel on my own since my training. Only, I’m afraid of the very idea.

  ‘Then that’s fine. I’ll book a room right away.’

  He collected Marian from home in the afternoon. It was easier to talk in the car, with the racket of the engine engulfing them and the countryside hammering past. ‘How’s the casualty?’ he shouted over the noise.

  She didn’t understand at first. Was she the casualty?

  ‘That little kid who had to be rushed to hospital. Your Florence Nightingale act.’

  ‘Oh, Judith Wareham’s boy. Florence Nightingale didn’t actually cause the injuries she dealt with, did she? Anyway, he’s fine. Broken collarbone, strapped up a bit but he’s fine.’

  ‘You made a conquest there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He changed gear with slick fluency, double-declutching, whipping the car through curves so that she instinctively put her hand to her head to keep her scarf from flying away in the wind. She fancied it was like being in an aircraft with him, tight beside him in the cockpit as he aimed the nose towards the oncoming tarmac. ‘He couldn’t take his eyes off you. Can’t say I blame him.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d be better off keeping your eyes on the road.’
r />   He laughed.

  ‘Have you told anyone about me?’ she asked. ‘In your squadron, I mean.’

  ‘One or two. Do you mind?’

  ‘It all depends what you said.’

  ‘I said what’s the truth, I’m afraid. That you are a damned remarkable girl.’

  Girl. She liked that. Often she felt like an old woman, as old as the oldest woman, older than her mother, older than her French grandmother whom she hadn’t seen since before the war, as ancient as any crone. But Alan Walcott called her a girl. ‘I hope they don’t make a fuss,’ she said.

  The hotel was an old, stooped building hunched around a cobbled courtyard. Inside there were low beams and uneven floors and general shifting and creaking as you moved around. Alan quizzed her anxiously when she came down from her room. Was everything OK? Was she sure she was all right? As though she might be an invalid or some ancient, unwell maiden aunt. She didn’t want that. She wanted to be normal, self-confident, that girl she had been when the whole damn thing had started, when fear was a rational emotion and new experiences were there to be confronted and conquered.

  ‘Does it matter that I told people?’ he asked, as if he was anxious not to have done wrong and the problem was nagging him.

  Did it matter? That wasn’t the only thing she didn’t know. She didn’t know what she was doing here with this unknown man either. Was she becoming his girlfriend? Was that what all this meant? ‘I don’t want to be the object of curiosity, that’s all.’

  ‘You won’t be. They’re good chaps. Everyone will be very friendly.’ And then, quite startlingly, he put his hands on her shoulders and leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. And before she could decide what she felt about that he’d said, ‘I’ll pick you up at six-thirty,’ and was outside, climbing into Gloria and roaring off.

  Promptly at six-thirty he came to collect her. She’d had her hair permed. She was wearing more make-up than she had ever worn before and the dove grey Vionnet dress her mother had bought for her in Paris before the war began, the first real grownup dress she had owned. As she appeared at the top of the narrow staircase his expression was an untidy blend of shock and triumph. ‘You look wonderful. I never realised …’

  ‘What didn’t you realise?’

  ‘That you’d look so stunning.’

  She was lit up by a forgotten glimmer of pride. ‘I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or an insult.’

  ‘It’s a compliment. Clumsily expressed, but a compliment all the same.’ He held out his arm for her to take. ‘My lady’s carriage awaits,’ he said in an awkward attempt at humour.

  ‘Let’s have a drink first,’ she suggested. ‘Dutch courage.’

  The Air Force station was only a few minutes away across the river. When they arrived, there were already cars outside the officers’ mess, stewards at the door, a coming and going of men in uniform and women wearing what passed as evening dress in those days of austerity. The anteroom was crowded and awash with noise. She felt the panic crawl of insects beneath her skin as she came through the door. ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ she whispered, grabbing Alan’s hand for comfort.

  He took glasses from a passing tray and handed her one. ‘You’re doing fine.’ And it dawned on her that although she had not said anything about it, somehow he knew, somehow he understood the anxiety that eroded her fragile command of the moment.

  Together they plunged into the crowd. A group of senior officers materialised before her, blue tunics and gold braid, medals glinting in the light – first the president of the Mess Committee, then Alan’s squadron commander, then the station commander himself. Names and ranks she forgot instantly, eyes that looked her up and down, lingered over her bust and the line of her neck. ‘Miss Sutro,’ the station commander said. ‘It’s an honour to meet you.’

  She didn’t know how to reply. How could it be an honour? She attempted a smile while Alan said something on her behalf, something about his own experiences passing down the escape line through France.

  ‘We always suspected Alan was having a holiday on the Riviera,’ the station commander told her. ‘Now I can see why.’ People laughed. Alan steered her away through the crowd to find a group of pilots who were on his squadron. There were girls with them. One or two of the women tittered nervously when she was introduced, as though her presence was some kind of embarrassment. One of the men said, ‘My brother served with 138 Squadron at Tempsford. Perhaps he dropped you. Jimmy Aldrich?’

  Again she attempted a smile, recalling only young men grinning at her as they shook her hand beneath the overarching shadow of the aircraft’s wing. ‘I’m afraid I’m not very good at names.’

  ‘Ginger-haired fellow. Looks like a blithering idiot.’

  ‘Takes after his brother,’ someone added. There was more laughter. Laughter seemed to be the universal panacea. There’s a problem? Laugh. You feel nervous? Laugh. You feel frightened? Laugh.

  ‘There I was, thirty-five thousand feet over the Ruhr and the bloody engine cuts out.’ Laugh.

  ‘Hanging from my bloody parachute and they’re taking potshots at me.’ Laugh.

  ‘Tried to take off in coarse pitch and flew straight into the trees at the end of the runway.’ Laugh.

  Amid the laughter she drank gin and sensed the noise and the faces move away from her, as though they had stepped back behind a glass screen and could be heard only dimly. Alan was at her side, holding her arm. ‘Gently,’ he said. ‘You’re doing fine.’ Somehow – she was unsure of the mechanism of this – he was inside the glass screen with her, just the two of them together with the others shuffling past beyond the pane, looking in.

  Later – the minutes passed erratically – they all filed through into the dining room, junior officers and their guests first, senior officers at the door, laughter reduced to a buzz of conversation while they found their places at the long tables. Candlelight gleamed on silver. There were cups and tankards decorating the tables, and even a silver model of a camera. A model Spitfire angled across the top table where the senior officers and their guests sat. The three squadrons sat at three long tables arranged at right angles to the top table. Alan and Marian were on the borderline between the two, on the end of the high table, next to the squadron commander and his wife.

  ‘An excellent flight commander,’ the CO said of Alan, as though she might have an interest in his future. ‘If he wants to stay on in the Air Force, he’s got a good career ahead of him.’

  The CO’s wife was called Beryl. She was a blonde with the suggestion of good looks behind her prominent eyes and big teeth. ‘My dear,’ she whispered, leaning across her husband, ‘never mind Alan’s prospects – where did you get that divine dress?’

  ‘Paris,’ Marian said. She wished she could have said something different – Marshall and Snelgrove or Selfridges or somewhere. But Paris. ‘It’s Vionnet,’ she added as if that might explain things.

  ‘Vionnet? Goodness, how glamorous! It must be wonderful being French as well as English.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve nothing to compare it with. It’s just what I am.’

  ‘So where’s your family from exactly?’

  People were listening, watching. She could feel eyes on her, the cold touch of curiosity. ‘We lived in Geneva before the war. My father was with the League of Nations.’

  ‘How very international. I must say, you don’t look like someone who would do anything so extraordinary. But I suppose that’s always the way.’

  ‘I’m sorry? What d’you mean? There’s nothing much extraordinary about living in Geneva. A whole lot of Genevois do it.’

  A shriek of laughter. ‘No, I meant leaping out of an aircraft with a parachute. And then all the rest. Capture and everything. They say …’

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘That you were most awfully badly treated.’

  Under the tablecloth Alan’s hand grabbed Marian’s and held it tight for a moment. ‘It was what we’d been trained to expect.’<
br />
  The conversation stuttered. The stewards took the soup plates away and served something described as chicken supreme. Down the length of the tables glasses of wine gleamed garnet red, like jewels hanging from a necklace. The room hummed and roared around them and the subject slid away from Marian to other matters, to postings and possibilities, of what might happen to the squadron next. ‘What are you going to do now it’s all over?’ the woman asked Marian.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘No thought of settling down?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll go back to France.’

  ‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? I’d love to go to France but Bill can’t stand the food.’

  They moved towards a kind of pudding, a blancmange the colour of lifebuoy soap. Then the table was cleared, port appeared and someone called for silence. Bill had been appointed to propose the Loyal Toast – Mr Vice he was called, which seemed bizarre, as though he might be about to organise something disgraceful. He got to his feet and summoned the guests to stand. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the King!’

  ‘The King!’ they echoed, raising their glasses. As they resumed their seats and talk broke out once more, Mr Vice tapped a knife against his glass and brought the room back to silence again.

  ‘There’s just one further toast I’d like to propose,’ he said. ‘We have all of us done our bit over the last few years, but I’d like you all to raise your glasses to someone here who has done more than that. While we’ve been flying above it all – most of the time, anyway: I admit that Alan here did manage to get a rather lower level oblique than ops required.’ There was laughter. Alan grinned and looked self-conscious. ‘But Alan’s continental holiday aside, while we’ve been flying as far above the action as we possibly could, this person was down there on the ground below us, living and working among the Krauts. And if we thought our work was a bit dicey at times, then hers was plain bloody dangerous.’