Lost in the Flames

by Chris Jory

  ‘Hello darling,’ she said lightly. ‘How was your trip?’

  ‘Average,’ he said. ‘A bit of light turbulence over the Alps, nothing more than that. Oh, and the route took us over the Ruhr, all lit up like a Christmas tree. And bloody Perkins was asking about the war again, how could we have done it, all those women and children down below.’

  ‘Ignore him, dear. He’s just an air steward. He should stick to serving Martinis.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I told him. Anyway, darling, we should be getting ready, we’ve got this do tonight. I told the taxi to come back at six. We need to be there for seven.’

  Ralph made himself a long drink and Rose heard him opening the door onto the patio overlooking the lake as she went upstairs. She sat on the bed and took the small picture frame from the shelf and looked at the photo, the slightly blurred black and white image of Jacob in his uniform sometime in 1944, the year they had married. She touched the glass with a fingertip and held it there for a second as she always did and wondered now what might have been, if only she had known. Then she put the photo back on the shelf and slipped out of her dress.

  Ralph heard the rush of the shower and he went back into the kitchen and made himself another drink, slightly stronger this time, and he sat down again in the late afternoon sun. He wondered what the evening would bring, good memories and bad he supposed, perhaps a few faces he knew, morphed by years that had sprung upon them suddenly. He had been in touch off and on with one or two members of his last crew and he had always said he intended to make it along to another of these squadron reunions one day. He heard the shower go off and he drained his glass and went upstairs to prepare for the night ahead.

  The reunion dinner started slowly, a room of squadron men with their wives, distanced from the events of five years before by more than time. The world had changed and they lived cut off now from those with whom they had shared the fuselages of bellowing planes. But as the drinks were served and the food followed up behind, they found themselves sucked back into the experiences they had shared, if not with the particular men they were talking to now, then with others just like them, and the memories flooded back and the controversies were aired, the moral arguments about the bombing and the way the country and its leaders had rejected these men, turned against what they had done in their name, and a sense of injustice filled the room alongside the companionship.

  Then someone stood to make a speech and a ripple of laughter floated across the room at a wry observation that he made and Rose saw Ralph looking at her, but she was lost in her thoughts, only half listening, and she already knew all the arguments anyway. They made no difference to her now, they could not bring Jacob back whole, could not put him back together again the way that he had been. And when she pictured the men of Bomber Command it was not Ralph she saw, but Jacob, her Jacob – Jacob as she most liked to remember him, in that damned uniform of his, leaving her at the gate of the airfield as he went to join the others in his billet, turning away from her in a sense forever that time while Rose went to pack her things in their regular upstairs room at the pub, a wife packing herself away to become a WAAF again; and Jacob as he was on their wedding day in 1944, his face lit up by the prospect of extended leave punctuating the period between his first and second tours; and that day on the farm with the kite in the wind, laughing together as they tugged it this way and that in a piece of sky that was blue above their heads; and skimming stones when he was a boy and she was almost a woman, down at Pool Meadow where lost coots called to each other across the lake in the dusk; and that first time, not long after he was born, a dim and distant memory, a little bundle of wrinkled flesh in a cot in the top room behind the Victorian glass of the window at the gable end above the pigs and the orchard. And what a thing that little bundle of flesh had become, what meaning he had given her, then and now, a strange haunting constance that had been with her always, even when he had been away in Canada and who-knows-where over Germany – especially when he was who-knows-where over Germany – and after he had gone he was still there too, he was with her this evening, really with her, even more than the flesh and blood that was sitting physically beside her now, this flesh-and-blood Ralph who she had once admired and been fond of but who could never be that other thing that Jacob had been, perhaps still could be again, that magical other thing that could not be explained or understood and had no need to be. She noticed Ralph turn and smile at her again and she smiled back as she always did and he turned away and nodded as the man making the speech listed the erosive effects of the bombing on German resolve and her capacity for the continuance of war. Rose looked around the room at the men, several tables of them, most now slipping towards lives of comfort, a milestone most of them could never have expected to see, a milestone Jacob had been denied and Ralph had for some reason been destined to achieve, and she wondered again, why him, why had it been him who escaped from the plane, not Jacob, even though Jacob had been in the nose, the bomb-aimer, nearest the escape hatch, and Ralph had been at the wheel. The persistent thought came to her again, that Jacob had been cheated out of it, cheated out of it somehow by Ralph, and she herself had been cheated too, cheated out of a life with Jacob by the man who sat beside her now. But she pushed the thought back into the black box in which she kept it, that dark little place that she did not want to see, that place where the truth had been recorded – she preferred the truth now in dormant form. And she reminded herself that it was of course for all of them that she had at first lobbied and written and chivvied, to her MP and the Prime Minister, and anyone who might listen, that it was on behalf of them all that she so hoped there would one day be recognition, the recognition they had been denied, recognition and forgiveness, though forgiveness was not the right word, and not just for Jacob. Yes, not just for Jacob, for all of them, even if above all for him, for all of them, even for Ralph. Even? Where had that word come from? He wasn’t so bad, she thought, she shouldn’t be so harsh – she had admired him, was fond of him once. That must mean something. She repeated it to herself again – she was fond of him, admired him, used to anyway. But then the dark little box of truth creaked its lid open again and something uncomfortable began to slip out and so she slammed the lid shut and lit another cigarette and sucked the smoke down and poured herself another full glass of wine and took a long swig and then took Ralph’s hand in hers.

  She zoned in again now to a speech that was winding down towards its conclusion, recounting the importance of the bombers in clearing the way for the land forces after the invasion of France, and Rose found herself looking around the room again, commenting to herself inwardly now on the wives who accompanied their men this evening, the lucky ones, those who had clung on to their men beyond the limits of the war or had met them in the post-war years, and she saw their broad smiles and their happy sparkling eyes and enthusiastic applause and her own clapping slowed and then stopped, like the slow winding down of the propeller of an engine that has run out of petrol and died.

  ‘My heart is my engine,’ she had told Jacob. ‘And love is my fuel …’ But when had the fuel run out? When had it gone? That first time, when his plane was lost and the days went by, one more dawn, one more dusk, no news, just three letters, FTR, failed to return? Or was it the telegram, the uncertain one, the presumption of loss, lost over enemy territory, no word to be given to the press? Or the later telegram, the confirmation, premature though it now proved. Or that knock on the door at the house by the lake in Surrey the other day, Jacob there again on her doorstep. What was left of him.

  Ralph was quiet in the taxi on the way home from the dinner and Rose took his hand in hers again.

  ‘Who was that chap you were talking to at the end of the dinner?’ she asked.

  ‘Bill something-or-other. Bomb-aimer.’

  He slurred his speech slightly. He had drunk more than he should again, she thought. So had she.

  ‘A bomb-aimer? Like Jacob …’ Rose said.

  She regretted the comm
ent as soon as she said it, but Ralph ignored it or pretended to.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We were working out which raids we’d both been on. Quite a few towards the end of the war, it seems – he started his tour in January ’45 and was tour-expired by early April. That was a pretty intensive period of punishment we were dishing out then.’

  They sat in silence as the taxi accelerated along the outer lane. She guessed Ralph was thinking about Jacob too now, but he shifted the subject when he spoke. She squeezed his hand, a reflex. It was warm, hers was cold. It had always been that way, this difference between them. The taxi sped along in the orange glow of the streetlights.

  ‘Do you think we did wrong back then?’ he asked suddenly. ‘It does bother me sometimes.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you didn’t do wrong,’ she said. What was he suggesting? How could Jacob have done anything wrong?

  ‘It was a pretty awful thing, though.’

  ‘Plenty of awful things happened back then. You had a job to do and you did it, that’s all.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  The taxi pulled up the drive and along the avenue of chestnut trees and Rose walked up the steps as Ralph paid the driver. They went into the kitchen and Rose put the kettle on the hob.

  ‘I think I need another drink,’ said Ralph. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘Maybe a small brandy,’ she said, knowing she shouldn’t.

  He poured the brandy from the decanter on the chiffonier and passed it to Rose and then took a tall glass for himself and shovelled in some ice and filled in the gaps with whisky. They went out onto the patio and sat in a pair of chairs beneath the wisteria. Ralph stretched out his legs and drained his glass, then got up to make himself another and she watched through the gap in the curtains as he filled the tumbler and tipped the liquid down his throat, then filled up the glass again. He came and sat next to her again and lit a cigarette. She noticed the glowing ash quiver in his trembling hand. He saw her looking.

  ‘Chilly isn’t it?’ he said, grinning in that way that always annoyed her now.

  She had become accustomed to the tell-tale signs that the war brought on when it intruded again on his thoughts. It was normally only the alcohol that invited it in. After a heavy night she would find specks around the house where he had sat with a cigarette, unseeing eyes retracing long-lost events, his hands twitching the ash unseen to the floor, the empty bottle tossed into a hedge afterwards to be found the next day by the gardener.

  Rose recognised the signs now.

  ‘So did you enjoy the evening?’ he asked at last.

  ‘It was the same as last time, wasn’t it? The same arguments, the same controversies. You get tired of hearing the same thing after a while. But it’s so unfair, how people speak so badly of you all these days, like you were criminals or something, like you should feel guilty for what you did.’

  ‘It’s hard to face the truth sometimes, isn’t it?’ he mused, after a moment’s pause.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing really.’

  ‘Look Ralph, let’s not talk about the war now,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about what we’re doing tomorrow.’

  ‘No, no, let’s talk about the war some more,’ he said. ‘Tonight of all nights I think perhaps we should.’

  ‘Come on Ralph, darling, let’s just …’

  ‘No, let’s not just … when you said in the taxi, you said we had a job to do and we did it …’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s correct, strictly speaking. In my case, I mean.’

  ‘What on earth are you on about? You flew far more ops than most.’

  ‘Yes, but the others …’

  ‘It wasn’t your job to die, Ralph.’

  ‘But Rose, there’s something I’ve never told you.’

  ‘Well maybe it’s best you don’t tell me now, then. You’re far too drunk and so am I.’

  ‘No, really Rose …’

  ‘Ralph, you’re drunk, leave it to the morning.’

  ‘No, Rose, no, I can’t leave it till the morning. The morning might never come.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, dear, it’s nearly morning now.’

  But he did not laugh in response as she had hoped he might.

  ‘Listen to me Rose,’ he said, leaning across towards her so that his face was close to hers and she could smell the deadening breath of spirits as he spoke. ‘That night over Dortmund, what really happened Rose, I wasn’t flying the plane, you know that don’t you? I wasn’t the pilot then.’

  ‘What do you mean you weren’t flying the plane? Who was?’

  ‘Jacob was.’

  ‘Why on earth was that?’

  ‘I wasn’t well, hadn’t been for a long time. My nerves were shot, you see. It was the flak and the fighters, Rose, they got to me in the end. I flew the plane out but I didn’t always fly it back, not after the first twenty ops or so. Once we’d bombed, the thought of the fighters on the way home, sometimes I just couldn’t cope. So Jacob helped me out.’

  ‘Jacob flew the plane?’

  ‘He never told you? He said he wouldn’t. A family secret, he called it. What’s in the family stays in the family, he said.’

  ‘No, he never told me. Not then, not since.’

  ‘Not since? What do you mean, not since?’

  ‘Oh my God …’

  She looked at him, horrified at what she had said.

  ‘What, Rose? What?’

  ‘He’s come back, Ralph. He’s come back at last, he’s come back from the war.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘He survived, Ralph. Oh, he isn’t the same at all, but he’s back all right. They sent him home in ’49, what was left of him. He’s burned Ralph, burned away, inside and out. But he’s still Jacob. He’s still my Jacob.’

  ‘Good lord,’ said Ralph. His voice came clear and flat and low, barely a whisper now, and he bowed his head and waited for her to put an arm around him and stroke his hair like she used to do and tell him it did not matter now, too many years had passed and life moves on, but she sat still and quiet and when he looked up he saw tears in her eyes and her tears overflowed and rolled down her face and she stood up and went into the kitchen and took a napkin from a drawer and dabbed at her eyes. When she looked up, Ralph was in the doorway.

  ‘Tell me all this doesn’t matter now, Rose. Tell me, please.’

  ‘Ralph, I’m sorry …’

  ‘Please, Rose.’

  ‘Ralph, I’m so sorry, I can’t.’

  ‘He always meant far more to you, didn’t he?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Didn’t he?’

  ‘I was meant to be with him, that’s all,’ she sobbed. ‘And I was cheated out of it.’

  He approached her and attempted to place an arm around her shoulder. She looked up at him, her Ganges-delta eyes now flooded with tears and clogged with the black silt of mascara. She eased his arm away and spoke in a raised whisper, as if her mouth were ashamed of the words that it uttered.

  ‘How the hell did you have the gall not to tell me about this before, about Jacob flying the Lanc? Isn’t it the skipper who stays with the bloody plane?’

  ‘Rose, that’s not fair.’

  ‘Do you think I could have married you if I’d known?’

  He stared at her blankly.

  ‘Well, do you?’ she cried, and she hurried away up the stairs and Ralph heard the bedroom door as it closed.

  He went out onto the patio and walked across the lawn to the place by the alders where the punts lay tied up and he slipped the chains out of the mooring and stepped aboard and pushed himself out into the middle of the lake. He felt for the length of fishing line and pulled it up to see what was on the end. Gin, half a bottle, the label had come off in the water but he knew the shape. He unscrewed the cap and held up the bottle and tipped a long stream in the approximate direction of his mouth and felt it splash upon his
face and into his eyes. He cursed the wasted liquid and held the empty bottle over the side of the punt and pushed it under the surface, letting the air bubble up out of it until the cold water had filled the empty vessel and he let it go and the bottle fell away to the silted-up bed at the bottom of the lake. He lay back on the punt’s cold hard boards and watched the clouds scud across the moon and saw the vapour trails of departed planes high above, dispersing now in parallel lines, floating apart up there, never again to meet, a strip of silent sky always between them now.

  ***

  The first time Jacob and Rose met after that was for tea. Rose drove up to Chipping Norton when Ralph was away overnight with BOAC, somewhere down in Italy. Then out into the Cotswolds with Jacob on the bike that Norman had given him, Jacob revving the engine hard as they tore along the lanes, Rose clutching her arms around him, burying her face in his back, breathing him in, a happiness in her lungs, clearing out the smoke. They stopped at Chipping Campden, left the bike by the medieval market and found a tea room. Tentative and whispering they sat, Jacob and his girl, aware of the gaze of the others, their eyes burning in on him, Jacob dipping his head as he stirred his tea and Rose glaring back at them when she knew he could not see, wanting to say something, to put them right, but not wanting to cause a scene, fearing embarrassment, for him more than for her. And Jacob not caring, just glad to be there, with her, with Rose, the reason he had got through his war, his Rose again now for an hour or a day, husband and wife again, pretending to be, as if they had never been stolen away. And then out again to the bike with a bellyful of scones and Rose with her face buried again in the folds of his jacket as the wind ripped at her hair and the wasps flailed by and flecked her, and her arms again around his chest, a thing that she thought could never be again, and he could not see her now, could not see her tears.

  After that she came whenever she could, and she was thrilled at Ralph’s promotion to long-haul flights.

  ‘That’s wonderful, darling! I’m so proud of you.’