“I had heard horror stories of houses, General, historic houses, that have been treated like barracks—you can imagine how relieved I am to see that you love and understand beauty,” Bruno said, looking around his library with an air of the perfect guest, as if he had no proprietary connection with the room, yet felt free to admire it as it deserved.
“It is one of the most beautiful houses in this most beautiful of all cities, Vicomte,” von Stern said, pleasure, well-hidden yet still visible, in his eyes.
“It was built while Louis Quinze was a young man. I have always maintained that those lucky enough to live in it are only caretakers, like the fortunate curators of museums.”
“You are a museum-goer, Vicomte?”
“It was my passion, my reason for living. Before the war I spent every free hour in museums, every vacation was devoted to travel—Florence, Rome, London, Berlin, Munich, Madrid, Amsterdam—ah, those were the days, were they not, General?”
Von Stern sighed. “Indeed they were. But they will return, I am convinced of that. Soon, under the Führer, all Europe will be at peace.”
“We must hope for peace everywhere, General, or else all the beauty in the world will be destroyed. I think we can agree on that without any problem.”
“Shall we drink to peace, Vicomte?”
“Willingly, General, most willingly,” Bruno agreed. Rules against fraternization with the enemy were meant for German soldiers and French whores, not for gentlemen who might have something of mutual interest to offer each other. Von Stern was not a man who was alone by choice, of that he was certain, he thought as he relaxed in his armchair, waiting for the invitation for dinner that he knew would soon be forthcoming.
I love you, I love you, thought Freddy in rapture. I love every one of your one thousand two hundred and fifty fierce and mighty horses, I love the clear bubble of your perspex canopy, I love your tapered, ellipse-shaped wings and your noisy, don’t-give-a-damn exhaust and your snug narrow cockpit and your crazily crowded instrument panel, I even love the too-long cowling of your sublime Merlin engine that blocks my forward view on landing and takeoff, and your nose-heaviness that means I have to brake you like a baby carriage, I love you ten times more than any reliable, Hawker bloody businesslike Hurricane I’ve ever flown, and I’d give anything to throw you around the sky, to battle-climb you all the way upstairs at full throttle with two thousand eight hundred and fifty fucking wonderful RPMs and then put you into a screeching, diabolical power dive, until we’d both had ourselves a bit of well-deserved fun, and, for dessert, trim you off at four hundred and sixty miles an hour and fly your lovely ass off, because I know I could do it, and, God knows, everybody knows you can, because once you’re off the ground you’re a snap to fly. A pussycat! Just a simple, forgiving love of a pussycat. I’m talking to you, my Mark 5 Spitfire. What do you have to say for yourself?
“Bloody bugger,” she said out loud, as the sight of a familiar chalk pit far underneath, in the toy landscape that was England, reminded her that she was routinely delivering a Spitfire from the Vickers Supermarine factory in Eastleigh to an airdrome at Lee-on-Solent. From her altitude she could clearly see across the Channel to the green fields of France, where the German raids were daily launched against England.
Today, in September of 1941, the day was made for flying. No fog, not even any haze over England, and only a few big scattered clouds out over the water. The late-afternoon sun, sharply angled and unusually bright, warmed the back of her neck between her helmet and her collar. On this rare day, after two other ferry jobs, Freddy had been given much too short a trip for her taste, one that took only a half hour. Worse, the new Spitfires were flown by the ATA at their two-hundred-miles-per-hour cruising speed, to break in their powerful engines, a procedure that, to Freddy, was utterly frustrating, no matter how accustomed she was to it.
She now flew Spitfires every day, for she and Jane had been sent to temporary duty at the 15th Ferry Pool at Hamble, to work clearing the Vickers factory of the sleek, sophisticated warplanes they were making with greater speed each succeeding month. There was great danger in allowing any group of new planes to sit on the field outside the factory, providing a natural target for a hit-and-run German bomber, so they had to be moved as quickly as possible.
When Freddy handed the Spitfire off at its new base, it would be painted with identification numbers, armed, perhaps fitted with special fuel tanks for long hops, or cameras if it was to be used as a spy plane; it would receive the painted insignia of the nationality of its pilot, and if he was a Squadron Leader or Wing Commander, his initials would be inscribed on its rear fuselage. It would become some lucky fighter pilot’s very own kite, his most prideful possession, which no one else would fly unless its master was sick or dead. Now, only now, was it hers, totally hers.
She had just glanced to the left to see how far she was from her coastline destination, when, from out of a particularly large cloud mass over the water, two specks appeared on her newly polished canopy. Something about them drew Freddy’s instant attention and she looked hard, with all the extraordinary power of her vision. There was an abnormality there, even at this distance. Like half of England, she was no stranger to observation of aerial combat from the ground, but now, aloft, the relative positions of the two planes told her instantly that one of them was chasing the other.
She should lose altitude and get out of the way, she told herself, even as she gained altitude so that she could observe them. She was invisible, with the sun at her back. The planes had rapidly reached a place in the sky, perhaps a mile away, where she could recognize them. The first machine, fleeing for its life, was another Spitfire, one wing lower than the other in an attitude that meant its aileron controls had been hit. The second plane, a Messerschmitt 109F, whose performance rivaled that of any Spitfire, was gaining on the English plane, clinging to its tail. The Spitfire was jinking violently to avoid the bullets coming from the Messerschmitt, bullets now clearly visible to her, since they were tracers used to inform pilots when they were about to come to the end of their ammunition.
“No!” Freddy screamed as the Spitfire’s oil tank was hit and the flames started spreading backward from the engine toward the cockpit. The hood of its canopy popped open and its pilot tumbled out. She held her breath until she saw the chute open. The victorious Messerschmitt, flaunting its Maltese cross and its swastika, circled the area. Making sure of the kill, she thought. But then, instead of heading for home when the Spitfire hit the Channel, it continued to circle, without opening fire, in descending spirals around and around the dangling Spitfire pilot. The bastard’s going to shoot him while he’s in the air, she realized, and since he’s low on ammo, he’s taking his time, waiting for the perfect shot.
Immediately, Freddy opened her throttle to the maximum and charged ahead, her engine responding instantly. As she did so, all that she had ever learned about dogfights from Mac, all the RAF lore that Tony had taught her, all the flying stunts she had planned for the movies, fused in her mind into one piece of absolute knowledge: the only hope lay in a head-on attack.
She had exactly one chance, in an unarmed plane, to drive off a Messerschmitt. She had to pounce at full speed directly into his cannon. He had to be convinced that she was approaching to blaze away at his windscreen and that she intended to wait until the last second to fire.
He saw her coming now, she realized, as he stopped circling and veered about, presenting his windscreen head-on. They were about three thousand yards apart, Freddy estimated automatically. An accurate shot was made at two hundred and fifty yards. She held her reckless, relentless course as the two planes sped toward each other, in an instant that hung in the air, like a static painting of a war dance. Some three hundred yards away, at the last possible split second, the Messerschmitt swerved, made a tight, climbing turn, and fled east.
“Got you, you fucker, got you!” she screamed, bounding in her seat in victory as she started chasing after the German fighter.
It took her minutes before she came back to her senses and realized that she was acting like a maniac. Pulses pounding, higher on adrenaline than she’d ever been before, she reluctantly listened to the voice of reason and turned back to the west, where she could see the pilot of the Spitfire jut about to hit the water.
Wearing his Mae West life jacket, he struggled out of the harness of his parachute, and while she throttled back and swung protectively over him, he inflated his single-seat “K” dinghy, the tiny, puffy, oval rubber boat that had saved the lives of so many Allied airmen. The pilot brandished his double-bladed paddle reassuringly at her, but Freddy continued to circle low over his head until she spotted one of the Air-Sea Rescue launches, leaving from a station on the beach, and approaching him. She couldn’t resist slowing the Spitfire down to its lowest speed, just above the sixty-four miles an hour at which it would stall. Impulsively she pushed back the hood of her canopy and leaned out to try to exchange some sort of greeting with the pilot, bobbing about in a brisk current. Only the blur of his tanned, grinning face was clearly distinguishable.
Freddy could see that he was trying to shout something at her, over and over, but she couldn’t hear him. She pushed back her helmet so that her ears were uncovered, and a few strands of her hair blew free in the wind, but she was still going too fast to catch his words. The launch had nearly reached him now, and she no longer had an excuse to linger, she realized, expelling her breath. Regretfully, Freddy shut the hood, eased the stick forward, and prepared to head for her destination over a countryside so familiar by now that she could tell when an individual farmer was cutting his hay.
“Freddy, do you know anything about this?” Captain Lydia James, the commanding officer of the women’s ferry pool, asked her, holding up a copy of a newspaper. Freddy inspected the page in question. MYSTERY SPIT SAVES RAF PILOT the headline read, over a story of her feat, written by a reporter who had been at the air-sea rescue station when the pilot of the downed Spitfire was brought in, wet but unharmed.
“I don’t understand, Lydia.”
“I’ve been queried about this incident … this ‘mystery Spit.’ You were flying in that area yesterday. Did you see anything unusual?”
“No, Lydia. I must have missed it.”
“Strange, I can’t seem to find anybody who witnessed anything. That pilot claims he didn’t make out any identifying markings on the plane that saved him, but that the pilot had red hair. They think it may have been one of our lot.”
“That would hardly be likely, an unarmed plane taking on a Messerschmitt. Who would do anything as crazy as that … unless it was one of the men? Why did they ask you? There are three male pilots to every woman. To say nothing of its being against every ATA rule? That RAF pilot was probably in shock.”
“That’s what I’ve told them,” Captain James said with normal ATA formality. “Well, Freddy, good luck tomorrow. Or isn’t that exactly the right thing to say to a bride?”
“I think it’s utterly appropriate, Lydia. Thank you—and thank you again for the week’s ‘compassionate leave.’ ”
“Normal, under the circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”
“Normal but wonderful.” Freddy turned to leave the office, her back to her commanding officer.
“Oh, Freddy—one more thing …”
“Yes?”
“If you want to stay in the ATA …”
“Yes, Lydia?”
“Don’t do it again.”
Longbridge Grange lay dozing, all its inspired sprawl redolent of the scent of late-blooming yellow climbing roses, in the lazily lambent September sun of Freddy’s wedding day. Eve and Paul de Lancel, and Tony’s two schoolboy brothers, Nigel and Andrew, had arrived the night before. With all the Longbridges, they were waiting impatiently outside the front door when Freddy and Jane finally drew up in the MG, driven on the gas denoted as a wedding present by some of the other ATA pilots.
It had been a long courtship, as Freddy had warned Tony, for she was not about to leap into matrimony without a thought for the consequences. She was not infected by the feeling that it was her duty to make some fighting man happy, as were so many noncombatant women, for she was desperately needed at her job, as few women have ever been in the history of warfare.
Although Freddy’s schedule of thirteen days on duty, followed by two days off, rarely coincided with time when Tony could get a day’s leave, they were able occasionally to catch a few hours together at night, when flying was over for the day. Eventually she had capitulated to his determination and his passion. She had fallen reluctantly in love, with many an internal question, many a secret backward glance, which became, in Tony’s perception, a captivating elusiveness.
To cheers and kisses, she emerged with difficulty from the MG, her progress impeded by the arms of the three little girls around her legs.
“Where’s my Antony?” she asked his mother, surprised not to see him.
“Only just on his way. He rang up ten minutes ago … it’s too silly, my dear, but it would seem that you’re going to have a stranger for best man … Patrick’s down with the mumps, today of all days!”
“Better today than tomorrow,” Jane exclaimed. “Who did Tony say he was bringing?”
“One of the boys from his squadron, I imagine … the connection was bad and he was in a rush.”
Freddy turned to kiss Eve and Paul, who both looked perfectly at ease amid the swarm of Longbridge children. They had visited Longbridge Grange a number of times before, coming out from London by train during the spring and summer of 1941, at Lady Penelope’s invitation, and the two older couples had grown into a warm, easy friendship, motivated just as much by mutual liking as by their hopes that Freddy and Tony would manage to get themselves married, as they quite obviously should be.
“Is it all right for a bride to be starving?” Freddy asked no one in particular. Paul put his arm around her shoulders, tipped her chin up and kissed her forehead. Thank God for this child, he thought, and exchanged a quick glance with Eve. Where was Delphine? Their eyes asked each other the question that had tormented them for so long. They had learned to speak of her as little as possible, for inside Occupied France she was as unreachable as if she were on the dark side of the moon, but the question was never far from their minds. Eve turned away to concentrate on Freddy.
“You’ll need your strength,” she advised her daughter. Eve had been part of all the arrangements, from the wedding in the village church, to which every soul in the neighborhood was invited, to the reception at The Grange, at which they expected only family, restricted by wartime travel problems to some sixty people, which seemed to Freddy an enormous number.
Accompanied by the little girls, Sophie, the youngest, and Sarah and Kate, the twins, Freddy and Jane ate sandwiches in the pantry, warned not even to think of going into the kitchen, where several women from the nearby farms were helping Lady Penelope and Eve put the finishing touches on the wedding feast.
Traditionally, the wedding should have taken place at noon, but since neither the bride nor the groom could guarantee to get there in time, it had been arranged for three in the afternoon, to take advantage of the daylight and still enable all the reception guests to arrive before dark and the blackout.
“I don’t think this is such a hot idea,” Freddy muttered to Jane, as she swallowed the last of her sandwich.
“What’s wrong … stomachache? You ate too fast. You’re excited, that’s all.”
“Excited, shit, I’m in a panic. I’m terrorized. I can’t do it, Jane It’s a mistake. I hardly know Antony. I should never have let you talk me into it.”
“Me?” Jane was indignant. “I never said boo. Do you think I want you for a sister-in-law, you half-assed Yank? My brother could have had a duke’s daughter … and here he’s throwing himself away on just another fairly pretty face. You’d never have had a chance with him in peacetime. What’s worse, you’re really a half-assed Frenchie, when it comes right down to it, and in my family
we’ve never forgiven William the Conqueror. Should have stayed on his own bloody side of the Channel and left Britain to the Anglo-Saxons. Look, if you like, I’ll go tell Mummy to cancel the whole show. We’ve already lost the best man, so why not the bride too? The wedding presents weren’t up to much anyway … nothing we’d mind sending back. People would understand … since the war everybody’s had to learn to be flexible. If Antony weren’t my brother I could marry him myself so as not to disappoint the guests, but just say the word and we can be back at Hamble before they know we’ve gone. Better yet, we could drive on to London and pick up some cute, hot-blooded, sex-starved enlisted men for a really good time.”
“All right, all right, I’ll come quietly,” Freddy said gloomily.
She dressed in Jane’s bedroom, with Eve and Lady Penelope hovering about. The Longbridge attic had been ransacked for wedding dresses, but nothing that fit Freddy had been discovered, for she was taller than any of the Longbridge brides of past generations. Wartime restrictions and lack of clothing coupons made buying a new wedding dress impossible, yet Lady Penelope had been determined that her oldest son was going to have a bride who looked like a bride.
Wartime had turned her talent for petit point into an almost professional dressmaking skill. For the bodice, Lady Penelope had taken the top of a late-Victorian gown with a low, wide, ribbon-trimmed neckline and balloon puffed sleeves, that began just at the end of Freddy’s bare shoulders. Ruthlessly, she cannibalized two dresses from the period of George III, one of them possessing a pleated, full satin cloud of a skirt, held at the waist by a wide belt. It wasn’t long enough to reach the floor, but served beautifully under a split over-skirt, made entirely of lace, from which trailed a four-foot lace train. Sophie, Sarah and Kate had spent the morning weaving a garland of tiny white rosebuds that held in place a shoulder-length veil, a family heirloom that had been carefully preserved for more than three hundred years, from the time of Charles II.
Judith Krantz Page 47