A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  Arie is confronting an idea far outside political theory and rationality.

  ‘That you should come from your country, Beatrice... should be there at that exact moment and feel this way about me, a foreigner you’ve never met. Explain this to me, please.’

  ‘I can’t but it was like I’d always known you’d be there, waiting for me to arrive.’

  ‘No, I cannot understand. It is beyond all calculation.’

  ‘But that’s what I felt. That’s what happened.’

  His face betrays confusion and helplessness.

  Somewhere, hidden within him, there is also a terrible fury, blown from the desert of grief he has left behind. For the moment, it is controlled but its day will come.

  Before more can be said, the apartment’s front door is banged. Arie gets out of bed quickly. He pulls on his clothes, unwashed in a heap on the floor, and orders her to answer. Bea wraps herself in a dressing gown. Standing on the step is Peter Casserley and another man in civvies. Casserley tips his trilby to her.

  ‘Beatrice, good morning. Your guest decent enough to receive visitors, is he?’

  He pushes passed her unbidden and enters the flat. Arie emerges from the bedroom, fully dressed and holding the brown suitcase he had carried from Prague.

  ‘Minsky – glad you’re ready. Say your adieus, there’s a good man.’

  Bea knows from Arie’s eyes what has been done behind her back. She can think of nothing to say, not in sorrow or anger or supplication. Events she herself contrived are in spate. The urge to kiss him, to cling to him or demand of Casserley his safe return – all this must be suppressed. She can do nothing but hold his poet’s hands in hers and grieve. Arie is marched from the flat as if he is being arrested and taken into custody. Casserley leads the way. Arie gets into the back of a waiting saloon.

  Bea, alone and cold on the pavement, tries to glimpse a final image of the face she adores. Then all that is precious and all that is rightfully hers is driven away.

  Another car is parked across the street... a Humber with a uniformed chauffeur and a limp RAF pennant on its black polished wing. It, too, moves off.

  And as it does, so Bea sees her father staring at her with contempt and distaste.

  Chapter Eleven

  McCall took a welfare call from a freelance cameraman who once shared a ditch with him during some minor African skirmish they had both almost forgotten.

  ‘You need a holiday, chum. Somewhere warm. Pneumonia is serious.’

  ‘So they tell me.’

  ‘Did you hear Ricky Benson’s died?’

  ‘The stills guy? But he’s younger than me.’

  ‘That’s my point. But it was him in the coffin, believe me.’

  ‘You went to the funeral?’

  ‘Of course. I said to his wife “Ricky’s looking a bit peeky” and she says “well, he’s not had a drink for three days.”’

  ‘What price the love of a good woman?’

  ‘Listen, McCall – do yourself a favour and get on a plane and get some sunshine.’

  ‘Yeah, but where’s the buzz lying on a beach?’

  ‘There isn’t one but it’s a damn sight safer than getting a tan while some bastard’s shooting at you.’

  It took all morning for the results of McCall’s second hospital X-ray to come back. The inflammation in his lungs had not reduced enough to sign him off. He drove back to Garth and found Bea’s note propped against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. With it was a photograph of his father he never knew existed.

  Thought you might like this, Mac. Forgotten we still had it, somehow lost in all those old letters in the attics. Am shopping with Mrs Craven. Try to keep an eye on Francis.

  Here was only the third picture of Edward McCall he had ever seen... this stranger who gave him life. It was black and white like the others and showed the same intense young man, but strapped in a bomber’s tail gun turret as it prepared to leave on another mission.

  His pale, aesthetic face looked so unsuited to the utilitarian mechanics of aerial warfare. But it was the eyes that riveted McCall, big with dread and seeming to draw his son into that claustrophobic bubble from which there was no escape. Kill or be killed. On the back, he had written :

  All tail gunners must surely all go mad. It is like being suspended in space, looking into a void with no sense of being part of the aeroplane or the crew. I feel so detached, just me, running my own little war against the enemy, waiting and watching.

  Francis always said Edward had nerves of steel and they brought each other luck. That was how they survived. McCall held to this as he put the picture in his memory box and closed the lid.

  But something nagged at him, some little pinch of guilt he had first felt at Evie’s questions. Why had he shown so little curiosity about this unlikely warrior, still less about the woman he had married and borne him a son? Who were these people, what were they?

  He forced himself to imagine his father taking off that late afternoon, the blood, guts and fragile bones of the man, so aware that a single burst from an enemy gun could cast him down to earth, screaming at the stars as he fell. Only a fool would not be terrified.

  McCall, weaker than he would admit, became nauseous at the very thought. He went to the bathroom and sank his face in a bowl of cold water. For a brief second in the mirror before him, McCall fancied he recognised this man he never knew. He went to touch his reflection but there was nothing... just silvered glass and a memory of terror not properly understood.

  *

  Evie gazed towards Piccadilly from behind the long net curtains of her anonymous office in Leconfield House. Distant, anonymous figures came and went, heads down through the drizzling January day, each unaware of the plots and conspiracies fomenting on her desk.

  Here were transcripts of phone intercepts, tape recordings from listening devices in office walls and Special Branch memos written by cops who had got their press and trade union snouts pissed in Gordon’s wine bar by Charing Cross Station or the Blue Posts pub in Soho.

  But the miners were now a broken force, down on their knees, never to rise again. Mrs Thatcher had slain the enemy within as surely as she had seen off the Argentine generals without. Dancing on graves could now begin in the Carlton or Travellers clubs or wherever power took money to bed and fucked the rest of us.

  Evie had tried to warn her father without showing out too much.

  ‘You’re being led to defeat, Dad... why don’t you start thinking for yourself?’

  ‘Like you do, you mean – spying for the bloody bosses?’

  He accused her of treachery in the row that followed. That cut deep. But her father was not a wicked man, nor did the Realm need defending against him. He had never even been to London and only got to Oxford once – by motorbike when she went up in the year of revolution which was ’68.

  Evie took him for tea along The High. She had already assumed a new accent which he mocked as la-di-dah. He was soon gone home again, back to the world he knew. Evie had wanted him to feel proud of her, not ill at ease. But in a place of funny gowns and silly hats, it was him who was the oddity. It was kinder never to invite him again.

  She remembered a covertly filmed baton charge by lines of police on horseback. Miner standing with miner, forming a single, fluid mass like starlings yawing from a hawk. The camera zoomed in to the main troublemakers. Each face was a contorted image of alarm and hate, hands raised for protection against the stamping hooves. Evie actually knew some of these men – one especially. Not that his name ever went into her official report.

  Something Bea said reminded her of all this.

  ‘Never forget, Evie – every law is man-made. Some are so morally wrong, it can be one’s duty to break them.’

  She had taken to Bea but the old lady’s Leftist sympathies seemed out of character. Then again, communistic traits often ran in the duplicitous ruling classes of England.

  *

  Doctor Preshous had ordered McCall to exercise. He
had taken to walking Garth Woods each afternoon, barrowing back fallen branches to saw for logs. He needed to rest up every so often and would sit listening to the stream just as Francis had. Nearby was the great crown of an ash tree and the tree house had Francis built for McCall. Here was childhood in a box of planks with a make-believe chimney and windows, slowly rotting in the seasons and no longer a place of safety.

  Garth Woods were overcast. But its dun earth would soon lighten with snowdrops and yellow aconites then daffodils, anemones and bluebells.

  The woods were all about life, death and renewal. He turned towards the bridge over Pigs’ Brook then saw something which made no sense – bits of paper the size of playing cards, impaled in the trees along the path. McCall reached one down – a page ripped from a hymn book with a verse underlined in green pen.

  O Lord, turn not thy face from me,

  Who lie in woeful state

  Lamenting all my sinful life,

  Before thy mercy gate.

  Others were highlighted with a verse from the same hymn.

  And call me not to strict account,

  How I have sojourned here

  For then my guilty conscience knows,

  How vile I shall appear.

  Some mad ritual was being carried out. As McCall retrieved the last one, the young rector came across the bridge carrying all the hymn books that had been vandalised then strewn across the church field. He seemed distressed but relieved to see McCall.

  ‘This is Mr Wrenn’s doing. A lady in the bungalows saw him and rang me.’

  McCall hardly knew what to say beyond promising to pay for the damage. He turned back towards the dacha where smoke rose from its metal stovepipe. He heard raised voices coming from inside. Bea and Francis were having a row.

  ‘You’re spying on me again... spying, spying, spying – ’

  ‘Don’t start all this again, Francis.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be in here. Get out. You’re not allowed in here.’

  ‘Please, Francis. Stop this. I just want you to come home and have some food.’

  ‘You think I don’t know about your little game, don’t you?’

  ‘What game, Francis?’

  ‘I’m onto your secrets and don’t think I’m not.’

  ‘I haven’t got any secrets.’

  ‘Oh, no?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Now are you coming to eat or not?’

  ‘Just clear off, you witch. Leave me alone – do you hear?’

  Bea emerged in her long gardening coat and green boots. It looked like she was crying. McCall caught up with her and asked what was going on.

  ‘How do I know? I’m not a doctor. But I can’t take much more of this.’

  He found Francis staring into the wood burner which roared with flames. He looked up at McCall as if he were a complete stranger.

  On the floor were more ripped pages from Hymns, Ancient and Modern and a slew of aerial reconnaissance photographs of German cities he had bombed. Francis threw one at him without preamble.

  ‘See? What can’t speak can’t lie.’

  ‘It was dreadful, Francis. All war is dreadful.’

  ‘You know nothing, boy.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Well, I was. I saw it all from my aeroplane.’

  ‘But it’s all over, now.’

  ‘Not for me, it isn’t.’

  ‘Tell me why, Francis.’

  Francis started rocking in his chair in great distress, back and forth, back and forth, fingers gripped around his knees.

  ‘Firestorms firestorms. Bombs and incendiaries... thousands of tons of them. Everything destroyed, all the people. All destroyed. A wind of fire so terrible...’

  ‘You were doing your duty, Francis.’

  ‘My duty, was it? My duty to turn my fellow beings into living torches?’

  ‘It was all a wicked waste.’

  ‘Not wicked, boy – pornographic.’

  McCall saw other photographs under Francis’s chair – close-ups of German civilians Francis helped to incinerate. Men, women, children like seared logs, reduced to a third of their size, twisted in pools of their own liquidised fat.

  ‘Come on, Francis. It’s getting late. We should go back to Garth.’

  ‘No. She’s there. That bloody spy. Thinks I’m not onto her, you know.’

  ‘Bea’s concerned about you, Francis. She loves you.’

  ‘Strange sort of love, boy... still, she’s covered her tracks pretty well.’

  ‘What tracks do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll find out one day.’

  ‘Why not tell me now?’

  ‘Because information shared is an advantage lost.’

  ‘But Bea’s your wife – ’

  ‘She’s much more than that, little friend... much, much more.’

  Chapter Twelve

  This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us...

  The prime minister’s words come to Bea from the wireless in her lounge. She is standing in the bath, drying herself with a soft white towel. The room is full of steam condensing on the checker board tiles. Her face is shroud grey in the mirror. It will be lunchtime soon. But she does not feel like eating. Not today. She pulls the chain plug and makes to step out onto the square yellow mat she bought last week at Liberty.

  Her eye is caught by something in the eddying water – a thin brush stroke of dilute crimson being drawn through the swirling bubbles towards the drain. It seems to have no connection to her. Yet she feels something is wrong. It makes her afraid and she does not know why.

  Almost at once, a fierce pain detonates deep within her, sudden and shocking like the blast of a bomb.

  ...I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany...

  She stares down at her treacherous body. Blood drips from her, exploding against the virgin enamel as the water empties away. Bea presses the towel into herself. A vivid scarlet stain, wet and warm, spreads behind her fingers.

  She is overtaken by panic and runs naked from the bathroom. A trail of bright red spatters marks her uncertain passage over the new mat, down the woodblock hallway and across the green and white linoleum in the kitchen.

  Bea sinks to her haunches in the middle of the floor and wraps her arms tight around her folded knees so she is small again, like a child, moaning between the cycle of contractions ripping at her stomach.

  Then it happens... a spasm so violent that she screams until at last it ends. Maybe her neighbours will think murder is being committed here but she does not care for she knows something is being done to death in this place.

  On the floor, in the sticky pool between her feet, she sees the tiny creature her body refuses to nourish any longer.

  She picks it up with such tenderness, as if it might break, and holds it in her votive hands, pink and precious in its translucent sac with fingers and toes, little arms and legs and a face that looks like a boy’s. And in that head, what wisdom there would have been and in those sightless eyes, what love might have shone.

  It rests now, this child with no name, still and starved of life so Bea will never know what it could have become, what it might have achieved.

  She squats, drained and helpless. Fatigue overwhelms her and she crawls across the bloody floor on hands and knees to her bed where she returns to the womb and everything goes dark.

  When she wakes, Bea boils water and every trace of the son she would have worshipped is scrubbed away so that he never happened... he never was.

  Just like his father must be.

  Outside in the street, with eyes so full of tears it is like walking under water, the faces of people and the noise of traffic distort and bend and all the time, the parcel in her pocket weighs heavy though it is only
small, no bigger than a kitten and just as soft, wrapped in sheets of tissue paper.

  She passes through a narrow back entry behind a restaurant where they bin their waste. No one sees her. It takes only a second or two. Then it is over. But it will never be over. It will callous her heart for ever.

  *

  Even now, all these years later, those wormwood days were with Bea still. Such loss she suffered, such pain at the duplicity of men. She remembered Casserley’s clipped charm at besting a rival, her father’s glowering face. Of Arie, there was to be no news, neither letter nor message. An unbridgeable gulf had opened up between their lives. What happened in Bea’s apartment was suffered alone, endured in secret.

  Casserley’s team moved out of St Ermine’s. Someone said they had gone to train under arms in Scotland. Maybe that was where Arie went to learn the business of heroic death. Bea would not have dared ask her father. They did not speak for months, not until after war broke out and he ordered her to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

  ‘We must all do our duty, Beatrice. Our personal feelings count for nothing at times like these.’

  For the Air Marshal, the disgrace of that Jew boy was a family scandal beyond forgiveness, mitigated only by her meeting Francis the following year.

  *

  Bea parks the Hillman Minx opposite the officers’ mess. Across the airfield, a dozen trainee pilots practise take-offs and landings in flimsy Avro Tutors, all string and canvas like the flying coffins of the Great War.

  Bea, smart in the pressed blue uniform of an Aircraft Woman First Class, walks to the canteen. Her black hair is much shorter now, cropped to regulation length. She wears regulation service knickers, too – grey like the thick lisle stockings the girls all hate but have to wear.

  She rooms with another ACW1 called Joan who is waiting for her with a mug of tea. Four Harvard trainers just delivered from America, roar over the canteen’s tin roof and they duck instinctively. But all the new recruits crowd to the windows to watch them turn into the sun and wheel over the placid Wiltshire countryside.

  ‘There’s a dance tonight, Bea. You are coming, aren’t you?’