‘Then we’ll all go, get a hotel and make a weekend of it.’
*
They find Edward McCall at The Crown in Churchill. Bea has not seen him since he left Francis’s crew. He sits on his own in a brown overall made messy by oil paint from the pictures he tries to sell.
The pub has just opened but he has almost finished his first pint of bitter. His eyes are red from crying or insomnia. The smell of self-pity and failure is all about him. Edward looks up and meets Francis’s eye.
‘Edward, good to see you again. We were just passing.’
‘Pull the other bloody one, skip.’
He is introduced to Arie who buys a round of drinks. Bea asks about McCall’s son, young Francis.
‘He’s well enough, I suppose.’
‘We’d love to see him – and Elizabeth, of course.’
‘Well I’m busy. There’s a man coming who might buy some of my pictures.’
Bea hopes he is telling the truth. They leave for McCall’s cottage without him. Elizabeth looks worn down from trying to cope. Little Francis scrambles behind her legs and hides his face from the strangers’ smiles.
Elizabeth’s kitchen is small, dark and squalid, the table covered by newspaper, not cloth. The red floor tiles are furred white with salts coming up from the bare earth on which they are laid. She boils a kettle for tea. Arie feigns a liking for the framed paintings stacked against the stairs. They are chocolate box views of thatched cottages and country scenes. No originality, no flair – not like his pre-war efforts. Arie tempts young Francis outside with a promise of candy. They all follow and Francis senior records the gathering on his cine camera. Then he takes Elizabeth across to the orchard to talk out of earshot. Arie asks Bea what had happened to make Edward the way he is.
‘Something on a mission, I think. Francis has never told me the full story.’
Edward McCall returns from the pub a few minutes later. His mood is even darker. The would-be buyer failed to show. Arie offers for ‘Farmhouse at Dawn’ and refuses change from the five pound note he puts in McCall’s hand. Then Francis starts recounting war stories about how he and Edward survived their hairy raids over Germany. McCall turns away, almost angry.
‘Leave it, skip. I’m sure you have to be somewhere else.’
He gathers up his boy and carries him inside. Bea sees the child’s eyes looking at her, not understanding. Elizabeth looks at her, too, on the point of tears. She goes inside and they hear the door being bolted.
*
They drive away from Mendip Cottage, knowing they have brought distress to those within, not comfort. Arie asks why Francis takes Edward’s problems so personally.
‘Because he was a brave man, once.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Cracked up spectacularly on a raid... fell victim to the eighth passenger.’
‘The what?’
‘Fear. That’s what we called it.’
They check in at the Cliff Hotel in Cheddar then set off walking a path along the limestone ridges of the Mendip Hills. Bea can think only of how much she pities Elizabeth and despises her husband. He seems incapable of understanding what a blessing a child is.
They rest a while on a seat above a steep-sided ravine. The quilt of England’s soft green hills lies beyond. No one speaks. Arie and Bea are waiting for Francis to finish the story of Edward’s downfall. When it comes, his account is somewhere between a debriefing and a confession... and long overdue at that.
*
It is October the 14th 1944. Two hundred and fifty Lancasters from 5 Group take off from bases in Lincolnshire. Their target is Brunswick in Lower Saxony, thirty miles from Hanover, a medieval city of timber-framed buildings but which has factories making aircraft as well.
Each Lancaster carries two one thousand pound bombs of high explosives and sixteen canisters of multiple incendiaries. They fan over the North Sea in three great wedges of destructive power. The target will be reached by midnight. Each crewman is about his business. The navigator is curtained off with charts and instruments and signals are coming into the radio operator. Crouched in their turrets are the gunners – forward, mid-upper and rear – watching for enemy fighters in the fearful vastness of the night sky.
Tedium and routine are but preludes. Ahead will be confusion, panic and the ferocity of combat... and the prospect of instant death. Within each man, there is all this – that and the conflict between the instinct for self-preservation and the demands of duty. Those who accept they are likely to die will suffer less stress. More imaginative men see only the horrifying end that might await them.
They are seventeen thousand five hundred feet above Brunswick. The city’s streets are running with white fire from the first storm of Lancaster bombs. Francis and his aerial warriors begin their run. They are about to be tested to destruction once more. Then they hear screaming on the intercom.
‘I’ve had it, I’ve had it. I’ve fucking had it!’
It is their rear gunner, Edward McCall.
‘Do you fucking hear me, you bastards – I’ve had it!’
There is terror in every word. At that moment, the bomb aimer should be signalling weapons away so Francis can peel left and descend below German radar. But he doesn’t. Something is terribly wrong. Francis hears scuffling from behind then McCall lunges at him.
‘Out of the bloody way, skip. Get out of my way.’
He tries to wrestle Francis from the pilot’s seat to get at the escape hatch. McCall wants to bale out... wants to leap into the inferno below. Francis is fighting to keep control of the aircraft. McCall punches him in the face again and again and they go into a dive, hurtling towards the flaming city at two hundred miles an hour.
The forward gunner manages to scramble up from his turret and grabs McCall. The flight engineer pitches in, too. They sit on him and bind his hands with webbing. But still McCall kicks and thrashes about till they hit him so hard, he goes unconscious. Francis struggles back into position and levels them out just above the inferno and orders bombs away immediately.
*
Bea shakes her head in disbelief. Arie asks what happened when they got Edward back to base.
‘In war, a man’s courage is his capital... but he’s always spending. Edward was broke in every sense yet they still accused him of cowardice.’
‘But he’d been a good man till then. How could they do that to him?’
‘I had to make a report, you see. I felt bad about it but he’d endangered us all so he was up before a court martial charged with lacking moral fibre.’
‘What a very English way of putting it.’
‘They’d have called it shell shock back in the Great War but our top brass thought that if the men started getting out of combat duties by having breakdowns, it’d spread like a contagion and there’d be no one left to fight the air war.’
‘So he had to be punished, made an example of?’
‘And very publicly... stripped of his rank and put to shovelling coal in the boiler house.’
‘Not just treated like a coward but like a criminal, too?’
‘Exactly. Edward wasn’t seen as top drawer, you see, not from a class where courage was a matter of breeding and character. Those of us who actually flew aeroplanes and not desks knew this to be utter rot, of course.’
*
Bea tried to open her eyes beneath the bright hospital lights. She felt her hand being lifted and put to the lips of a visitor. Then she was kissed on both cheeks and her untidy hair pushed back tenderly from her forehead by a lover’s long, tapering fingers.
He had come back to her as she always knew he would.
Chapter Twenty Six
Evie was due to meet Phillip on Westminster Bridge. But her disorganised husband would be late. He always was – academically brilliant but unable to find soap in a sink. That was Phillip. They were never truly compatible because his insecurities were even worse than hers. He kept phoning her, still desperate for reconciliatio
n after all these months. Everyone needs hope and she had loved him – after a fashion – since Oxford. So Evie agreed to marriage guidance sessions, if only to ease the final separation when it would come. Not till then did she ever think she could tell McCall she had been married.
Big Ben struck twelve. Tourists pointed, cameras clicked and the city bustled by. She wondered about all the countless trysts and discreet moments that would have begun on this bridge. Bea had stood here once... Bea and the man with no name who looked so happy holding McCall, the child.
What was the story there? Maybe McCall better off not knowing.
Phillip approached, waving with one hand and holding onto a plastic shopping bag of history text books in the other. Evie smiled and they hugged. Who wouldn’t be fond of such a shambles?
*
In the hours before dawn, Garth Hall had the feel of a studio after the actors and technicians had gone but before the scene-shifters came in to create a new reality. Sleep was not coming easily to McCall. Evie called it brain whiz – the uncontrollable pinballing of fears and doubts in the mind. He lay on the chesterfield in the drawing room, counting the minutes till seven thirty when he knew Winnie Bishop would have had breakfast, maybe put fresh flowers on David’s grave and be busy with housework. Then he drove to her bungalow.
‘I need your help on something important, Mrs B.’
‘Today’s washing day young Francis so I’m busy this morning.’
‘No, I understand but I need you to look at something. It shouldn’t take long.’
McCall saw she was intrigued. He drove her back to Garth and they went through the woods to the dacha where the Eumig and screen were already set up.
‘This is all a bit mysterious. What’s it all about?’
‘You’ll see, Mrs B. Just watch this little bit of film.’
Then he played the footage of himself as a toddler with his mother. Bea stood smiling in the garden of the McCall family home as young McCall was handed to a dark-skinned man who laughed at the camera and put him on his shoulders.
‘Who is that man holding me, Mrs B?’
‘Why are you asking me this?’
‘Because I think you know him.’
Mrs Bishop sat plucking the hem of her dress as she always did to cover uncertainty. But she had not looked surprised at what she saw.
‘His name, Mrs B... what is it?’
‘He was a friend of the Wrenns, that’s all I know.’
‘Yes, but what was his name?’
‘I don’t rightly remember. There were so many people coming here.’
‘OK, then what about his job... do you know what he did or where he came from?’
‘This isn’t fair, Francis. It’s all a long time ago.’
‘But you’ve usually got such a good memory, Mrs B.’
‘For some things, yes.’
‘Then why not this?’
‘Like I’ve said before, leave people in peace. What’s done is over.’
‘But this man obviously knew my mother... and he was at the funeral so he’s still alive and I can talk to him about her if only I can find out who he is.’
‘That’s as may be but I want to go home.’
If nothing else, it was interesting she did not tell him to ask Bea. They drove back to her bungalow in silence. McCall regretted ambushing her, making such a big deal out of it. Mrs Bishop turned to him as she unlocked her front door.
‘You’ve had no breakfast, have you?’
She scrambled eggs and watched him eat as she always had. They sat drinking tea, still saying nothing but smiling when their eyes met. McCall thought he should go but she motioned him to stay where he was.
‘You see things when you work in other people’s places, young Francis... you see things and hear things but it’s best to keep your mouth shut in service.’
She looked out of her window, over the graveyard and the trees of Garth Woods to where the big house stood beyond.
‘Your mum came up here on her own more than once... came here when you was just little, before you came up here full time.’
‘I never knew this, Mrs B.’
‘Well, it’s true... on David’s memory, it’s as true as I sit here.’
‘So you actually met my mother... talked to her?’
‘Many’s the time, yes.’
‘Tell me what she was like as a person.’
‘She had trouble at home, that was clear as day but a nice enough little woman, only ordinary like the rest of us but a decent soul.’
‘What did she tell you about her family, where she came from?’
‘No, nothing... she didn’t seem to have no people of her own.’
‘And the man in the cine film... who was he, Mrs B?’
‘All I know is he was on the wireless a lot, reporting on wars and such, like you.’
‘You mean for the BBC?
‘Like from places where you’ve been, yes.’
McCall could not understand her reluctance to tell him any of this. Nothing she said could offend anyone. Yet she started ruching her skirt again.
‘Is there something else about this man, Mrs B?’
‘Gossip, yes.’
‘What kind of gossip?’
‘About him and Mrs Wrenn.’
‘You mean they were having some sort of affair?’
‘I never said that. It wasn’t my business to know and I never stuck my nose in.’
‘No but that’s what you meant, isn’t it?’
‘Always going away, she was. She’d get a phone call and she’d be away.’
‘With this man?’
‘I don’t know who she went with or where she went but all as I do know is that’s why you had to live at my house so much.’
*
McCall saw Bea naked once... in the room where he now stood, about to play the burglar. At six years old, it had been the most confusing sight he had ever seen.
He’d cut his finger so ran to the house for a plaster. All the old lead pipes were gurgling so he knew she was emptying her bath. Some primitive compulsion was at work and he found himself crouching on the step of the maid’s stairs, peeping down the long landing. Part of him was playing a made-up story about secrets and spies. Part of him wasn’t.
Bea came out of the bathroom and walked towards her bedroom. She was completely undressed... just as something inside of him wanted her to be. It felt naughty but he went to Bea’s door and stood watching her towelling her glossy hair. As she did, so her breasts swayed above the inexplicable black bib at the root of her soft white belly. Here was infinite strangeness, compelling but beyond his understanding.
Bea looked up and smiled. She did not shout or make him feel dirty but just pulled on her nylon stockings then selected her clothes from the wardrobe and dressed for the day. No words passed between them. McCall pretended concern for his cut finger which dripped little poppies of blood onto Bea’s carpet.
So now he knew. She’d had an affair and betrayed Francis... their Francis. She was no better than Helen.
Bea’s bureau was open but its hidden compartment wasn’t and he had no idea how to spring the lock. So he stole through her other belongings like a thief. He turned out every drawer, cupboard and closet and even the pockets of her dresses and coats. There was nothing – not a scented envelope or a coded note. He even checked the floorboards but none was lose enough to make a hiding place.
How any of this would help him to find the truth about his real family, he neither knew nor cared. It just got rid of some of his anger.
He was interrupted by someone knocking the porch door. It was the rector’s wife who was also village correspondent for the Ludlow Advertiser. She wanted to check Francis’s war record for an obituary. McCall made her coffee and saw she had a list of mourners from the funeral.
‘Where’d you get those?’
‘We leave cards on the pews and people fill in their details.’
McCall went down the names. All the o
ld Whitehall spooks were there – Evie, too. But no one whose name sounded foreign. The missing mourner had not signed in.
*
Bea was a stubborn and awkward patient, much given to stick banging and glaring at speech therapists and nurses. But they didn’t mind her annoyance and frustration. It showed spirit, a will to fight the depression that can overwhelm those who have suffered a stroke.
She was still grieving, not just for Francis but for the person she once was and whose freedoms she had taken for granted. Yet after a visit from an elderly man as smart and elegant as Bea herself, the rehabilitation nurses saw improvements. He sat holding her hand, his head close to hers. They heard him whispering in a silk-soft voice and saw the tears. After he went, she was happier than they had ever seen her. The specialist thought she might yet recover some speech. It seemed she had something to live for.
Bea was propped up against her pillows when McCall visited. A hairdresser had been in to wash and set her hair. She had make-up on, too. Bea gave McCall a guarded, lop-sided smile and wrote him a message on her pad. Go home, I. It would be a while before her mental grammar improved. Soon go. McCall nodded encouragement. Garth go, me.
McCall felt rather ashamed after rummaging through Bea’s possessions. It had been a sordid intrusion into her privacy, however upset he was with her. Yet what he was about to do was more of the same.
He took out the four photographs she dropped on the orchard lawn and laid them out to see her reaction... the Nazi soldiers, the concentration camp victims, herself and her alleged lover. He watched closely. The stroke may have twisted that once beautiful face but it could not rob the truth from her eyes.
‘What is his name?’
Bea shook her head. If she had been unaware of what McCall was really after before, she knew now.
‘I missed him at the funeral, Bea. I want to write and thank him for coming. I thought he could be one of Francis’s old diplomat friends.’
She scowled and waved him out of the ward. McCall’s audience was over. Bea turned her back and did not even watch him go.
*
Next morning, McCall received a registered parcel and a note from Edgar Fewtrell.
A Place Of Strangers Page 17