“You kept it all these years?”
“Locked up with other unfinished affairs from my life in Whittingbridge.”
“My God! Was I ever that young?”
“You haven’t changed,” I tell her honestly.
Angela laughs and waves away the absurd compliment.
Then I tell her about the letter to Sergeant Browning. I had spent a year burying him with useless personnel records just for the chance to be with her. “I figured I owed him the answer to his riddle.”
I review my search of Browning’s records and tell her about the autobiography of a simple country policeman. “I think he knew that he could get me to bring him information just by mentioning that he had no further need of my help. I would have done anything for an excuse to meet with him so I could meet with you.”
“He had his hook into both of us,” she says, more in humor than bitterness.
“Certainly into me, but I really didn’t give a damn. I was using him as much as he was using me.”
I get back to my letter. In it I had spelled out the story of Roger McTiernan and all the evidence that pointed to him as the murderer. I spend the end of our meal, our entire dessert, and most of our second bottle of wine unraveling the convoluted details. It’s like one of those English parlor mysteries where the detective reviews the clues in the presence of all the suspects. Angela listens intently, surprised at the plot.
And then it ends. We’re out of words and the last patrons still at a table. She declines a nightcap and I drive her home, ready for the much longer drive around London to my hotel at Heathrow.
“Jim, do you have to leave tomorrow?”
“Well, not really.”
“I’d like to take you up to Cambridge. There’s something there you should see.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“I suppose I could tell you, but it will mean much more to you if you see it for yourself.”
“All right. I’ll move my flight back.”
“Where are you staying?”
I tell her about checking out of the inn in Whittingbridge and booking a reservation at Heathrow.
“That’s a long round trip. Why don’t you stay here? There’s a guest room.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”
“You’ll be on the road for four hours.”
“I don’t want to scandalize your neighbors.”
She shrugs away the thought. “I’d be flattered if they thought I was that interesting. If someone asks, I’ll tell them you’re my cousin from America.”
I lie awake for the first hour or so, enjoying the coziness of the small dormer room and listening to the strange night sounds. It’s like my own house in the months after Kay’s death, but not nearly as lonely. I can’t help but think of the small rooms in the English inns when Angela slept in my arms. I wonder what she’s thinking about, once again being under the same roof with me. Can I tell her? Can I ask her? Or is it better if we leave all those memories undisturbed?
She’s cheery in the morning, which I find amusing. Kay and I had pretty much agreed not to say a single word to each other until we had had our first cup of coffee, and then to keep conversation to a minimum until the pot was empty, but Angela seems to be a morning person. When I poke my head into the kitchen, she is already involved in cooking an English breakfast of runny eggs and rare bacon.
She has her only cup of coffee in the morning—the rest of the day belongs to tea—so there’s nearly a full pot for me. The breakfast is delicious—a meal I haven’t eaten since the discovery of cholesterol. Angela moves her own food around, but she is watching me eat and enjoying my every bite. She may be wondering if this is how every day of her life might have begun, because that is certainly what I’m wondering. Is this a snapshot of the other life that I never lived? I have my third cup of coffee and ask her what we’re going to see at Cambridge.
“A cemetery, if you must know.”
“A cemetery? Are we visiting a grave? I was hoping for something a bit more cheery.”
“That’s all I’ll say,” she says as she gets up from the table, “but I promise you that it will be worth your time.”
I get up and carry my dishes to the sink. “A cemetery,” I repeat with a baffled shrug. Angela dresses while I wash and dry. She reappears in casual slacks and sweater, with sandals on her feet. I notice that the locket is hanging around her neck. She climbs into my rental car and I toss my suitcase into the back seat, then we start north to Cambridge, only about an hour ahead.
The conversation is easy. She can tell me the history of nearly everything that we pass: how it was during the war and why it changed since then. What was farmland or pasture is now suburbia, linked to London by the motorway system and by the commuter trains that have replaced the intercity passenger trains. Much of the charm has been paved over. As we near Cambridge, the vertical gothic appears, unchanged from the time of Isaac Newton. There are church spires and college facades from as far back as the fourteenth century, and we both recall the joke that in England, American history is only a one-semester course.
As we reach the rotary, I can see that modern civilization has grown like weeds among the grain. There are motels that could be in Kansas, fast-food huts, gas stations with attached convenience stores, and bland apartment buildings that serve as student housing. Thankfully, they haven’t yet gotten to the point of knocking down college yards so they can put up parking garages. Angela directs me around the rotary to the westbound highway that leads us out of Cambridge before we are really in it.
“Where are we heading now?”
She smiles at her secret. “To the cemetery I was telling you about.”
With that I see a sign for the American Cemetery, three miles ahead at Madingley. “Americans?”
“Your friends who died in the war.”
“Died? Here in England?”
“Mostly on the Continent. The bodies were brought back here from Normandy and Belgium—wherever the killing was furious and the boys couldn’t be properly identified. There are nearly four thousand American soldiers who stayed here. I understand some of the Cambridge dons make their students spend a day at the graves, just to keep them from becoming too smug.”
“Four thousand?”
“So I’m told. But there’s only one of them who you will remember. I think you’ll find visiting him is worth the extra day.”
We turn off and run along the wall of the cemetery until we reach the open gates. Then we turn into a gently rolling field that seems like an orchard, with its precise rows of white crosses. I’m stunned. I’ve been to Arlington and to the graves at Normandy, so the overpowering emotion of so many sacrificed lives isn’t new to me. But to find it here, set comfortably at the center of British learning, is a surprise. We left no architectural monuments of our invasion of England, but we did become part of the soil. Thank God for the dons who send their students here. No medieval marriage ever bound two countries together so effectively.
We leave the car and walk together down one of the pathways. There is a posted directory that locates the known dead by row and aisle, but Angela doesn’t need to study it. Obviously, she knows where she is going. Then I see a small monument ahead, a short column surrounded by a stone bench. There’s a figure atop the column.
As we get closer, I can see that it is a man in flight gear. The trousers bag a bit at the top of the flight boots. The leather jacket is open, showing a sweater topped by a collar and tie. A parachute pack hangs loosely from his shoulders, and then, ridiculously, the figure is wearing an old leather flight helmet. The goggles are pushed up and the chinstraps hang down. That wasn’t the way we flew, but I guess the sculptor couldn’t convey that the man was a flyer if he put him in a baseball cap or a woolen ski hat. The absurdity falls under artistic license.
The face is bold and strong, looking skyward at its environment, or given the purpose of the place, maybe at a heavenly vision. It could be nearly anyone, or perhaps an abstract repre
senting of all of us who flew. But yet it probes at my memory. This is someone I knew.
There’s a bronze plaque at the flyer’s feet.
Major General Reginald T. Mast
Commanding Officer, 396th Bomber Group
Whittingbridge, Norfolk
I look in amazement at Angela and find her looking back at me. I had probably mentioned Colonel Mast’s exploits to her a hundred times. She must have felt she knew the man as well as I did. She was certainly right in bringing me here.
On 20 August 1944, Colonel Mast returned from a bombing raid over Normandy with two engines of his B-17 Flying Fortress inoperative and with petrol leaking from his wing tanks. He overflew a landing field and ordered his crew to parachute to safety.
As he attempted to land his damaged bomber, the remaining two engines failed.
Colonel Mast could have saved himself by bailing out. Instead, he chose to stay with the aircraft and assure that it did not come down in a populated area. He aimed his plane into a wooded field near Mundford, Norfolk, and died heroically in the crash.
This testament is erected in his memory by a grateful people.
He fought to free us and died to save us.
May he rest in eternal glory.
“Sweet Jesus!” I say out loud. Then I laugh toward Angela and tell her, “My most important assignment was keeping the English out of his face. I guess he didn’t hate them as much as he let on.”
“He’s quite a hero to us,” she replies. “As well he should be.”
We walk reverently out of the cemetery and find a small restaurant with white tablecloths and teacups already set. It isn’t yet noon, but morning tea with scones seems to be a local institution. I reach back into memory—to my first flight as copilot to Colonel Mast—and run through the incidents of his legend in surprising detail. Obviously, every one of my days in England is buried somewhere in my head. Angela listens, her face propped up by her elbow, sipping from her cup without taking her eyes off me. She is more the young girl I remember than the woman sitting beside me. I’m talking with more animation than usual, imitating voices and gestures, laughing out loud at Mast’s fear that an English bureaucrat might set foot on his base or meddle in his affairs. For an instant I’m fully immersed in my other life—a young man, sitting beside the woman I love—in the surroundings where we met.
I’m paying the bill when she asks me, “Was it Roger McTiernan that you wanted to tell Detective Browning about?”
“Yes…not that it could make any difference after all these years, but it was part of the incomplete heritage of my years. It was something I had to do for myself.”
“And I was…”
“You were the real reason I came back, even though I didn’t admit it to myself I had to find out how badly I had hurt you, and then maybe find some inconspicuous way to make amends.”
She shakes her head slowly and there is an instant of sadness in her eyes. “And I thought you had found out about my working with the detective. I just assumed that you would never want to speak to me again.”
“The fault is mine,” I insist. “You never did anything to hurt me. I was the one who made a mistake.”
We are walking now into the town, with the great colleges rising all around us, courtyards visible through the ornate gates. The streets are busy with a constant traffic of students on bicycles and professors rushing in their gowns. We seem to fit in as comfortably as anyone around us.
“Jim, there’s one more mistake that I wouldn’t want you to make. Do you mind if I tell you a few things that you weren’t aware of?”
My expression shows amused surprise. “More secrets?” I tease.
“Not secrets, just things that happened after you left. You see, Sergeant Browning knew all about your Lieutenant McTiernan, and he knew that he wasn’t the one who had killed Mary Brock.”
Then
Mary Brock wasn’t really a close friend to Angela. She was older, far more experienced, and much more sophisticated. “Like a movie actress whose life you follow in the tabloids,” Angela explained. “She was adventuresome, bawdy, and even shocking. You envied her, but didn’t want to be like her. You enjoyed the way she sipped a highball and smoked a cigarette and maybe even tried it yourself. But what was normal for her was once in a lifetime for me.”
Mary had lived in the tired row houses of Manchester, middle class in the Depression years, when middle class wasn’t quite enough. At sixteen she had married the boy next door, a lad whose prospects were as bad as her own. By eighteen they had tired of their shared poverty and gone their separate ways—he into a military unit that never made it back from Dunkerque and she into London’s secretarial pool.
The war, for all its horrors, was a blessing to her. Suddenly everyone was away from home. Suddenly everyone was working and had money. For the first time in her life there was an active singles scene, and Mary was well equipped to participate. She had a prettier face, a better body, and fewer inhibitions than most of the women around her. Men singled her out for their attentions.
There were the civilian men, suited business types whose skills, they implied, were too vital to the war effort to be wasted in a trench. They had the apartments, the hotel suites, and the spending money. They would share it all with her, provided she was content to be a shadowy secret. They didn’t really want to be seen with her, much less allow her to intrude in their personal lives.
Then there were the soldiers. Hardworking factory sweepers and coal diggers who had found new status in their khaki uniforms and ridiculous sailor suits. What they were looking for was a kiss in a movie theater and a grope in an alleyway. Mary already knew where that kind of romance was headed.
And there were the officers. They had better manners that the soldiers, and more money to spend. They weren’t nearly as secretive as the businessmen and weren’t at all ashamed to be seen in public. That was because their homes were hundreds of miles away in the north or west of the island, or maybe even thousands of miles away in one of the colonies. Mary was clearly a class or two below them.
Then the Americans came. Young men who were officers without the attending class distinction. Men who had not only money to spend, but affection to lavish. Best of all, they were even lonelier than she had been. They wore their big hearts on uniform sleeves. When thousands of young American officers landed at the air bases in East Anglia, Mary moved up from London to be with them. “I don’t think she planned on conning anyone,” Angela said. “I think she just wanted to be where the excitement was, at the center of their attention.”
“She wasn’t after the insurance?” I asked.
Angela laughed. The idea was ridiculous. “Mary probably didn’t know what insurance was. God knows her father had never had any, and her husband couldn’t have paid a penny premium. No one knew anything about insurance. I don’t think my own father had any.”
Then one of the American flyers had decided he loved her, and as proof of his love he told her that she was his beneficiary. She asked enough questions to understand what he meant, but she probably didn’t care at all. She was young, beautiful, and adored by all these men in uniform. Who cared what would happen a thousand years from then, when this one flyer got around to dying?
Except it wasn’t a thousand years. The boy’s plane exploded over France on his next mission. A month later, the biggest check she had ever seen was posted to her mailbox. She had sat in a kitchen chair, still wearing her nightgown, her painted toes splayed out before her, repeating over and over again the amount of the check. It took her hours to figure out what had happened.
She had dated this flyer a half a dozen times, dancing and drinking and hugging. There was nothing wrong with that. Twice, she had brought him back to her one-room flat for a toss in the sheets. She had enjoyed it as much as he did. It had been nothing more than good, clean fun. For this he had made her beneficiary of his insurance? Maybe some of the other Americans she was dating and sleeping with would like to do her a favor
as well.
“She wasn’t part of any organized crime ring,” Angela told me, ridiculing the idea. “She just found out what lots of English girls found out: Americans were lonelier than our own lads, and much more generous.”
That was the advice that Mary Brock passed on to all the young girls in the office: “Find yourself an American and give him whatever he wants. He’ll give you more than you could even think to ask for.”
For Angela, this was Mary at her outrageous best. Angela hadn’t dated anyone since her schoolmate had gone off with the commandos. At night she was going home to her parents. And here was Mary, advising that she take a few American lovers and screw them out of their paychecks. It was better than reading the tabloids.
“Mary was with a different American flyer every night of the week. It was easy to do, because the Americans were generally restricted to base. They got passes only a few days a month, so she could be seriously involved with any number of flyers without having to worry that one of them would find her in the arms of another. She enjoyed their company, and the checks that started coming in were really a bonus.”
“You make her sound completely innocent,” I interrupted. “It’s hard to believe that all this was just happening to her.”
“At first that’s exactly what it was,” Angela insisted. “She kept teasing me to start dating American flyers. ‘They’ll give you a nice dinner, a great lay, and write you into their wills. Let me fix you up.’ I’d laugh, embarrassed at the idea, but at the same time tempted. I wasn’t having much fun at home with my parents.”
Later, according to Angela, Mary Brock had become much more professional. She’d give an officer two or three dates and a half dozen hints to name her his beneficiary. If he didn’t, there were plenty of other men to play with. She had become cynical and cold-blooded, telling the girls that whenever bad weather kept the Americans grounded, it was costing her money. “She stopped being naughty and funny,” Angela recalled. “After a while, she was just sick and revolting.”
The Last Mission Page 31