The Forgotten War Page 20

  After that it was simple, apart from the knowledge that for the second time in as many weeks I was signing for the good behaviour of someone over whom I had absolutely no control. If the copper noticed that I was familiar with the form he handed me to complete, and had breezed through it, he didn’t say. He did say something to Miller, though, and it ruffled my feathers.

  ‘And Charles? We haven’t seen him recently.’

  ‘Not all that busy. Everyone’s behaving themselves.’

  On the way back I asked her, ‘Why was he surprised not to have seen Mr Miller for a while? What’s your husband to do with the police?’

  ‘I never talk about Charles’s work.’

  ‘Not even with the man you’re going to sleep with?’

  Pause. Sotto voce. ‘Especially not men I’m about to sleep with.’ That was good. I let the silence hang.

  It was a good thick overcast, but not cold, so I’d left the hood up but dropped the side screens into the back seat. The passing air, curling back into the car, ruffled Miller’s hair. She said, ‘You already know that he works for the Ministry of Food. He makes sure that the food produced in the county is officially accounted for; that people aren’t slipping it onto the black market. He manages a kind of accountancy team: they visit businesses and see if the numbers add up. When he catches folk at it, he writes reports and has them arrested. It’s always the same people, time and again.’

  ‘We had a phrase for that sort of job on my first squadron.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Pissing into the wind.’

  Miller turned her head away and pretended to watch the passing countryside. I’d said the wrong thing again.

  But you lose one, and then you win one. Back at the farm I hung back in the kitchen, and said to her, ‘Why don’t you use the room first?’

  Bella was there, and I’d just saved Miller’s blushes. But I hadn’t, because she reddened anyway, looked down, and said, ‘Thank you, Charlie. I won’t be long.’

  Bella and I stood outside with half-pints of cider. There was a veil of thin steel-blue cloud stretching across the horizon, and above that heavy bubbling cumulous clouds, brilliantly white. It wasn’t until a tiny silver aircraft scuttled beneath them – a Lancaster like Tuesday – that you realized how big the clouds were. I said, ‘Bad buggers.’

  The chickens were uncannily silent; for a moment you could have heard that pin drop. Bella said, ‘Aye; storm brewing.’

  As she said it there was a distant flash of sheet lightning, and an explosion of thunder that rattled the tiles, rolled all around us, and seemed to go on for ever.

  ‘Story of my life,’ I told her.

  I smoked my pipe until Miller came back.

  We didn’t speak much in the car, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, and we parted as soon as we left it. My bum had scarcely touched my office seat before Liz bounced in, with a piece of paper in her hand. She shoved it at me and said, ‘American fella phoned. That’s his number.’

  I recognized it as the London number that Tommo had given me for his friend. It wasn’t Tommo who answered when I dialled it, but after a wait of a few seconds he came to the phone.

  ‘Did you know that I’d have to sign up with your mob to get free of this thing?’

  ‘Not at first. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘What about you? Your neck stuck out over this?’

  ‘Not too far. Did Piers come round to see you?’

  ‘Yup – real freak, ain’t he? Someone from my embassy came after that. I’m a kind of Deputy Honorary Consul in Frankfurt now, with a diplomatic passport. What you got me into, Charlie? I feel like a fuckin’ Mason.’

  ‘You can get in and out of the country again: isn’t that what you wanted?’

  ‘Yes it is, Charlie, and I forgot to thank you for it. Thank you.’

  I nearly asked him, ‘What are friends for?’ before I realized that I didn’t want to know the answer. Instead, I said, ‘OK, Tommo, why don’t you get going? Give Alice my love.’

  ‘Sure.’ And that was it. When you know someone that well, a lot of things are never said.

  14. No Name Rag

  Miller’s revenge was giving me several hundred paper requisition slips to sign before I left. Who used all this stuff? I was in the middle of them when Liz put her head round my office door and said, ‘Your Jedburghs are signalling again, if you’re interested.’

  Mrs Boulder was also in the radio room when I got there. She was just replacing the telephone handset. ‘Sorry, sir; we have to inform Mrs Miller whenever the Jedburghs are on.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ It wasn’t, but never mind. Liz was back at her rig; I said, ‘Shift over and let me in.’ She shifted seats, but remained sitting beside me.

  I listened to the short rattles of Morse, and gently rested my fingers on the key. I knew exactly the right moment to roll the dice. The Krauts sometimes used to do it to us when we were somewhere over Germany. I broke in with the CFZ call sign I used at Bawne, and sent in open.

  Hi, Jed, this is Charlie. I knew that I had just seconds.

  Charlie who?

  Charlie who thinks it’s time you came home. I’ll buy you a beer in—

  Nice try, Charlie. NFO.

  Then they were gone. Both of them. But one of them had acknowledged me. Now they knew I was there.

  ‘What did NFO mean?’ Liz asked me.

  ‘Now fuck off. He must have figured that ladies could be listening.’

  Miller was in the doorway: she was good at doorways. She asked, ‘Did you get anything, sir?’

  ‘I got told to fuck off. Perhaps they’ll talk to me next time.’

  ‘Never for long enough for us to establish where they are.’

  ‘That was never going to work anyway. If you want them to come in, you’ll have to make them want to. Give them a good reason. Get Jane to offer them sex, and a decent meal . . .’

  That didn’t amuse Mrs Boulder. Her mouth turned down at the sides. Then she said, ‘Why only Jane?’ and smiled. It was a good smile. I realized that I’d been had.

  Miller said, ‘I’ll just go and tell the Boss.’ I assumed that she meant Watson.

  I was supposed to be the ranker here, but apart from the flying I was treated as if I was the office junior and that was beginning to piss me off. What could I expect? The fact was that I didn’t really want the job anyway; I was just doing my time, and they all knew it. They were still going to be here with their ears to their boxes when Charlie was long gone: they all knew that as well.

  I sat on the steps of St Paul’s with the D girls, and cried like a child. Den sat beside me and Dolly on the step above: she massaged my shoulders as if she was a trainer working on a boxer between rounds.

  They had taken me to visit John Donne, late Dean of St Paul’s. In a niche high up on a wall in St Paul’s Cathedral, his statue was smaller than I had imagined – say half scale – and was of an old man wrapped in his shroud preparing to die. Dean John was big on death before he died. I hated that. Where was the wild spirit who had written about love as if he had been exploding with it? I suppose that that’s a bad metaphor under the circumstances.

  The bad stuff started on the steps outside. Don’t laugh, but that was precisely where and when the business of bombing Germany got to me at last. It pinpointed my scarred conscience, there on the scarred steps of St Paul’s. I hadn’t noticed it when we arrived, but afterwards, outside on the steps . . . well, there was nothing around St Paul’s, you see: just acres of bomb-site. Cellars open to the sky, giving off a heavy foetid stench. Some had been screened by temporary walls or fences, to stop drunks falling into them in the dark.

  St Paul’s stood huge and sooty in a wasteland of smashed brick and stone. In places a pall of dust fouled the air, whipped up by eddying breezes as the wind learned new routes around London. I’d seen something similar in Bremen, but for some reason hadn’t understood it then. What I was thinking about was the thousands of places we’d creat
ed in Germany which looked exactly the same, and the bodies that stank beneath them. What the hell had Krefeld looked like after we had finished with it? In a remnant of yard that had been cleared, I knelt behind a displaced headstone that had surfaced from somewhere, and was sick. No doubt the late Dean would have been pleased to see me on my knees at last.

  I was wiping my mouth as I walked back to them. I said, ‘Sorry. It’s funny how things catch up with you.’

  ‘What was it?’ Dolly asked. I sat down, and that was when she began to knead my shoulders.

  ‘I suddenly saw all this mess, and thought about Germany, that’s all. I just didn’t think about it at the time; not many of us did.’ The wind had changed. Some of the dust drifted towards us, carrying the heady scents of urine and faeces. ‘I never thought about mile upon mile of open cellars, and dead people.’

  ‘Toilets,’ Den said. ‘Dunnees. It took the Germans nearly three years to knock this part of London down. It took us less than three months to turn it into an outdoor dunnee – can’t you smell it? What are people like?’

  I still felt I owed them an explanation. ‘There are big holes in every city I’ve seen since the war. Nothing like this, though – except in Germany.’

  ‘Liverpool,’ Dolly said. ‘They have pretty big holes in Liverpool too, and Glasgow, Coventry and Portsmouth. You haven’t been down the docks yet, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, don’t: not if you’re going to get a fit of the ’abdabs. Around the docks is worse than this. What have you seen in Germany?’

  ‘Bremen and Bremerhaven – that’s its port. Parts of the North-West. There were thousands of people living underground. I expect there still are. I went into a cellar that had two hundred people in it. They were living on water flavoured with potatoes and cabbage.’

  It was as if Dolly’s fingers were reaching through the skin and muscle to my very bones. She said, ‘Didn’t you see this when you were here during the war?’

  During the war and in the war were phrases that punctuated our vocabulary. Some people talked as if the events were as distant as ancient Rome, or Babylon.

  ‘No. It wasn’t like that. When we were up in town, we were out all night looking for fun, and a girl to get your leg over. Didn’t get up until dinnertime, and then it was out to a pub again. ’S funny. It was almost as if we had become nocturnal animals – we only moved around in the dark; and we flew in it, of course. I remember that everyone in the crew had pale faces; like they had drowned. All a bomb-site meant to me then was a copper with a swinging torch, diverting our taxi. It had nothing to do with people. Not then.’

  ‘And it does now?’ That was Den.

  ‘Yeah. Now it’s got everything to do with people.’

  She leaned towards me and kissed me on the cheek.

  It took us nearly fifteen minutes to find a bus stop. From the top of the bus I could suddenly see bomb damage everywhere. Den asked me, ‘What about the atom bomb, Charlie?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘If this is what London looks like today, and the German places you’ve seen look worse, imagine what those Japanese cities look like. Just one bomb, and no city any more. Hundreds of thousands dead, and hundreds of thousands infected with deadly rays and bound to die. Like a plague.’

  ‘Is that what it’s like? A plague?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the only way I can think about it. I try not to think about the children but sometimes I can’t think about anything else.’

  It was just after opening time so we were the first into the bar of a pub in Camden Town that they wanted to show me. The Parr’s Head. A tiny snug bar around the back, off a side alley, contained old sitting-room chairs leaking their stuffing, small low tables, a radio and a tank of goldfish. The licensee was a short, vivacious woman who everyone called Ma. The beer was Watney’s – so good that even the girls drank it. Den drank pints, like a man; that was still unusual in a woman. There was something about the atmosphere of that little bar that made you reluctant to leave.

  Den and I sat on their new leather sofa, and sipped American sour-mash whiskies. The girls never seemed short of drink, or new furniture.

  ‘Can I ask you something personal?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sure – shoot.’

  It was almost an appropriate response, because I asked her, ‘Are you and Dolly whores, or whatever prostitutes call themselves these days?’ I felt her stiffen, but she stayed jammed up close against me.

  ‘What do you mean, Charlie?’

  ‘What I said. Sorry I didn’t dress it up in prettier words. Look . . . you both have ordinary jobs, but you both get paid to go out with men that Stephen selects for you as well, and sometimes you sleep with them . . . I just thought . . .’

  She just reached down and touched me. Then she kissed me under the ear, and asked, ‘Thought what, Charlie?’

  ‘Thought that I wasn’t sure whether you were or not, that’s all. It doesn’t worry me.’

  ‘I’m pleased about that, Charlie.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re being sarcastic. I shouldn’t have asked, should I?’

  ‘Look at it this way: are you fucking anybody yet, down in deepest Gloucestershire?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Possibles?’

  ‘One. Almost a promise, I think.’ I probably closed my eyes, and put my head back. It’s what some cats do if you rub them under the chin.

  ‘What would you think if she gave you money, or a present, after she’d been out with you?’

  I wanted to move. I dared not.

  ‘She’s already given me a new raincoat.’

  ‘There you are, then. Does that make you a whore?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  She said it again. ‘There you are, then. Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘No.’

  So she stopped immediately. She took my face between both her hands and turned me to look into her eyes. I squeezed my knees together. She explained: ‘A whore would do exactly what you wanted: I’m not a whore, so I won’t.’ A six-beat pause. ‘See?’

  ‘Lesson learned,’ I confirmed between clenched teeth.

  ‘I fancy a jam sandwich. Shall I make you one?’

  It was as if the rest of the conversation hadn’t occurred.

  They had a smart new gramophone, and the best record collection I had ever seen. If I named a singer or a band, she produced and played it for me. If it became like a competition, then she won, because eventually I listened to whatever she chose.

  I remember her carefully dusting a record and saying, ‘Benny Goodman – “Sing, Sing, Sing”. You’re a lucky man, Charlie. I only play this to the men I love.’

  ‘You still love me, then?’ We were sitting a yard apart by now.

  ‘Figure of speech; don’t get your hopes up.’

  Goodman reached for the high notes one after the other. Den looked very beautiful.

  She was alongside me with her head on my shoulder when Dolly came in at midnight. We had the radio tuned to one of the late-night dance-music programmes from Holland, and had the lights turned down low. Dolly frowned when she saw us, but replaced that with a weary forced smile. ‘Did she seduce you, Charlie? Just my luck.’

  ‘No; she was very cruel to me.’

  ‘I left him for you, if you still want him. Charlie was asking some rather nasty questions,’ Denys told her. ‘So I played him music instead. Served him right.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ Dolly stretched. My eyes followed her body as her contours changed. Then she said, ‘I’ll bet it was about accepting money for our little expeditions. It always comes up. It’s no different from being married, Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  ‘If I’m married and my husband is keeping me, I’m taking a man’s money anyway, aren’t I? What’s the difference? I cost less than a wife, and you know what you’re getting. If you’ve a better argument, beat that.’

  ‘I’d rather beat yo
u; don’t some people do that?’

  ‘You can have him back, Den,’ Dolly said. ‘He’s getting a little peculiar.’

  In the small hours I lay on top of Dolly in her comfortable bed, but I propped my weight on my elbows. Her eyes were closed but she wasn’t asleep. In the half-dark I could see that her cheeks were slightly puffy from our lovemaking. ‘That was beautiful. I loved that,’ I told her.

  ‘Is that why you love me?’

  ‘No. I love you because you’re outrageous in bed, but still use words like “golly” and “gosh” and “rotten devils”. Is that enough love to be going on with?’ It was just a game, I think.

  She didn’t reply immediately. ‘I’m going to try very hard not to let you get under my skin, Charlie.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know; I just know that it would be a mistake.’

  I kissed her on her nose. She smiled, and wrinkled it up. She still didn’t open her eyes.

  ‘I have to go and work with Piers in the morning; can I have you again before I go?’

  She giggled. ‘Can you come before you go? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me.’

  ‘Then don’t ask, stupid. What do you think I got you here for?’

  Not much sleep tonight, Charlie, I thought. What did Cole Porter write? Just One of Those Things.

  Just one of those things that Piers asked me about was Alice. He was fascinated by the idea of her, despite himself. ‘Has your friend taken his death worm out of the country with him yet?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ We drank expensive coffee from fine porcelain cups in his office. I was afraid that I would break one and lose a month’s pay replacing it. ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘The coroner will record a death by misadventure, and the police record will show that our gallant American ally was formally cautioned for driving injudiciously quickly over a blind summit: that’s a hump in the road. I chose the wording myself: awfully good, don’t you think? Amusing, under the circumstances.’