by Richard Ayre
I carried on with my walk, trying to put her out of my mind, but she stayed with me all the rest of the way and so, cursing myself for my stupidity, the following Sunday I pulled on my best suit and headed off to church.
There were less people there than had attended the Easter service, but space was still tight. A lot more people went to church in those days. I sat at the back and went through the motions of the service. It all meant less than nothing to me.
Grace was there again, sitting at the front. She wore the same blue dress but without the coat covering her I saw more details, of a figure a man would climb over hot coals to get to. I knew I was being stupid but I couldn’t help myself. I think I perhaps craved something after my years of enforced solitude, some sort of contact. Even just someone to talk to. It’s all well and good tearing yourself away from the rest of humanity, but in reality it is a very difficult thing to do. Whatever was wrong with me, however different I was, I was still a man. The last woman I had held was Molly and that had been ten years ago.
I briefly thought back to my time in New York and what had happened to that lovely woman, and then I wondered about Sean, my old companion from the Agnes. What had happened to him? I marvelled at how quickly time seemed to go by.
I was broken from my reverie by the sudden awareness of someone standing beside me. I looked up and saw the woman in the blue dress smiling down at me.
I stood immediately and smiled back at her. She held out a gloved hand and I took it in mine, feeling the warmth of her through it.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I hope you enjoyed the service. I’m Grace Yeo, Mr…?’
‘Deakin,’ I said. ‘Robert Deakin. I live just down the road.’
She smiled at me. ‘You don’t sound like you come from around here. Somewhere in the north?’
‘Originally, yes. Northumberland. Although I’ve lived in a few places since.’
She indicated towards the doors of the church and we walked down the aisle and outside together. Most of the congregation had already left.
‘Where else?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Where else have you lived?’
‘Oh, all over. New York, Paris, Berlin. I seem to have become an accidental wanderer.’
She gave me a look that seemed to let me know she was in on a joke. I forget sometimes how young I look. She must have thought me a liar.
We were outside by now. She gave me her hand again.
‘I hope we’ll see you again next Sunday?’ she asked, her eyebrows raised in a question.
I nodded, non-committedly. ‘We’ll see. But it’s been very nice talking with you, Miss Yeo. Good day.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Deakin.’
I tipped my hat and turned away. And, like a fool, I was smiling to myself.
I began to call on Miss Grace Yeo. I wouldn’t say her father was pleased, but he would have heard the gossip in the town and realised I had a bit of money in the bank. I wasn’t really what you could call gregarious with the population of Aylesford, but people looked at my house and my clothes and the MG PA Four-Seat Tourer I drove and they saw a young, wealthy, man about town. Father Yeo must have been seeing pound signs every time I knocked on the vicarage door. Like any father, I suppose he worried about his daughter’s future and who was going to look after her when he was gone.
I found out quite early on that he really did need to worry about her.
We had been walking out for a few months. It was now June 1937 and the future, if not secure, certainly seemed better than it had a couple of years back. Britain, like just about every other country in the world, was still in trouble financially, but for me that spring and summer was like a warm, golden haze. It was topped off when Grace made it clear one night that she was more than willing to take things a little further than just holding hands.
We had been out in the car, touring around the locale, and had stopped off for lunch and drinks at a nice country pub. I asked her if she wanted a night cap at mine before I took her home and she nodded agreeably.
It was still quite early when we got to my cottage. I poured her a glass of the French wine I imported over every now and then and we sat on the sofa. She giggled.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘You,’ she said. ‘When we first met, you told me you had lived in New York and France and Germany. You mustn’t have been there very long.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
She smirked at me. ‘I don’t have a problem with handsome young men telling me tales every now and then. I quite like it that you were trying to impress me.’
‘I wasn’t trying to impress you,’ I protested. I had been, but it didn’t make it less true.
‘How old are you? she scoffed. ‘Twenty-two, twenty-three? If you were in those places you must have been just a child. Either that or you were only there for a short while.’
I laughed.
‘You wouldn’t believe how old I am.’
I don’t know why I brought it up. I think I was trying to impress her. With what, I don’t know.
‘Come on, then.’
‘I’m almost forty-one.’
She looked at me for a second, and then laughed. She clearly didn’t believe me, and it was the closest I’ve come to ever telling anyone the truth, apart from Madeleine. And Pearl, of course. I forced myself to laugh along.
‘It’s true,’ I insisted. ‘I lived in Montmartre in Paris, in Berlin, and before that I worked for a gangster in New York, delivering illicit alcohol to Speakeasies all over the city.’
Grace laughed even harder at this. The idea seemed completely preposterous to her. Prohibition had ended four years earlier, and the movies based on that time were very popular. I frowned at her, slightly annoyed by her attitude. I got up and went into my study, returning with a photograph. I handed it to her.
It was a picture someone had taken one day outside Mickey’s in Hell’s Kitchen. It showed me and Sean frowning menacingly beside Mickey’s car.
Grace looked hard at it, taking in the fashion of the dresses two women were wearing as they walked past.
‘When was this taken?’
‘About 1924, 25. Something like that.’
She stared at the image of me. I looked exactly the same as I did now. She eventually shook her head and put the photo down.
She had dismissed it. It just wasn’t important to a person like Grace Yeo. She didn’t really care about anyone but herself, as I was to find out soon.
‘Well, I don’t care if you’re forty-one or twenty-one, Mr Deakin. I like you just the way you are.’
She put her head onto my chest and slipped off her shoes, curling her legs onto the sofa. I put my wine down carefully—it was expensive—and turned her face towards me.
I gently unfastened the buttons of her dress and stripped it from her. Her slip came next and I gazed at her naked, magnificent body. She smiled at me, and I smiled back, unfastening my own shirt.
For the first time in almost a decade, I made love to a woman.
XII
1937 turned to 1938 and things really began to deteriorate over in Germany.
In March, the Nazis formed the Anschluss with Austria, tearing up another page of the Versailles peace treaty. Once again the rest of the world, devoid of American strength, let Hitler get away with it. I listened to the radio and worried that things would soon be getting out of hand; but Grace Yeo was constantly taking my mind off world events, and I was happy to let her.
Having sex with Grace was now a very regular, and very enjoyable, event. We would tootle around the countryside, go for lunch, take bracing walks along the river, and then retire to my house to make love in all sorts of weird and wonderful positions. Grace, much to my surprise and pleasure, bought me an illicit copy of the Karma Sutra, and I have to say that book is the one book in my long life which I have studied the most. For a vicar’s daughter she was very experimental.
I was completely happy. I hadn’t th
ought about the Medic in any meaningful way for the best part of a year and I was satiated almost every night. Grace made me content, damn her, and soon the time came when I took her hand, went down on one knee, and asked her to be my wife.
It was a stupid thing to do. I knew it, even then. I was a man unlike any other she would ever meet. Even if it had worked out, how could we have lived out our lives with her getting older and bitterer and me staying young and healthy? It was an impossible dream.
But I was desperate; desperate for a connection to the world. I wanted to be normal; I wanted to be like everyone else. I craved the wonderful ordinariness of marriage and children and hearth and home.
She said yes. We went straight to the vicarage and her father, who had lost his own wife eight years previously, was happy that his daughter would have someone to take over from him once he went off to join his God. He never liked me, Thomas Yeo: he must have known there was something not right with me, but his love for his daughter and his need for her to be protected overrode his feelings. He said he would be honoured to do the wedding ceremony himself.
We went back to my house and celebrated with champagne and the Karma Sutra. I went to sleep that night believing I was a happy man.
But I never married Grace. The war got in the way.
In October of that year, the German army marched into the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. The land had been annexed from Germany after the war and it was another way for Hitler to bring about his promise of unifying the country. War loomed.
Grace was all for it. She had become an avid listener of the news and, when Chamberlain came back from Munich with his piece of paper, she was livid.
‘Hitler must be stopped!’ she shouted at me. ‘He can’t be trusted.’
She was right of course, because in March 1939, the Germans took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain gave Hitler the ultimatum that if he invaded Poland, as everyone now knew he would, then war would begin. But by then it was too late; Hitler simply did not believe him.
Grace and I listened to the broadcast in September as Chamberlain, in a voice as weary as I have ever heard, announced that, once again, Britain was at war with Germany.
I turned the radio off when the broadcast ended, thinking about how different it was to the triumphant, cheering excitement the outbreak of the Great War had brought about. Nobody wanted this. The country couldn’t afford it. It was a total and utter disaster.
Grace turned to me.
‘You have to join up,’ she enthused.
I stared at her. ‘What?’
‘Join up. You have to join up and fight those beastly Nazis. It’s your duty!’
I shook my head, totally bewildered. ‘Grace, I’m forty-three years old. I’m not joining the army for God’s sake.’
She pulled herself away from me, a look of utter loathing on her face. In that face I saw a strange reflection of Jane Godley, and I got my first inkling of what lay beneath her beautiful exterior.
‘Stop saying that! It’s ridiculous. You’re not forty-three. You’re barely twenty-three! Why do you insist on telling me lies?’
‘I’m not telling you lies, Grace. I was born in 1896. I fought in the Great War. I’ve done my bit. I’ve seen one war; I don’t intend to see another.’
Grace stood up, glaring down at me. She exuded loathing. ‘You coward!’ she hissed.
I stared at her in astonishment.
‘You’ve just heard what that madman is doing. Marching his army everywhere he wants. It’s every Englishman’s duty to join up and fight. And here you are telling me you won’t. Telling me you’d let a German Paratrooper come into this very house and have his wicked way with me. Telling me lies so you don’t have to defend me. Coward!’
She screamed this word at me. I stood up and grabbed her arms.
‘Grace, stop it, you’re being ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re saying.’
She yanked her arms free. ‘I know exactly what I’m saying. You are a coward. There. I’ve said it again and I mean it. You won’t fight for your king and country and you won’t fight for me. Well. If you won’t do your duty, I’ll find someone who will!’
With this, she pulled at the engagement ring on her finger and threw it at me. It hit my chest and fell to the floor. I shook my head, dumbfounded by the sudden change in her demeanour and the hatred she now showed me.
I opened my mouth to speak, but she turned and grabbed her coat, storming out of the cottage. The Karma Sutra, which I had carefully turned to my favourite page in expectation of the coming night, fell to the floor beside the ring. The door slammed behind her.
I stood there for a long time, various different emotions raging through me, before slowly sinking to the settee. I picked up my wine and sipped it.
She didn’t have a clue. She had been raised in quiet comfort by wealthy parents and had seen nothing of the reality of war. I had been dragged up in a Northumberland croft and war had forged my very character. It had changed me completely. I suddenly realised the size of the void between us.
The ring winked at me, as if it were laughing at my predicament. And laughing at the choice it knew I was going to take.
I was besotted, you see. I thought I loved Grace Yeo and, if going back to war would mean keeping her close, then that’s what I would have to do. I ran out of the house and down the lane until I caught up with her, telling her what she wanted to hear and pressing the ring back into her unwilling hand. Eventually, she returned to the cottage with me and rewarded me.
As she slept beside me later that evening, I stared at her profile in the moonlight. A terrible reality told me I had made the wrong choice.
*
There were thousands of us crammed onto the beach. We waited; it was all we could do.
The British Expeditionary Force, to which I now belonged, had been sent to France in May 1940. Churchill had become Prime Minister with the fall of Chamberlain and had immediately put things into motion after months of “Phoney War”. I had found myself sent to defend the Maginot Line: a series of huge, concrete fortifications built along the French / German border. However the Germans, with typical Teutonic efficiency, had simply gone around it through a forest to the north and cut us off.
We had been forced to blindly retreat before the massed ranks of tanks and Stukas, finally ending up herded onto the beach at Dunkirk, caught literally between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was, as one young soldier muttered to me as we marched, ‘A complete fuck-up.’
After making up, and making love, with Grace, I had travelled to London to join up. Conscription was already under way, but volunteers were still smiled upon.
I gave a false name to hide my true age, the first of many I would use in my long life. One of the women in the village had a son who had died in childhood twenty years ago, so I simply assumed his identity. No one looked too closely at my story. You have to remember that records then were not as precise as they became later on, and any able-bodied man was not going to be turned away. All I had to do was stay alive so the woman would not get a telegram telling her how sorry the army was for the death of her son, years after he had actually died.
So, it was a twenty-two-year-old named William Taylor who was reluctantly sworn into His Majesty’s Army and took his place on the ship to France.
Up until then the only things the Germans had thrown at us were leaflets, although there were rumours that the SS had machine-gunned a bunch of unarmed prisoners from a Norfolk regiment to death. But in the army there are always rumours; no one really believed it at the time. The Germans wouldn’t do that sort of thing to Englishmen, would they?
I remembered my time in Berlin and the bullying, abusive young men of the SA, pushing and shoving Jewish civilians around, and I wasn’t so sure.
The leaflets had a map, showing us surrounded on the beach head, with the words: ‘British soldiers! Look at the map: it gives your true situation! Your troops are entirely surrounded—stop fighting!’ written on
them.
‘Complete and utter fuck-up,’ muttered the young lad beside me again.
I had to agree. But I reckoned the Germans had fucked up too.
We had been on the beach for a full night and day now, and still they had not come in and wiped us out: which was well within their power to do so as we had no real defences left. I still don’t really know why they halted their advance, and I certainly didn’t know then.
However, we were in a precarious position. If we couldn’t get off that beach, the Germans would eventually move. We would be lucky if we made it to a POW camp and the war would be over for Britain before it had really begun. As I looked around the khaki masses on the sand, I remember believing most of them would soon be dead.
I wondered what would happen to me. Would I be killed too? Could I be killed? What if I was hit by a bomb? What if my body was scattered to the four winds to lay in bloody clumps on the clinging sand? Would I still live, continuing to exist in several hundred pieces of raw meat, or would such a huge trauma end my life?
It had to, surely. I thought about it a lot and I’m not ashamed to say I was frightened by the concept. Not of being killed, but what it might actually take to kill me. As I remembered the terrified face of Doctor Artigue and the wild fury of Mickey Donovan, the thoughts repeated themselves around my brain again and again and again.
Would I die? Could I?
And then the next morning, like a gift from the gods, ships began to appear on the horizon. Troop carriers, yes, but also trawlers, schooners, yachts and ferries, all sorts of different vessels. They came to our rescue, rallied by frantic requests for help at home, and the men around me cheered, waving their helmets over their heads at the approaching armada.
