‘Did you ever try to find the Colonel’s address?’
She did not reply at first. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Ever since I’ve been reading about the trial and seen it on tele I’ve been so worried. I thought it’d come out.’
‘Can you remember what Colonel Trelawney wrote when the money first came?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she replied. ‘Mum kept his letter. I have it here.’
She put her hand into her bag, a large cloth-covered bag, and brought out a crumpled single sheet of light blue paper and handed it to him. It was an air-letter form which folded and was stuck with gum to make an envelope. Harold put on his glasses and began to read the faded ink.
North Africa. May 1943.
Dear Mrs Willis,
By now you will have been officially notified of the tragic death in action of your husband, who was killed on Bou Arraka, Tunisia, on April 17th last.
I served with your husband three years ago in France and I was with him when he died fighting gallantly by my side here in North Africa. He was a very brave man, an outstanding non-commissioned officer whose loss all of us mourn. I considered him a friend.
From talking to your husband when he was alive I know something of your circumstances and, as your husband and I were comrades, and as a token of my esteem for him, I hope you will accept some arrangements which I am making to help you and your family.
Your husband had told me you keep the post office at Radley St Philip, so I am arranging that a monthly sum will be sent to you there to supplement the pension you will receive and to help you and your family during the difficult years which must lie ahead for you and your children.
Yours sincerely,
David Trelawney.
Harold turned, over the single sheet. He saw it was addressed to Mrs Jack Willis, The Post Office, Radley St Philip, Somerset, England. It was postmarked Field Post Office, M.E.F. and dated May 23rd 1943. On its back, where ‘Sender’s Name’ was printed, was typed ‘Major D. Trelawney, D.S.O, M.C., PO Box No. 1658, Middle East Forces’.
Harold looked up at the woman sitting on the other side of the tea-table and then handed the letter back to her.
‘I’ve been so worried by what I did. I thought some of his family might be at the court and I came to explain what I’d done. But when I asked at the court, no-one knew. They said no-one was there. Then I saw you, and I knew you were something to do with it. That’s why I talked to you.’
She paused and took out a small handkerchief. ‘I needed the money,’ she added, ‘but I know I shouldn’t’ve taken it. Not after Mum was dead.’
Harold looked at her worn, tired face. ‘You mustn’t worry about what you did,’ he said. ‘In his letter Colonel Trelawney said that the money was to help your mother and her family, and you’re one of the family. Of course you should’ve tried to find the Colonel when she died, but his letter spoke of the family. You said there was only you and your elder brother?’
‘Yes, Billy.’
‘Did he have any of the money that came after your mother’s death?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not after what he’d done. I needed it. He didn’t.’
‘Then you should forget all about it. But, tell me, when did the monthly payments cease?’
‘In May last year.’
May of last year. That was when Jonathan’s bank statements showed that the payments of £500 each month had ended. He looked at his watch. ‘How are you getting home?’ he asked.
‘There’s a train at seven. Then I’ll get the last bus from Bath. Are you sure I should do nothing?’
‘Quite sure. And you’re not to worry any more.’
He called for the bill. ‘My advice is, forget about the money. The Colonel is dead, and the money was for your mother and for her family, in remembrance of your father. You’re a member of the family the Colonel referred to. You needed it. So you forget all about it.’
A touch of colour had come into her faded cheeks. She stretched out her hand and put it on his. Embarrassed, he pulled his away.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘Are you sure I should do nothing?’ She smiled, and Harold again thought of Margaret.
‘Quite sure,’ he said. ‘It’s all over and done with. The Colonel’s dead. The money has not been missed. It was being paid, as the letter said, as a token of appreciation of your father. So a few extra months after your mother’s death with you needing it for your daughter, that doesn’t signify. Go home and forget about it.’
She put away her handkerchief. ‘Now, come along,’ he said briskly, summoning the waitress. ‘We’ll get my car and I’ll drop you at the station. You’ll be early but I have someone I must see.’
The waitress watched them leave. Such an odd couple, she thought, he so tall and angular with his wild hair over his collar, and she so small and neat.
20
‘WE’LL talk about it tomorrow,’ Jonathan said in the hall of Pembroke House. ‘I need to rest tonight.’
‘You had no lunch,’ Mary said. ‘You must have some supper. I’ll get Mason to bring you something later.’
‘No, my dear. I’m not hungry. We’ll lunch together tomorrow.’
Jonathan shut the door of his apartment.
‘I’ve never understood him,’ James grumbled as he followed Mary to their drawing-room. ‘He puts all of us through the wringer and when it’s over he’s as cool as he was when it all began.’
‘He’s exhausted. He did very well in the court,’ Mary said.
‘He showed a spot of feeling – for once. I didn’t know he had it in him.’
‘He’s always been very clever.’
‘Too clever for me,’ her husband replied.
Jonathan went into the bedroom and hung up his overcoat. In the bathroom, as he washed and dried his hands, he looked at himself in the looking-glass and smiled – an old man smiling at his own image.
In the drawing-room the curtains were drawn and the fire was blazing. Mason had seen to that. James had telephoned from the car, so they were in the hall to welcome him home – Mason, his wife, Tom the gardener, and Mrs Thorn the cleaner from the village. Jonathan had smiled at them, his slow, gentle smile, taking each by the hand but saying nothing.
In his chair he stared into the fire, no longer smiling. After a while he got up and went to his desk. He opened one of the small drawers, pressed the side slightly, closed it and, touching one of the ornamented wooden panels at the front, slid it to one side and drew out a large envelope. He went back to his chair and took from the envelope a sheaf of letters, then a small diary. At last, he thought, it really is over. Now is the time to be rid of this baggage of the past. It might be found after his death and it would matter to James. In the car driving home from the court James had said, ‘Now we must make a real fuss. Who do you know in the House or in Whitehall we can get to take it up?’
Lying back with his eyes still closed, Jonathan had said, ‘No, James. Let it be. It’s over now. I’m too old. Let it be.’
So why keep these pieces of paper, and the diary? He looked at the letter on the top of the bundle in the handwriting he knew so well, and then placed the bundle carefully on the table beside him, keeping in his hand only the old, battered diary, its cover torn and stained. He didn’t really need it to remember. It was all etched on his memory, those few weeks which had haunted him for fifty years, those days which were never long out of his thoughts and never out of his dreams.
His name was on the flyleaf. Captain Jonathan Playfair. And underneath, in his handwriting, ‘Campaign in North Africa, 1943’. In fading pencil, scribbled on the small pages, it was all there. Except what mattered, what had happened in the battle.
He turned the pages until he came to the month of March. For a time he studied the entries for that month, then skipped forward until he came to late in May. From there on he read steadily the short, factual entries which had been written later, when he was able to write again, lying in the tents of the dressi
ng stations as he had been moved from hospital to hospital.
‘Brought down on a stretcher from the hilltop,’ he read. ‘Dumped on a carrier and driven to where could be transferred to an ambulance. Jolted down the track to the Field Dressing Station.’ A day later: ‘Main Dressing Station. First sight of a woman, a nurse in khaki shirt and slacks.’
And so it went on, the record of the dressing stations and the hospitals, from Medjez through Bone to the Base Hospital in Algiers. In the diary for one day, or rather night, there was scribbled the record of the nightmare, the dream of the body falling with the bullet-hole in the centre of the forehead. He wondered now how he had risked writing that.
Several weeks further on came the note of David’s visit to the Base Hospital – David, the front of his forage cap high like that of General Alexander, the commander-in-chief, his canvas trousers smartly pressed and the new red and blue strip of the Distinguished Service Order sewed on to his freshly laundered bush-shirt next to the blue and white of his Military Cross. But there was no record of what he said, for David had come to tell what officially he had reported. Nor was there any of what they had agreed would be done once Jonathan was back in England.
A few days after that came the record of Colonel Phillip coming to say goodbye, then fuller notes about the trip home, the white hospital ship steaming through the Straits of Gibralter into the Atlantic with all its lights blazing, while those on board knew they were being watched and tracked by the periscopes of the U-boats which never attacked them. The entries ceased at the end of June.
Jonathan turned back the pages until he came again to March. Tonight, for the last time, he would start at the beginning and remember, day by day, hour by hour. Then he would burn it.
March 21st 1943. That was when it began, the night he had brought up the battalion transport to meet the infantry companies which had been ferried up by sea the night before. The rain and sleet had ceased, he remembered, as the convoy wound its way along the twisting road through the mountains. It had been bitterly cold, so cold that every hour he called a halt and ordered the drivers to run around their trucks and flap their arms to get their circulations going. On the horizon they could see the flashes in the sky from the gunfire they were unable to hear above the noise of the engines of their vehicles. That was where they were heading, to where the battalion was waiting for their heavy gear now stowed in the line of trucks moving across the mountain range towards the plain and the front line.
* * *
In the comfort of his warm room Jonathan could still remember the bitterness of the cold of that night. He saw himself as he was then, in his steel helmet, wrapped in his greatcoat with the webbing equipment buckled around it, his map spread on his knees, a torch in one hand, seated in the lead bren-gun carrier, a small, tracked vehicle with an open top. Beside him sat the driver, who was obliged to haul on the wheel to get the tracks to respond as the carrier, the first of three, led the lorries round the hairpin bends where the mountainside fell sheer from the edge of the road which was marked only roughly by stones. In the back sat the gunner, crouched behind the bren gun on its mount. Every so often the gunner and the driver changed places. Behind them, interspersed by two other groups of three carriers, stretched the line of three-ton lorries and fifteen-hundredweight trucks with only narrow slits of light coming from their shaded headlights to help them see the road.
One of the motorcyclists who all night fussed noisily up and down the line of vehicles had appeared beside the lead carrier, flagging it down. The convoy slowed and halted.
‘Headquarters Company’s truck at the rear of the column has gone, sir.’
Jonathan, perched on the pillion, had been taken back down the line of now stationary vehicles to where the truck, the last in the convoy before the two tracked carriers which brought up the rear, had plunged off the road. He joined the group on the edge of the road. The truck had exploded halfway down the mountainside. Jonathan ordered two men down, ropes around their waists. When they re-appeared they said there was no sign of either the driver or his companion.
They could not afford to wait. Jonathan had to get the convoy to the shelter of the forward area before the first light and the road ahead lay through what was known as Messerschmitt Alley, where the Messerschmitt 109s from Tunis machine-gunned the slow-moving convoys if they emerged in daylight from the mountains into the stretch of shelterless road. If he did not get the convoy through the Alley before dawn the battalion might see little of the gear for which they were waiting so anxiously.
‘We have to get on,’ he had said, and was taken back to the head of the column, leaving the remains of the truck burning on the mountainside.
Two hours later the motorcyclist was back again.
‘What is it this time?’ Jonathan shouted.
‘Number Three Company’s truck, Major Trelawney’s. It’s over the edge of the road, sir.’
‘Gone?’
‘No, sir, she’s hanging on, just. The front wheels are over the edge. The column has halted. The rear carriers are trying to pull her back on to the road. Sergeant Willis is there.’
Jonathan lowered the diary to his lap. Willis. That was when the name first appeared.
When he had been taken back to the truck he saw they had hauled it back on to the road. Sergeant Willis was supervising the removal of the hawser from the truck’s rear axle.
Jonathan could see him now, his blunt, pleasant features and ruddy complexion, the Somerset farmer’s son with the broad forehead under the rim of the steel helmet pushed back on his head.
‘What’s the damage?’ Jonathan had asked. ‘Will it be able to move?’
‘They’re checking the front axle,’ Sergeant Willis replied. ‘The driver must have gone to sleep. Dozy idle man!’
Sergeant Willis had experience. He’d seen action in France as a corporal in David Trelawney’s platoon at Dunkirk three years before, and he had been bitterly disappointed that he’d not been transferred into Major Trelawney’s company when David had returned to the battalion from Special Forces just before the battalion had sailed from the Clyde. But he had been told he was too useful with the carriers under the Carrier Platoon commander, Captain Playfair, and his transfer was refused.
Now he left Jonathan and went to the front of the truck, where the driver was lying underneath the chassis, inspecting the front axle with a torch. ‘What damage have you done to her?’ he said.
‘She’s all right, Sarge,’ Jonathan heard the driver reply. ‘She’ll go all right, now we’ve got her back on the road.’
‘Bloody lucky for you, my lad.’
Jonathan was looking back at the head of the column, to the sky above the mountains, which was lit every now and then by the flashes from the guns. They must get going, he thought.
‘Get back into the cab and start her up,’ Willis ordered. When the driver had moved the truck a few yards up the road he leaned out of the cab and shouted cheerily, ‘She’s fine, Sarge.’
‘Then stay awake and keep your eyes open,’ Sergeant Willis growled. The driver grinned.
‘We’ve got to press on,’ said Jonathan. ‘See that the column closes up.’
He waved up the motorcyclist. David’s luck, as always, had held. David’s truck had been saved.
Jonathan, too, would have liked a transfer when he had heard that David Trelawney had replaced one of the company commanders who had been struck down with polio when the battalion was entraining for Scotland to board the troopship to take them to Africa, and to battle. But Jonathan knew that at such a time he couldn’t ask for a transfer just because he didn’t want to serve in the same outfit with the man who had fathered a child on the girl he loved. So he had kept silent, and out of David’s way. Only Rory, second-in-command of No. 1 Company, knew what he felt.
He gave the command for the convoy to move off. There was just enough time to clear Messerschmitt Alley before daylight.
* * *
The faces, even the voices, were
still so vivid. Soon many would be dead. The survivors were now as old as he. For a time after the war he used to go to the reunions, when, after the years passed, as he entered the room stout, bald-headed figures greeted him – and behind the middle-aged, soon to be old, masks he saw only the confident young faces in all the splendour of youth. Then, after some years, he had given up attending.
* * *
When he had reported, the commanding officer, Colonel Philip Hartley, was in his headquarters, a farmhouse, or what remained of it, a near-ruin, heavily scarred by shell and bullet marks, nestling against the reverse side of a low ridge of hills. During the daylight hours shells from the German guns landed with a crump on the track and fields behind. They made a regular ‘strafe’ at 1600 hours, the English teatime, which showed, as Colonel Hartley said, the Boche sense of humour.
He was a plump, fresh-faced man in his mid-thirties with a fair, wispy moustache, a far more formidable personality and commander than he appeared. He had seen action in France in 1940 and was the only officer with battle experience, save for one other – David Trelawney, who after France had left the battalion and gone to fight with the Commandos.
For the next two weeks they lived in the holes they had dug on the reverse slopes of the hill and amid the ruins of the one remaining barn, moving up on to the crest each dawn. At night they sent out patrols of about half a dozen men under a subaltern to probe the enemy line. Not all returned. One who didn’t was Timms, the Intelligence Officer, and Colonel Philip, as he was always known in the battalion, had appointed Jonathan to replace him. A subaltern from No. 1 Company took over the carriers.
A week later had come the orders for the battle they had been expecting. It began, for them, with a night march in extended order under cover of a massive barrage. They marched across flat, untilled fields comparatively unharmed by the few enemy shells which fell spasmodically among them, until they reached another ridge of hills on the flank of those they had held before. As Jonathan marched with Battalion HQ alongside the commanding officer, he looked up at the stars and back at the flashes of their own guns which were pounding the hills ahead of them. This is what all the years of training have been about, he had thought at the time. He had often wondered if when the time came he would be frightened, but now, as enemy shells landed beyond and among them, he had felt no fear. Indeed he felt as though he were an observer, as though he were watching what was happening to someone else.
Indictment for Murder Page 25
