Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  A sergeant barked orders. The firing squad aimed at the sky and a broken volley banged like a string of firecrackers. The pallbearers came forward and took the weight of the coffin on canvas slings. The wooden slats were removed. Cattermole drew his sword and saluted. They lowered the coffin into the grave until little of the slings was left to pay out. The coffin, however, was still hanging a couple of feet from the bottom. The pallbearers glanced at the sergeant. He signaled to keep lowering. They stooped and leaned forward but the earth at the edge was wet. One of them slipped and let go his end of the sling. The head of the coffin fell with a muddy thud; the other end slid free and crashed to earth. The pallbearers stumbled; one nearly lost his balance altogether. “Sweet Mother of God,” said Flip Moran quietly.

  The pallbearers scrambled back, sweating and ashamed. Cattermole sheathed his sword. He picked up a handful of earth and threw it into the grave. The sergeant barked an order and an airman stepped forward with a bugle. He was halfway through the Last Post and making a good job of it when Reilly trotted toward him. Fitzgerald saw, and refused to believe. Surely someone would call the dog back? But Rex was staring at the sky, Kellaway was inspecting the grave, Skull was polishing his glasses, Flip’s eyes were shut. Reilly took a sniff and quickly pissed on the bugler’s leg. The Last Post wavered, cracked, blared and fell apart. Everyone looked, but by then Reilly had moved away.

  Twenty minutes later the pilots were gathered beside their transport, ready to leave as soon as Rex had finished telling Cattermole, Kellaway and the sergeant what an appalling shambles they’d made of everything.

  “Can’t understand it, sir,” the sergeant said. “I checked them coffin-slings myself. Standard size.”

  “Act of God,” suggested Kellaway.

  “Anyway, my bit went all right, sir,” Cattermole said.

  “In all my years—” Rex began again, when Skull arrived with an angry Frenchman wearing muddy overalls and carrying a shovel.

  “I may be wrong,” Skull said, “but I think this gentleman has a valid complaint. According to him, Starr is in the wrong grave. That particular hole was especially prepared to receive an unusually large farmer, with space reserved for his wife to follow in the fullness of time. Our grave is elsewhere. It’s smaller and not so deep.”

  “You buffoon,” Rex said to Cattermole.

  “Sir, be fair. How was I to know? I simply went where the firing squad was.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you sent us, sir,” the sergeant said. “Remember? I said to you—”

  “Get him shifted,” Rex ordered grimly. “Get him out of the wrong damned hole and into the right damned hole. Do it now. Where was this peasant when we needed him?” he asked Skull.

  “At home, eating his lunch,” Skull said. “He takes rather a dim view of people being buried at lunchtime. Bad form, apparently.”

  “Doubledecker, see,” the sergeant said. “Extra deep. Nothing wrong with the slings.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Rex said. “I don’t want to hear any more. All of you stay here and get it sorted out.” He strode away, calling for his driver.

  They trailed over to the open grave and looked down.

  “Dicky Starr flies again,” the adjutant said.

  Immediately after lunch the squadron assembled in the library, where Rex had a few hard, cold words to say.

  First, about Starr’s death.

  There was absolutely no room in Hornet squadron for tearaways, daredevils or stuntmen. Anyone who was desperate to fly beneath bridges or through tunnels or down coalmines should leave his name at the adjutant’s office, and steps would be taken to find war—work more suited to his talents, such as testing minefields by walking through them with his fingers in his ears.

  Investigations had revealed that other aircraft besides the one flown by Starr had recently been showing an unhealthy interest in the bridge at Thionville.

  If this was prompted by idle curiosity into the underwater performance of the Mk I Hurricane, it was to be hoped that no further experiments would be attempted.

  Apart from the extravagance and waste inflicted upon the British Exchequer, there was the reaction of the French authorities to be considered.

  In future, any airplane approaching Thionville would be shot down by French anti-aircraft guns.

  The frogs were being very snotty, and there was nothing worse than a snotty frog.

  Second, about the Armistice Day Fly-Past.

  The loss of Starr had disrupted training. A replacement pilot was on his way. He would have less than a week in which to learn the drill, slot into the formations, become one of the team. This squadron had a reputation to keep. It was the finest tight-formation outfit in Fighter Command. Bar none.

  What’s more, they would be performing in the presence of a Very Special Personage at the Armistice Day ceremony.

  If anyone made a cock-up he’d find himself towing targets over the North of Scotland for the rest of the war.

  Third, about the funeral.

  It had been an absolute shambles, an insult to the dead, a disgrace to the Service, and a very large black in the annals of the squadron.

  It wouldn’t happen again. Each officer to practice funeral drill with a burial party, including firing squad, bugler and NCO. A dummy coffin would be interred in a simulated grave, repeatedly, until the ceremony was performed perfectly. Skull would coach officers in this duty.

  That was all.

  The pilots scrambled to their feet as Rex and Kellaway walked out. The door shut.

  “All right, who pinched Lord Rex’s teddybear?” Stickwell asked.

  “What d’you mean?” said Cox.

  “Well, he’s got the guts-ache about something, hasn’t he? It’s not just poor old Dicky. I mean, that sort of prang happens. Why blame us?”

  “Maybe someone tore a strip off him,” Gordon suggested. “Maybe he got a bollocking from Baggy Bletchley or someone.”

  “Or maybe you simply got what was coming to you,” Barton said. “The CO’s only doing his job.”

  Moran nodded soberly; too soberly. “I go along with Fanny,” he said. “After all, he was like that once.”

  Barton fiddled with the cotton wool plugs in his ears, and winced.

  “If you ask me, I think he’s got his little chopper out,” Miller said. “He’s looking for somebody to chop.”

  “I don’t see why,” Cox said.

  “He’s fed up because we haven’t got a score,” Cattermole said. “Every other squadron in France has bagged a Jerry, but not us. He wants blood. Personally I don’t blame him. It’s no fun being CO unless you can wallow in gore occasionally, is it? If we don’t get a Jerry soon, I bet you a fiver that Lord Rex chops somebody.” He closed his eyes and smiled.

  “But that’s not fair,” Fitzgerald said.

  “The question is: who?” Cattermole said.

  “Whom,” Cox muttered.

  “I think,” Cattermole said, his eyes still closed, “it’ll be Pip.”

  They all looked at Patterson, who was picking at a tiny wart that had developed on his left thumb. He stared back, guiltily. “What?” he said.

  “Why?” Moran asked Cattermole.

  “Because he bleeds so easily,” Cattermole said. “Pip is an easy bleeder, aren’t you Pip? Ideal for chopping.”

  “Oh, shut up.” Patterson sucked his thumb and wished, as he’d been wishing all day, that his head would stop throbbing. “If I get chopped,” he said sourly, “I’ll damn well take you with me.” He knew that didn’t make sense, but he didn’t care. He’d made his wart bleed. He didn’t care about that either.

  An hour later, Rex signed something, gave it back to the adjutant, and stood up with relief. At last his desk was bare. “Bumf, bumf, bumf,” he said. “This isn’t a war, it’s a paperchase. I bet the German Air Force hasn’t got to wade through endless bumf.” He strolled to the window and looked down. A mock grave had been dug at the edge of the lawn. Skull, Mother Cox, a sergeant
and twenty airmen were down there, getting ready for burial practice. “Always assuming there is a German Air Force,” he said.

  “True, sir.” Kellaway was not really listening. He was still checking through the correspondence, reports, forms, memos, returns, summaries. “Have you written to Starr’s parents?”

  “Yes and no. I’ve done a draft.” Rex took a sheet of paper from a desk drawer and re-read it. Outside, there came the distant bark of orders followed by the unhurried crunch of boots slow-marching on gravel. “This won’t do,” Rex said firmly. “It won’t do at all.” He handed the draft to Kellaway. “I can’t possibly tell them the truth, but that simply sounds mysterious.”

  “Yes. The bit about ‘exceptionally harzardous circumstances.’ And yet no mention of the enemy.”

  “Makes him sound like a spy.”

  There was a long silence while they reviewed the problem.

  “His parents are what, again?” Rex asked.

  “Minister. The Rev. and Mrs. Starr, somewhere in Dorset.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  A volley of blanks was fired, only slightly raggedly.

  “Tell you what we used to do in the last show,” Kellaway said. “If a chap played silly-buggers and wrote himself off, his CO used to inform the parents that he’d given his life in the manner his comrades had learned to expect of him.”

  “Hmm.” Rex scribbled that down and looked at it.

  “If you like, you can always chuck in the old line about ‘conduct above and beyond the call of duty,’” Kellaway suggested. “I mean, that’s true enough.”

  Rex nodded and wrote. Sweetly and cleanly, the notes of the Last Post arced across the afternoon like a beautiful, effortless bird, swooping and climbing.

  “And it wouldn’t be wrong to say he’ll be sorely missed,” Kellaway added. “Especially as he hadn’t paid his last month’s mess bill.”

  Rex took the bill and glanced at the bottom figure. “You should have told me,” he said. “I don’t like officers getting into debt. It’s untidy.”

  “Dicky didn’t have much choice, I’m afraid. I found his bank statements when I cleared out his room. Overdrawn, poor little blighter. Stiff letter from the bank manager.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence.”

  Rex sat down, took a checkbook from his desk, wrote two checks, and gave them to the adjutant.

  “That’s not absolutely necessary, you know,” Kellaway said. “There’s the RAF Benevolent Fund and various other—”

  “It’s a squadron affair,” Rex said crisply. “Let’s keep it in the squadron.”

  Flip Moran found Pip Patterson in one of the bathrooms, having a shower. He was standing quite still, propped against the tile wall, his legs braced, his head and shoulders pounded by the spray.

  “You’re on duty,” Moran said. “Blue Section’s at available.”

  “Okay.” Patterson didn’t move.

  Moran spread a towel on a radiator and sat on it. “What was all that about, in the library? If I didn’t know you were a hardened, ruthless fighting-man I’d have said you were a bit upset about something.”

  Patterson let the streaming water erase all expression from his face.

  Moran shifted: the radiator was getting uncomfortable. “That was an awful waste, what happened to Dicky Starr,” he remarked.

  Patterson curled his toes.

  “Sometimes it’s a terrible burden, being a thick Irishman,” said Moran. “The world makes no sense at all. D’you ever find that?”

  Patterson held his face to the spray, and flinched as the tiny jets battered him.

  Moran got up and turned off the shower. He tossed the warm towel to Patterson. “Come away from there before you’re drowned entirely,” he said, and went out.

  “Apple,” said Flash Gordon, chewing.

  He was sitting in the Ligiers’ kitchen, blindfolded with one of Nicole’s silk scarves. Grandmother Ligier was dozing by the fire.

  “You are sure?” Nicole asked.

  “Absolutely.” He swallowed. “I know an apple when I eat one.”

  “No you don’t,” she said. She pulled off his blindfold and showed him an apple, intact, and a pear with a piece cut from it. “You ate a piece of pear. See?”

  “Well I’m damned.” He took the apple and smiled in wonderment. “How the dickens did you do that?”

  “Oh, it is simple. Smell is sometimes stronger than taste. I put the apple under your nose and then I put a bit of pear in your mouth. Old trick.”

  “That’s absolutely amazing.” Gordon stretched his legs and propped his elbow on the table while he sniffed the apple. “D’you know any more like that?”

  “No.” She wound the scarf in and out of her fingers. “Now I think I have told you everything I know about the human body.”

  “What a pity.” He polished the apple on his sleeve and made it shine a deep, waxy red. “I suppose I ought to be more careful when it comes to lovely ladies and apples,” he said lazily. This was their sixth meeting and he was fairly relaxed. “Didn’t some chap get into trouble that way a long time ago?”

  She watched him and said nothing. He had such a smooth face it was hard to imagine him shaving. His nose was snub and his lower lip was very full and strong. When he noticed her silence he glanced at her, and he cocked one eyebrow in a curiously individual way, half-challenging, half-uncertain, that she found touching. What he saw when he glanced made him keep on looking. Her eyes were bright and there was something in her expression he had never seen before. Curiosity? Mischief? Impatience? He put down the apple and straightened his tie. “He probably ate a different kind of apple,” he said. “All a fairy-tale, anyway. Personally I could never understand why—”

  “Come with me.” She stood up.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the summerhouse in the garden.”

  “Oh.” He got his coat. “Won’t it be jolly chilly?”

  “Yes.” She opened a chest and took out four blankets and a towel. She gave him the blankets. “But not for long.” She picked up a flashlight and a half-full bottle of red wine and went out by the back door.

  Flash Gordon hesitated, looking from the open door to the blankets to the apple to the fire alongside which the old lady snoozed. Its flames jumped in the draft, “Crikey,” he said thoughtfully, and went out, shutting the door behind him.

  “Well, that was a first-class grade-A disaster,” Fitz Fitzgerald said. He wanted to sound nonchalant or indifferent but he could hear the bitterness grating in his voice.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Mary Blandin said. “You mustn’t exaggerate, my love.” She began poking the fire to make it blaze.

  “I seem to have exaggerated my love. Or something.” He was slumped in a chair by the dinnertable, which had not yet been cleared. “Bloody stinking hell,” he muttered. He reached for the wine-bottle and filled his glass to the brim.

  “Don’t be broody.” She sat opposite him and cut herself a slice of cheese. “And don’t swig that wine. It’s a very good Traminer and not cheap. If you want to get drunk, go and buy a couple of liters of ordinaire.”

  “Thanks for your sympathy,” he mumbled. But he put down his glass.

  “Oh, sympathy, sympathy! What good’s sympathy?” There was no annoyance in her voice: just a touch of brisk, good-humored impatience. “All it does is feed your self-pity, and since there’s no earthly reason for you to feel sorry for yourself I’m not going to encourage anything of that sort. Besides, it doesn’t suit you.”

  “All right.” Fitz hunched his shoulders and stuck his jaw out. “What d’you want me to do? Tell jokes?”

  “Yes, please. If they’re really funny.”

  She drank a little of his wine while he glowered at the cheese. “Don’t know any,” he said.

  “Fitz, you’re a fraud. You’re a failure and a phony.”

  “Wait a minute. Just remembered.” He chewed on a knuckle for
a moment. “About the bloke who won an elephant in a raffle.”

  “Get on with it, then.”

  “Well, his friend offered to train it.” Fitz spoke flatly, almost curtly. “He said he could teach it to sit down. This chap said okay, so his friend went over and gave the elephant the most almighty kick in the balls, and sure enough it sat down.”

  “Education is a wonderful thing.”

  “Yes. Well, the chap didn’t think so. He asked his friend if he couldn’t teach it something without being cruel. His friend said yes, he could teach it to shake its head. So he went over to the elephant and whispered in its ear: ‘D’you want another kick in the balls?’ And the elephant shook its head.” Fitz swung his head slowly, ponderously and gloomily.

  Mary laughed. “That’s a rotten joke, Fitz.”

  “All right, you tell one.”

  “Ladies don’t tell jokes.”

  “Who said you’re a lady?” He watched her top up their glass. “Come to that, who said I’m a man?”

  She came around the table, stood behind him and put her arms around his neck. “You’re not the first, you know,” she said. “It often happens. Just don’t worry about it. Nature knows best. It’s not automatic. It’s not like putting your penny in a slot machine and always getting a bar of chocolate.” Her hands slipped inside his unbuttoned shirt.

  “I once lost a penny in a slot machine on Victoria station,” Fitz said, staring into space.

  “There you are, then.”

  “Perfectly good penny. No chocolate. Bloody swindle.”

  She kissed his ear.

  “Fruit-and-nut,” he said. “Platform three.”

  “Goodness me,” she whispered. “It must have made a very deep impression.” Fitz stood up, shoved the chair aside, and embraced her. A couple of rogue tears leaked from his eyes; he was glad she could not see them. “Talking of making deep impressions,” she said after a moment, and gently rocked her hips.

  “I know.” Fitz sighed. “God moves in a mysterious way.”