The Professionals

by Max Hennessy

  ‘How’s Edith?’ I asked.

  Sometimes I felt that Edith belonged to a different world now. She’d married a doctor from Norwich after my brother had been killed.

  He grinned. ‘Expecting,’ he said.

  ‘Oh? I’m glad.’

  ‘Her husband’s in France now. Base hospital. At least he ought to be safe there unless one of these damned Zeppelins drops a bomb. Nasty things, Zeppelins.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘One shot at me the other night. Hit me too. Or at least, my machine.’

  ‘It did? Are you up there after them?’

  ‘When we get a chance.’

  ‘They’re making a mess of London, I hear.’

  ‘Not so I’ve noticed,’ I said. ‘It looked all right as I passed through.’

  It was his turn to look surprised. ‘I thought they were,’ he said.

  ‘Newspaper talk.’

  ‘They killed thirteen people in King’s Lynn last year.’

  I shrugged. It showed the gulf that existed between us these days. I felt like saying ‘They killed thousands and thousands on the Somme,’ but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have been fair, and I noticed he looked older and more tired these days. Since the war, the days of being a gentleman farmer were over. He had to do the work himself now that his manager and his men had disappeared into the army.

  ‘The German High Seas Fleet bombarded Lowestoft,’ he went on. ‘Some time back. Did you hear? Knocked down a few houses on the front, and hit the pier and a convalescent home. Two men, and a woman and a child killed. One shell landed in Oulton Broad two miles away.’

  He also seemed to sense that we were different and was trying to reach me by giving me an account of his war. His was a trivial affair, though, and he knew it, but it gave him a sense of belonging to the vast tragedy that was taking place in France.

  There seemed to be no point in hanging around so I rode slowly home via the village in the hope of seeing someone I knew. Leave was always a bit of an anticlimax because everybody of my own age was in one of the services or working.

  As I passed the station, I noticed the signal was down and heard the thin whistle of a train approaching. I glanced at the clock and saw it was the afternoon slow in from Norwich and wondered if Jane was on it. I decided to wait and went into the village shop to buy a newspaper.

  ‘Hello, Master Martin,’ the old woman behind the counter said. ‘Back on leave again?’

  I didn’t know where she got the ‘again’ from. I wasn’t home all that often.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Home again.’

  ‘Shooting at them Zeppelins?’

  ‘Trying to.’

  It was the usual cheerful meaningless banter that went on between all those at home and all those who came from France. For the most part, though, it was harmless and no one took offence at it.

  I glanced at the newspaper in the doorway while I waited for the train to arrive. It contained the usual rubbish hailing the Somme as a major break-through, and there was no mention of the enormous numbers of casualties, only a lot about what had been achieved. It listed the villages which had been captured and enumerated the prisoners, but it didn’t mention that the villages were only a mile or two beyond the line. Considering the lives lost, they seemed a pretty poor return, and I decided that the newspapers knew nothing at all of what was happening and were making up a lot of what they printed.

  As I came out of the shop, a woman I didn’t know stopped me. I’d never seen her before, though her face seemed vaguely familiar, and I guessed she was one of the wealthy people from London who’d hurriedly bought houses in the area to get away from the strict rationing of the city to a place where they could buy country eggs, milk and butter, and where they were safe from the Zeppelins. She was a large woman with pince-nez spectacles and a hat with a feather in it that might have looked fine in Bloomsbury but looked as much in place in the middle of Fynling as a cow with a wooden leg.

  ‘Young man!’ she said.

  I looked up from the newspaper.

  ‘I haven’t seen you around here before,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t been around here,’ I said as politely as I could. ‘At least not for a while.’

  ‘My nephew,’ she went on loudly, ‘is in the army.’

  Obviously, I thought, her nephew was as stupid as I was.

  ‘On the staff of General Horne.’

  Clearly he wasn’t that stupid but I couldn’t imagine what business of mine it was.

  ‘He’s only twenty-three,’ she went on ‘and he’s a captain,’ and I decided her nephew was luckier than most and wondered who’d pulled the strings for him.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  Again I couldn’t imagine what business of hers it was but I was still caught a little unawares and I told her.

  ‘Going on for nineteen,’ I said, stretching it a little.

  ‘You’re not in uniform.’

  ‘No.’ I was just going to tell her why when she pressed on, ploughing over me like a ship in full sail.

  ‘I also have a nephew of twenty-two,’ she said. ‘He has joined the Flying Corps. Most young men of nearly nineteen are in the Services.’

  It suddenly dawned on me what she was getting at. She was the sort of woman who talked glibly of ‘the field of honour’ and ‘our noble allies’ and ‘We will not tolerate the cry of “Peace” until the Hun has been put where he belongs’, the sort of childless woman who could happily write to the newspapers to tell other women how to lose an only son without too much heart-searching, and liked to think of British soldiers chasing the Germans round their trenches with the cheerful glint of battle in their eyes as if they were ratting in an allotment. It made me squirm.

  I was just going to tell her exactly what I was doing there when she thrust an envelope in my hand.

  ‘It’s quite obvious,’ she said, ‘you are a great deal in need of encouragement.’

  As she swept away, I stared down at the envelope and as I opened it I saw it contained a white feather. I felt my face going red and the fury boiling up inside, but she had disappeared now into a shop further down the street and I stood holding the envelope, wondering whether I had the courage to go after her and throw it in her stupid face.

  I was still staring at it when I heard Jane’s voice. The train had arrived while I’d been talking and she was running across the road towards me from the station. I turned and she flung her arms round me and hugged me as I swung her off her feet.

  ‘You didn’t say you were coming home!’ she said excitedly, her eyes shining.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I grinned. ‘I just managed to snatch a week-end.’

  ‘It’s lovely to see you. What’s the matter though? You were looking as though you were wanting to murder someone.’

  The smile died. ‘I was,’ I said. I opened my hand and showed her the white feather. ‘I’ve just had that given to me.’

  ‘You?’ She stared, her face growing angry. ‘But who…?’ She stopped. ‘Oh, no, don’t say that stupid woman’s been at it again.’

  ‘What stupid woman?’

  ‘Catlow-Hope’s her name. Gosh, she’s a bit out of date, isn’t she? That sort of thing stopped when conscription came in. Her husband’s some sort of importer in London. They’ve taken a house here and she’s been making a nuisance of herself all round the district.’ She began to giggle. ‘Fancy, though! You! Of all people!’

  It didn’t seem all that funny to me, but her laughter was infectious, and I laughed with her.

  ‘She always picks the wrong men,’ she giggled. ‘Always.’

  ‘She told me her nephew was on the staff of General Horne.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. He’s an awful little toad. They all are. She’s got several and they’re all as bad.’ She frowned. ‘I’ll see that she learns who you are.’

  ‘Oh, blow the white feather!’ I said. ‘It’s not that important. It’s much better to talk about you. What are we going to do for
the week-end?’

  She frowned. It was her father all over again and it was so unexpected it was like a smack in the face. She recovered quickly, however. ‘It’s too late in the year to sail,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing. We can always walk, though.’

  I didn’t push the matter but I wondered why for the first time she wasn’t eager to spend her time with me. ‘How’re you getting home?’ I asked.

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘I’ve got a bike here. You can get on the cross-bar if you like. You’ve done it before.’

  ‘I was less well padded behind then, too.’ She smiled and as I brought the bicycle across she lifted herself on.

  We talked as I pedalled and I asked her how her job was going.

  ‘Oh, all right.’ She didn’t seem too sure. ‘Helping a solicitor doesn’t seem a very positive way of pushing the war along.’

  ‘I should forget the war if I were you,’ I suggested. ‘Just be around to look spiffing when warriors like me come home. That’s the best war effort I can think of.’

  She was silent for a moment, clutching her parcels and balancing on the cross-bar, and I saw she was frowning.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’

  She laughed but it sounded a little forced to me. ‘It’s the war, perhaps,’ she said. ‘It gives you the pip occasionally. Everybody disappearing and all that.’

  After a couple of miles I came to the conclusion she was heavier than I’d thought and decided I needed a rest, and we stopped on a stone bridge across one of the dykes and sat on the parapet. I took out a packet of cigarettes without thinking and offered her one. She took it and I lit my own and offered the light to her. Then it dawned on me what she’d done.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  The match burned my fingers, and I threw it away. ‘When the hell did you start smoking?’ I said.

  She stared at me unperturbed. ‘About the time you started swearing, I expect,’ she said. ‘When the war started.’ Her face became a little sad. ‘Or perhaps after that – when people began to get killed. Did you know Tommy Colney was dead?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know when. On the Somme. Arthur Stokes, too. And Henry Benson came home wounded.’

  The good humour I’d begun to recover disappeared again. I didn’t like the way people in England dwelt on this sort of thing. It made the war an ugly personal thing that involved me. It was much better to do what we did on a squadron and pretend it hadn’t happened. Whenever there was an empty chair in the mess we always all politely ignored it as if it weren’t there and the next night when it was filled by a replacement everything came all right again.

  There was an enormous quality of sadness about her, however, that even I could feel, the everlasting female grieving over male stupidity. ‘It’s a horrid war,’ she said. She took the matches from me and lit her cigarette with such aplomb and skill I felt a little boy in front of her.

  As she blew out the smoke, she managed a big smile that seemed a little unreal. ‘How about you?’ she said. ‘Got a girl yet?’

  ‘Only you. Who else’d have me?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘With a face like mine?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with your face that I can see,’ she said. ‘It’s a good face. An honest face.’

  ‘Even if not too clever.’

  ‘Sometimes it even looks clever.’

  ‘Too many knobs and bumps on it to be good-looking, though,’ I said, hoping she’d tell me it wasn’t like that at all.

  She didn’t, though. She was far too honest to flatter. ‘They give it character,’ she said.

  ‘But not beauty.’

  She gave a little frown. ‘Martin Falconer,’ she said, and the way it came out made me feel about fifteen. ‘You’ve got to stop running yourself down in this way. You make yourself out to be stupid, ugly and clumsy. You’re nothing of the sort. You’re quite a person. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

  She seemed ancient in her wisdom, though she was actually younger than I was and once more I felt that our relationship was suddenly all wrong. I’d always got on well with Jane. Once I’d been in love with her sister, with the soulful love of a little boy, and when she’d rejected me for my brother I’d suddenly noticed that Jane was growing up too. When I’d had my first leave from France I’d realized she was already a young woman. Now she seemed mature and confident, in a way that I still hadn’t managed. While she at seventeen was already grown-up, at eighteen and a half I still felt just a child.

  Only at home, though, I thought, seeking consolation. Only at home! On a squadron it didn’t matter if you blushed when you made a faux pas or said something stupid or almost choked over the whisky someone had shoved into your fist to steady you after some particularly nerve-racking experience. There, it only mattered that you could do what was expected of you with an aeroplane and that you had the courage to do it even when the sky was full of flying pieces of metal.

  We were both very quiet as we finished the journey. It was almost as though Jane had sensed what was passing through my mind and was carefully avoiding bringing it into the open, because I suspected she’d also caught on to the difference between us. Because we’d held hands in the dark on my last leave and I’d fumbled a clumsy kiss as I’d gone back to France, she was being gentle with my emotions and letting them sort themselves out without help.

  As we rolled up to the door of the farm, the gravel crunching under the wheels, she turned and smiled at me and suddenly I felt the situation was much easier. She’d made it much easier.

  As we stopped she shivered and pulled her collar tighter. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea,’ she suggested. ‘It’s cold and I’ve got some tea-cakes and we can toast them in front of the fire.’

  It dawned on me that the tea-cakes meant more to me than Jane and I felt better immediately.

  ‘Done,’ I said.

  As I threw the bicycle against the browning winter forsythia that grew against the porch, I saw a horse tethered near the stackyard and the old stableman coming out with a bag of oats for it. I wondered whose it was because it was one of the handsomest beasts I’d seen for a long time. Jane had missed it in her haste to get out of the wind, and I followed her inside, hoping it wasn’t anybody so important I’d shrivel up.

  The winter afternoon was coming to an end and the hall was full of shadow. Jane’s mother came out of the kitchen, carrying a tea pot.

  ‘Martin!’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were home!’ She paused long enough to beam at me, then led the way to the sitting-room. ‘Come inside, Jane,’ she went on. ‘You’ve arrived just in time. There’s someone to see you.’

  I could have sworn Jane blushed but it was hard to tell in the shadow, and then she was standing in the doorway, the light from the lamp on her face, a slow smile of sheer delight spreading across her features.

  I followed her into the sitting-room and stopped dead, staring at the man just rising from a chair by the fireplace. He was elegant and poised and made me feel lumpish, badly dressed and awkward. I seemed pushed out, gauche and far too young, and I was disgusted with him.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I blurted out indignantly.

  Chapter 3

  Sykes had obviously moved fast. Even with the advantage of a motor car he’d made good time to get from Hathersett by horse, especially looking as he did. He was wearing immaculate breeches and boots and a hacking jacket that seemed to have been built around him.

  ‘Ludo,’ Jane said, her eyes surprisingly bright. ‘This is Martin. Martin Falconer.’

  Sykes came forward, a faint smile in his eyes, and held out his hand gravely, as if he’d never seen me before. ‘Delighted,’ he said. ‘How nice to meet you.’

  Jane turned to me, blushing furiously. ‘Martin, this is Ludo.’

  The protest that was on the point of strangling me burst out at last. ‘Ludo?’ I said indignantly. ‘That’s not Ludo! That’s Bill Sykes!’

&nbs
p; It was her turn to stare. ‘You know each other?’

  ‘He’s been getting in my way for months,’ I said. ‘Two nights ago, in fact, I nearly ploughed him down.’

  ‘But this is…’ Jane was looking from one to the other of us now, bewildered, and Sykes’ solemn face cracked.

  ‘Tell you a secret, Brat,’ he said to me. ‘My name’s not really Bill. It’s Coe Ludovic Wilfred Bartelott-Dyveton-Sykes.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. Nobody could ever have a name like that.’

  ‘No gettin’ away from it. On my birth certificate.’

  ‘C. L. W. B. D. Sykes,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it on your kit. I thought at first it was a chemical formula.’

  Sykes was smiling broadly now. ‘Protested as soon as I was old enough,’ he said. ‘Too late by then, though. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I live here.’ I gestured. ‘Over there. A couple of miles away.’

  ‘At Fynling! Of course!’

  ‘And you at Hathersett.’ I stared at him, light suddenly dawning. ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘You’re not one of the Bartelott-Dyveton-Sykes from that great palace of a place there, are you?’

  ‘’Fraid I am. Son and heir actually.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ I felt like a poor relation.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Sykes said cheerfully. ‘We get on quite well with the proletariat.’

  Suddenly things began to click into place. The horse outside. Things he’d mentioned. Jane’s evasiveness and her father’s uncertainty. He’d obviously been coming over to Fynling often.

  ‘Met a cracking girl down that way,’ he’d said on the train, and as I looked quickly at Jane I saw she hadn’t taken her eyes off him since she’d entered the room. I looked back at Sykes again and for the first time since I’d met him in France I realized that he wasn’t the mature man I’d always imagined but someone who wasn’t really very much older than I was – perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three – but who was so much more adult because he was poised and worldly. I couldn’t imagine Sykes ever falling over the carpet – as I did regularly – when he was trying to make a grand entrance into a room full of girls.

  ‘That your horse outside?’ I said.