by Marie Joseph
‘Root beer,’ Francine told him three minutes later, appearing suddenly through the open hatchway. ‘My father had three flagons stored away. He plied them with it, and we watched them drink it like water, swigging it down like the swines they are.’ She came to him and David slid down to the floor and pulled her close. ‘They couldn’t guess how strong it is, and my father kept filling and refilling their glasses. Oh, God, they got redder and redder till I wondered how they would ever be able to walk.’ She began to laugh, snorting through her nostrils, till her nose and eyes ran together. ‘My mother looked as if she was going to die of fright, and Louis … oh, God … Louis! My father told them that to make sure his son never wandered out after curfew he had explained that the Germans would slit his throat.’ She gulped for air. ‘They thought that was funny! They yelped with laughter. Oh, David! Why aren’t you laughing? One of them even clicked his heels and kissed my hand before they left.’ She held up a hand, roughened by the hard work on the farm, and waved it about in front of her face. ‘To think the day would come when this hand would feel the touch of a German’s lips! Oh, God, it’s so funny! So funny …’
David kept on holding her, straining her close until with a last hiccough the sound of her hysterical laughter died away. With a deliberate determination he was calculating how soon he could discard the unwieldy crutches, test his leg without the splints, and perhaps with the aid of a stick get away. He frowned. He would go by night, walking as far as he could, putting as much distance between him and the farmstead as was possible. Then he would hole up by day and hopefully move on.
It wasn’t working out at all in the way he had been told it would. There must be Belgians who were in touch with the army of resistance, but it was gradually becoming clear that Fernand Colson didn’t know of any. Or was it his wife who had persuaded him not to trust anyone? Had she pleaded with him not to give their secret away? Not even to one of his own countrymen?
‘I know Diksmuide,’ he told Francine when she had regained some semblance of control. ‘I was sixteen when my mother and I came to Belgium to find my father’s grave.’ He moved slightly to ease the pins and needles in the arm she was lying on. ‘We went out in a bus to somewhere north of the Somme. Arras?’
Francine nodded, snuggled closer to him and closed her eyes.
‘I’m suddenly so tired,’ she said.
‘Rows and rows of white crosses,’ David went on. ‘We went to see the trenches, and there were duckboards laid across them. We saw some barbed wire red with rust. Then one day we went to Diksmuide. There was a statue on the cobbled square of a Belgian general who had besieged the town continuously for four years. I remember there were quiet streets and closed white painted doors with the windows shrouded in net curtains and filled with pot plants. It seemed so peaceful.’
‘And now it’s all happening the same.’ Francine sat up, pushing the heavy weight of her hair away from her flushed and damply swollen face. ‘How silly it all is. How stupid and silly and utterly pointless. Oh, David …’
She lifted her face. When he kissed her he tasted the salt of her tears, and when he moved his hand to caress the back of her neck the silken weight of her hair flowed across his wrist.
‘I do not want you to make love to me, David,’ she whispered. ‘But I would like it if you lay with me.’ She pulled him down to lie pressed closely to her. ‘Just to be held, that is all.’
So David held her.
They stayed like that for a long time with the sounds of the September afternoon drifting up from the yard below. For the moment there was nothing in Francine either of hate or contentment, but the terror was slowly drifting from her mind.
And David? As the resolution to get away hardened in him, his expression was that of a dreaming boy. An English grammar school boy, reared to discipline, ever conscious of wanting to do the right thing. He thought of his home and the pristine cleanliness of it, with the cricket and tennis club no more than a stone’s throw away. He saw himself dressed in white flannels with a cravat tucked into the open neck of his shirt, walking down the road carrying his tennis racket underneath his arm. He saw the rough lane leading to the pavilion and the courts beyond, and he saw Sally Barnes, her curly dark hair tied up in a blue Alice band, sitting on a stile and waving to him, her round face bright with the vivacity of innocence. He remembered swishing with his racket at a cluster of weeds, as he talked to her. He remembered the shape of her round brown knees, and the way her cotton frock had rows of wavy braiding round its hem.
‘Were you ever afraid when you were flying, David?’
He came back with an effort to reality, and smiled into the top of Francine’s head. ‘I was once grounded for a while,’ he told her. ‘Lack of moral fibre, they used to call it, but now that we’re at war they’re kind and send us somewhere for a resting period until we’re mentally fit to fly again. It won’t happen to me again. Never again.’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘How can you be so sure?’
He frowned and bit his lip, struggling to overcome his natural sense of reticence and his aversion to divulging his innermost thoughts.
‘Because at first I was, I suppose, an idealist. At the beginning I was filled with a sense of burning patriotism, saving my country, you know, that sort of thing.’
‘And you’re not now?’
‘Now it’s my job,’ he whispered, groping for the right words to convey his meaning. ‘This war is going to go on for a long time yet. I, that is my mind, cannot accept the callousness of slaughter.’ He smiled. ‘I’m a Lancastrian and a Lancastrian in the main thinks straight ahead, not in a curved line, making excuses and working out reasons. If I were really brave I’d chuck it all in and become a conscientious objector, but even if I found the courage to do that I know I’d find myself wanting to be back in the thick of it again. I think about my mother’s wasted life for all those years after my father was killed, and I try to work up a good thick lather of hatred. But all I can feel is the sadness of the sheer futility of it all. And in the meantime the war goes on.’
‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either, David.’ Francine pushed him from her gently, then kneeling up in the straw by his side lifted her arms and secured the heavy curtain of her sun-bleached hair in the nape of her neck again. She smiled her bleak little smile. ‘I don’t mean that what you said doesn’t make sense. It makes a lot of sense.’ She bent down and laid her lips sweetly against his for a moment. ‘You are a nice man, David Turner.’ She flipped the disc at his throat. ‘Your Sally, the girl you talked to when you had a fever, is a lucky girl. I hope she loves you madly.’
To her surprise she saw the deep blush creep up from the Englishman’s throat to stain his cheeks with colour.
‘I haven’t told her yet,’ he mumbled. ‘She doesn’t know.’ He sat up and fiddled with his belt. ‘I blotted my copybook with her, and we don’t seem to have hit it off since then.’
‘Blotted your copybook?’ Francine’s face was a study of bewilderment. ‘My English isn’t good enough for that. But you must marry her, David. When you go back that is what you must do. At once. Okay?’
‘Bang on,’ David said, and they smiled at each other, closer than if they had indeed made love lying there in the musky-smelling hay.
And when David ran a finger down the apricot softness of her cheek, when he leaned forward and kissed her swollen eyelids, she did not know that he was saying his goodbye.
In October the weather broke at last. David chose his time carefully. Wrapping the food he had stored for the past two days in a piece of old sacking, he climbed slowly down the ladder, feeling his way, letting his good leg take the strain, clutching his bundle and the stick Fernand had fashioned for him from the branch of a tree.
It was very different walking outside on the rough ground from his daily deliberate circling of the hayloft. His leg ached intolerably, and his head throbbed with a rhythmic pounding beat.
Away from the farm he made for the open fields, a
voiding the road winding like a dark ribbon in the direction of the nearest village. Fernand had given him an old coat to use as a bed covering, and he had buttoned this over his uniform, threading two of the buttonholes with string where the buttons were missing.
Without papers he knew that he must avoid the towns at all cost, and with no clear idea of where he was heading he stumbled on, catching his coat in bramble hedges, keeping to his intention of putting as much distance as he could between himself and the farm before the light of dawn streaked the sky.
He found an empty farm building with the walls broken and pitted, and crouched in a corner, his ears alert for the slightest sound. He opened the bundle and gnawed at a piece of bread, and swallowed a little of the water in the green glass bottle he had found discarded in a pile of hay in the loft which he hoped was now at least five miles behind him.
His trouser legs were torn by the brambles as he had stumbled and crawled his way through the long night, and he smelled to high heaven from the cow pat he had fallen into in his frenzied search for shelter once daylight came.
He was exhausted and knew it would be foolish to sleep. Maybe when the morning came and he could risk a quick survey of his surroundings, maybe then … He stretched his eyes wide and tried to pinpoint his exact location. Francine had mentioned Bruges. He concentrated on remembering the long-ago time he had spent there with his mother.
There were – had been – the bells of course, and the café with a red-checked gingham frill round the wall. He remembered a large tureen of thick soup on the table, and a sort of dish moulded into the shape of a fish. There were tiny birds in cages, and one day they had gone on a trip down the canals, past seventeenth-century houses leaning almost into the water. Tall spires of churches, and a stone cat set in the middle of a grassy courtyard. That he remembered well, because he had taken a photograph of it with his new box camera.
His head drooped onto his bent knees. And somewhere, not all that many miles from here, his father’s grave, one of thousands, with his mother weeping, her hand on his shoulder. He recalled his embarrassment, and the way he had automatically snatched his school cap from his head, feeling the sense of drama called for by the moment.
Surely there was drama too in the fact that the soldier’s son was here, a victim of another war, fighting the same enemy, but this time determined to stay alive. Determined to stay awake.
His eyes closed, his legs twitched, his hands unclenched, and as the grey light crept over the fields, he slept.
He jerked awake at the sound of a voice. He raised his head and saw a man looking down at him, a slight man with some sort of deformity pulling his head to one side. David instinctively drew the coat closer round him and tried to stand up, only to feel the man’s hand on his shoulder, pressing him roughly back against the wall.
As David hesitated the man’s hand shot out to tear aside the front opening of the coat, revealing David’s RAF uniform, and the brevet sewn above the flap of his top pocket.
‘Name, rank, number?’ The question was asked in very bad, very broken English.
David’s heart sank. ‘Turner, David. Flight Lieutenant. 164308.’
‘Squadron?’
David shook his head. ‘Turner, David. Flight Lieutenant –’
The man sighed. ‘Very well. You have given me enough for the moment.’ He kicked the sacking bundle aside. ‘Fasten your coat and follow me. No speaking! Right?’
‘I follow you,’ David said, and reaching for his stick staggered after the man into the wide sweep of fields, pale green now in the early morning mist.
There were clouds drifting over the inevitable rows of mushroom-topped trees; a wind was blowing and already it was obvious that the day was going to turn wet and stormy.
They turned into a field dark with fresh-ploughed furrows, and as David tried to negotiate the uneven ground his left ankle twisted and a pain like a red-hot needle ran up his leg. Hearing him cry out, the man turned and smiled, and his smile sent a shiver of fear down David’s spine.
Was he a loyal Belgian? Or was he taking David now to hand him over to the Germans? David stopped for a moment, glancing round, assessing his chances of making a break for it, dismissing them as nil.
He could see smoke rising from chimneys hidden by the trees of an orchard, trees bare of fruit, with apple leaves scattered in dank wet mounds.
It was like the end of everything – or it could have been the beginning. The man turned round again, motioning David to move more quickly. As David stumbled and almost fell, the smile flashed again, mirthless and uncalled for, twisting his mouth into a devilish grin.
Six
BY NOVEMBER GERMAN troops were still bogged down outside Leningrad and fighting hard on the outer perimeter of Moscow. The weather in England was cold and damp and there were shortages now of practically everything. Pears were two shillings a pound, and on a never-to-be-forgotten day for Sally she saw a zinc bucket in the window of a hardware shop, and bore it home in triumph to her mother.
Stanley Barnes, crouched over his precious wireless set late one evening, heard a recording of Nazi sadism in a concentration camp reported by a doctor from Frankfurt. The described brutality filled Stanley with horror, and not even the news that the Italians in the Mediterranean were being routed could cheer him up.
Sally received a letter from the young airman who had called at the works to tell her that David was now officially reported ‘Missing, believed killed’. The short letter had such a resigned fatalistic ring about it that Sally was filled with a deep sadness as she read the stilted words. So correct and proper, she thought bitterly, as if the writer had considered himself duty-bound to inform her of any eventuality. It was just the kind of letter David himself would have written, hiding his true feelings, phrasing it as if it were a school essay.
For a brief moment she saw him, standing as she had last seen him at the cemetery gates after his mother’s funeral, straight and tall, hair sleeked back, his neat moustache brushed into line. It was impossible to erase his memory from her mind even if she had wanted to, and every night before she slept she prayed that he might still, somehow, be alive.
Lee’s letters were very different. Even the airgraphs, photographed and reduced to a minute size, brimmed with the sound of his laughter and his capacity for seeing everything as a kind of game.
‘Hi!’ he had written from Canada, sending her an over-tinted card from Niagara Falls, showing the Rainbow Bridge with a technicoloured rainbow spanning the water. ‘By the time you get this I will be on my way back. Are you ready for me, Sally, honey?’
Oh yes, she was ready for him. She was more than ready for the mere sight of him. The vivid blue of his eyes and his way of laughing with his head thrown back, sudden explosive laughter that she felt as a tingling in her ears. That dark November, laughter was in as short supply as the tiny luxuries of life, things which not long ago had been thought of as necessities. Like a zinc bucket spotted lying unbelievably in the centre of an ironmonger’s shop window.
On the fourteenth of the month Lee disembarked with two thousand RAF personnel at Greenock. Rushing impulsively to the nearest telephone he actually dialled Sally’s number before realizing that to the girl who had occupied his heart and mind all the time he had been away a telephone call was an impossibility. For the first time the enormity of her disability was brought home to him and he banged his fist against the sides of the call-box in an agony of frustrated impatience. The idea of passing on a message through either of her parents he dismissed entirely. After so many weeks of longing it would be an anti-climax he couldn’t stomach, not at the moment.
The entire contingent boarded a train for Bournemouth, and Lee wrote immediately from the family hotel where he was to be billeted for a time not yet specified.
‘I had forgotten the queues, honey,’ he wrote, ‘and the goddamned black-out, but I’m comfortable here. There’s maid service, would you believe it! I might just change my mind about the class system
yet. Now that I’m an officer things look kinda different from the other side of the fence.’
At the end of his second week he wrote to say that already the enforced waiting time was dragging. ‘It’s boring the pants off me, Sally. After the stiff discipline over in Canada I don’t have enough to do! The weather has turned fine, and Bournemouth is a vacation resort in spite of everything, but I find it all so goddamned boring! But in December, honey, maybe in the first week of December, I’ll be getting leave. So you hurry and tell that boss of yours the war effort will have to carry on without you for a while. Why? Because you’re going to meet me in London, that’s why!’
‘He’s an American,’ Stanley said. ‘That’s why he talks daft about you going down to London to meet him. Distances mean nothing to them. I once heard tell of a Yank who drove three hundred miles there and three hundred back, all on the same day. They’re mad, the lot of them. I remember them in the last lot. Just the same.’
Sally shook her head. ‘Now, come on, Dad. You’ve never talked to an American, ever, have you? You can’t generalize; it isn’t fair.’ She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Unless a man’s a Lancastrian and follows cricket in summer and football in winter he’s no good. Oh, and it helps if he’s Church of England or Methodist, and isn’t too keen on the Irish. An’ you can just about tolerate him taking his tie off on his holidays, but only just.’
‘Well, you’re not going anyway, so there’s no point in arguing, is there?’ Stanley glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and began to unlace his Home Guard issue boots. ‘If you’re not coming up to bed just yet, remember to leave the front door unbolted for your mother. She goes to that blessed factory in the dark now and comes home before it’s proper light. Cheese and flippin’ rice, that’s the second time in a week this bootlace has broken. They couldn’t be more fragile if they made them out of liquorice chews.’
He wasn’t going to admit it, not even to himself, but Stanley Barnes was a frightened man. It wasn’t just the war and his only son being in the thick of it out in the Middle East, though those things were bad enough. No, it cut deeper than that.
