Motor bike and sports car moved away down the drive. The last James saw of his wife was her reflection in his wing mirror. She was trying to wave, but as he watched he saw her sink to the ground in her wedding dress, Oliver and Gwen running to support their daughter.
He pulled out into the lane and accelerated, hard. The breeze strengthened as the car picked up speed and he suddenly found himself blinking back tears. It was the wind that caused them.
Nothing else.
Half an hour later, he was stalled in stationary traffic. Almost as soon as they’d set off, an impatient John had roared ahead and out of sight, after giving him a backwards wave. James didn’t blame him; the whole point of a motor bike was getting there quickly.
He drummed the steering wheel with his fingers. Something must have happened up ahead. After a few minutes he turned the car round and picked his way through the countryside along back lanes, finally emerging on to the main road ahead of whatever was holding things up.
The aerodrome was buzzing like an angry hive of bees when he got there. All the Spitfires were at dispersal, engines throbbing as mechanics checked them over.
‘Blackwell – about bloody time!’ shouted his squadron leader when he spotted James walking across the tarmac. ‘You should have been back hours ago! Where’s Arnold?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ yelled James over the roar of a dozen Merlin engines. He hesitated. ‘I just got married, sir,’ he shouted. ‘Pilot Officer Arnold was my best man. We didn’t get the telegrams recalling us until we got back from the wedding. But John should be here by now – he was on his motor bike.’
The commander strode across and shook James by the hand. ‘Congratulations, Blackwell! You picked a hell of a day for it. Is she pretty?’
‘Yes, sir! Very. What’s happening here?’
‘Big flap on. We’re taking off in half an hour. Get your gear straight away. I’ll give everyone the flight plan when we’re in the air but I can tell you now we’re going across the Channel. All except your bloody best man. Maybe he’s had a puncture. Now get weaving!’
37
Diana had taken off her wedding dress. She felt strangely numb as she did so, and she hadn’t quite known what to do with it afterwards. In the end she hung it on the back of her bedroom door, where it sagged forlornly from the hook.
She tried not to start crying again as she unpicked the flowers from her hair. She was determined not to feel sorry for herself, not on her wedding day. When she’d finished, and put her hair back in an Alice band, she threw on slacks and a cardigan, and wondered what to do next. She had never felt so restless.
‘I can’t settle,’ she said breathlessly when she found her mother, who had gone upstairs to her studio to distract herself with painting. ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel so lost and peculiar.’
Gwen put her brush down and went across to her daughter. ‘I know exactly how you’re feeling, darling,’ she said, hugging her. ‘It was the same after your father and I got married – except that at least we had our wedding night before he had to go back to France. If I were you, darling, I’d—’
The phone began to ring downstairs.
‘That might be him!’ said Diana. ‘He must have got back to Upminster hours ago!’ She ran from the room, her father’s voice drifting up from the hall as she clattered down the stairs.
‘Yes, this is he. Yes. Well, no, we call him John, but his birth name is Robert. Yes, I’ve told you, I’m his father. This is Oliver Arnold speaking. What is this about, please?’
It obviously wasn’t her brand-new husband on the line, Diana realised. This was some business to do with her brother. Disappointed, she turned to go back upstairs when a sudden note of concern in her father’s voice made her pause.
‘Yes, that’s correct, Officer; he owns a Triumph two-fifty. He left here on it – oh, three or four hours or so ago. Look, our boy’s not in any kind of trouble, is he?’
There was silence in the hall as Mr Arnold listened to the reply. Diana saw her father sway a little, then put out his free hand against the wall to steady himself.
‘What? What kind of accident? Has he been hurt?’
A terrible sensation begin to creep over her.
Her father turned slowly around and stared through her. ‘When? When was this? How, exactly?’
Another pause for the answer. Then: ‘Are you telling me that . . . Is my son . . . ?’
‘Oh-oh-oh-oh-no, Daddy, no! No no no!’
Now Gwen was coming down the stairs behind her. ‘Dear God, what’s happening? Diana, whatever is the matter with you? What’s all this commotion?’
‘I see – yes, I do quite see. Mr Arnold was speaking again, very quietly. ‘Thank you for telling me. What? Yes, of course, I shall expect them. I’ll meet you there shortly. Yes. Goodbye.’
With infinite slowness, he replaced the receiver on its cracked cradle, and looked up at his wife and daughter. The two women gripped hands and stood motionless together, choked into silence by a fearful apprehension.
‘That was Sidcup police station,’ he said at last, his voice thick and slow. ‘There’s been . . . an accident. They’re going to send a car for me. I have to . . . I have to . . .’ He stepped towards the two women and gave a helpless shrug.
‘I have to identify John. He’s been in a motor bike accident. It happened a couple of hours ago. Some sort of collision with an Army lorry.’
Gwen gave a low, animal moan. ‘Identify? Isn’t that . . . doesn’t that mean . . . ?’
Mr Arnold took a deep, juddering breath. ‘Yes. Our son is dead, my dear. John is dead.’
He sprang forward and caught his wife just in time. A trembling Diana helped him lower Gwen into an awkward, half-sitting position on the polished wooden floor.
The three of them huddled there together for some time.
They spoke not a word, nor made any sound.
And so, presently, Lucy found them.
It was nearly dark when Mr Arnold was delivered back to the Dower House in a police car. A swollen-eyed Lucy let him in. He hugged her, wordlessly, and then walked slowly through to the drawing room. Gwen and Diana were clasped in each other’s arms on the sofa. They looked at him through reddened, bruised eyes, almost as if he were an enemy.
‘Well?’ Gwen whispered.
‘Yes. It’s John.’ Mr Arnold rubbed his face in his hands. ‘We’d all better have a drink.’
Diana crossed slowly to the sideboard and filled three glasses to the brim with scotch.
‘Listen to me, both of you,’ her father told them heavily after they’d all swallowed a finger of neat whisky. ‘It’s important you both know that John didn’t suffer. It seems he was overtaking a car when the lorry came out of a side lane. The police say it must have been over in a split second.’
Before he could say any more there was a loud double-knock at the front door.
Mr Arnold threw his head back. ‘Christ. What now?’
He walked back into the hall. The women heard the door open, and a murmur of voices. It went on for some time before there was an exclamation from Mr Arnold. The voices came louder now, from inside the hall itself.
Instinctively Diana and Gwen stood up.
Mr Arnold came back into the room, closely followed by two men, both in RAF blue. The younger man wore a chaplain’s collar.
Gwen hesitated, before giving a helpless shrug. ‘Oh. It’s kind of you to call on us so soon, but we’re only just . . . our son has only just . . .’
Mr Arnold shook his head. ‘They’re not here about John, darling.’ He faced his daughter. ‘Diana . . .’
She froze.
‘I just don’t know how to tell you this, my dearest child. Come to me.’
‘Tell me.’
He stared at her, and then ran his fingers through his hair, almost violently. ‘Oh God! This is a terrible, terrible day.’
‘Tell me.’
He stretched his arms towards her. ‘James has bee
n shot down, Diana. Over France, this afternoon. Two other pilots saw it happen and they say – apparently they say there was no parachute.’
Diana stared at him, then turned calmly to the two officers.
‘Are you here to tell me my husband is dead?’ she asked, almost conversationally.
The men exchanged glances, before the older one stepped forward. Kind eyes met Diana’s and when he spoke, it was with great gentleness.
‘I’m Captain Blake, Flight Commander Blackwell’s Squadron Intelligence Officer.’
Diana nodded wordlessly.
‘I’m very sorry to tell you it’s as your father said, Mrs Blackwell. Your husband has been shot down, over the Pas de Calais this afternoon. Other British pilots in the vicinity say that his aircraft exploded when it hit the ground, and it seems he wasn’t . . . in a position to bail out. There was no sign of a parachute, you see.’
Diana stared at him. ‘So he’s dead.’
The officer nodded. ‘Yes, we believe so.’
‘He and my brother.’
The man turned and frowned faintly at his colleague, a prompt to the younger man to speak, but after an awkward silence, the intelligence officer sighed and turned to Oliver and Gwen again.
‘Yes. We learned about your son,’ he nodded sympathetically to Diana, ‘your brother, Mrs Blackwell, shortly before leaving Upminster to drive down here. It’s . . . well, it’s a very bad business. The whole squadron is extremely cut up about it. Your boy was exceptionally popular, as was Flight Commander Blackwell.’
He hesitated, and then added: ‘As a matter of fact, I might as well tell you that we lost another chap over the Channel this afternoon. That’s three good men in as many hours. It’s been the squadron’s worst day of the war so far.’
Mr Arnold swallowed and nodded. ‘That must be extremely hard for all of you. I’m very sorry.’
The intelligence officer inclined his head in appreciation. He seemed to have run out of words. After a long, defeated silence, the young chaplain finally cleared his throat.
‘The RAF offers you its sincerest condolences.’
His colleague closed his eyes. The Arnolds stared at the chaplain, before Diana gave a short, brittle laugh.
‘Well, thank you. Yes. Thank you very much indeed.’
For the first time since the men had entered the room, she moved, stepping quickly to the cigarette box. With shaking hands, she extracted one and fumbled to light it.
‘I only married him this morning, did you know that?’ she asked in a strange, high voice. She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Not much of a marriage, was it? Not much of a marriage at all, I’d say.’
Diana turned to her parents, tears suddenly streaming down her face.
‘What are we going to do now, Mummy and Daddy? Whatever are we going to do?’
Part Two
38
Nice, South of France, April 1951
This damned coffee-maker sounds just like a buzz-bomb, Diana thought as she switched on the chrome-plated machine in her gleaming American kitchen. This morning, as the device bumbled and crackled its way to producing the steaming black coffee that still had the capacity to jolt her senses at the first sip, Diana struggled, as she always did, with the blinds that screened her from what she was certain would be another dazzling sunrise.
Eventually she found the critical angle where the drawstrings reluctantly engaged the fickle pulleys, and the Venetian blinds smoothly rolled up to reveal a Mediterranean dawn.
Diana blinked as the slanting light fell on her face. This was no English sun; even this early in the year – it was still the first week of April – she could feel the latent strength beating through the glass. It would be better to drink her coffee outside in the shade, where the early morning breeze still carried something of the cool of the night.
As she stirred preserved cream into her coffee – preserved cream was still virtually unavailable back home – Diana glanced around the kitchen of her new home. Everything sparkled and shone; everything was twice as big as its equivalent back in England.
Giant fridge encased in shiny chrome. Chromed toaster, which could accommodate six slices of bread; chromed juice-maker which Stella loved playing with, stuffing freshly picked oranges into its gaping maw and laughing delightedly as surprisingly paltry amounts of liquid dribbled into the steel beaker underneath; brushed-steel coffee-maker, now growling and burping in a sulky undertone after yielding its first drink of the day; shiny white washing machine with built-in tumble-dryer which Diana had yet to place her faith in (so far, she had hung all the family’s laundry out to dry from the iron balustrade that ran the length of the sun-terrace at the back of the villa) and, most wondrous of all, the enormous television which sat in its own walnut cabinet set to one side of the door that led into the vast refrigerated pantry.
The television, like everything else in the villa with a plug attached, was American-made. The previous occupants had shipped everything here to Provence from their house in Cape Cod, and then back again to Massachusetts when they left – everything but the kitchen appliances and the TV.
‘You might as well keep the goddamned thing,’ the departing tenant had told them with a shrug as he showed them crossly round the villa, all the while incongruously twirling a golf club in his hands. ‘It’ll cost me more to ship it home again than to buy a new one. Anyway, it’s no goddamned use, no use at all. Back home it’d give you forty channels. Here I can only get one, and that’s in goddamned French.’
But Diana liked watching French television. It was limited to about three hours each evening. Stiff, formal programmes, most of them – news bulletins, political discussions, dull farming documentaries – but they helped her steadily improving French. Only the evening before she had watched an interview with the American President, Harry Truman, coming live from a studio in Paris, and she had correctly interpreted at least two of the questions before the President’s translator did. She had thought the interviewer rather rude and offhand with Truman; you wouldn’t have thought America had helped liberate France from the Nazis barely seven years earlier.
Now, Diana put her coffee cup on her usual tray, stencilled with abstract designs in the vibrant colours of Provence: blue, to represent the sky, yellow, the sun – and green, for the lush vegetation that thirstily drank the winter rains and then stood verdant and defiant in the scorching summer heat.
Indeed, summer was almost here. There were little more than ten weeks to the solstice. The strengthening sun was almost as high in the sky at its zenith as it would be on an English midsummer’s day. Diana slid open the double doors leading on to the south-facing patio and stepped outside.
As she’d hoped, the air remained cool from the night, although the sun, rising above the hills to the east, licked her skin as soon as she left the villa’s shade. She retreated under the terrace’s white and yellow striped awning. It was going to be another warm day. Away down the long valley that led to Nice, Diana could see the Mediterranean, a hazy bowl of blue flecked with white; distant fishing boats returning from their night’s work.
She sat in one of the terrace’s rattan chairs and stared out across her little corner of Provence. Even now, six weeks after the three of them had arrived, she could hardly believe she was actually here, and likely to stay for the coming two, perhaps even three years.
Diana had changed little in the past decade. She still preferred to wear her dark hair down, although instead of being swept back from her forehead, now she had a fringe. It added to her youthful appearance; she could have passed for someone in their mid-twenties.
A casual caller at the villa coming across Diana this morning could be forgiven for addressing her in French. She looked French, her naturally olive skin darkened by the light tan she invariably seemed to acquire after even the briefest exposure to the sun. As always, the darkened skin made her eyes appear extraordinarily exotic: at times they seemed almost to flash and flare in electric bursts.
Her cho
ice of clothes added to the Gallic illusion. Almost the first thing Diana had done on arriving in Provence was to shop for new outfits in the smart dress shops of Nice and in the ritzy neighbouring port of Antibes.
She had left almost her entire English wardrobe behind. Britain still laboured under what the papers called ‘The Age of Austerity’. Everything seemed grey and drab and hopeless. Near-colourless clothes. Weary queues waiting patiently outside almost every shop. Bombsites that seemed permanent fixtures in the urban landscape: depressing expanses of shattered brick and glass, weeds poking through the rubble. Smashed building timbers had long since been removed for winter fuel.
Women did their best to dress well but it was difficult. Material was in short supply, and by the end of the 1940s the contents of most women’s wardrobes had been re-cut, re-sewn, altered, mended and cannibalised to the point of exhaustion. Diana’s was no exception and it had been a relief to leave it all behind, packed into cardboard boxes she was quite certain she would never open again.
One of the few items to remain on its hanger was the wedding dress she had worn the day James and John were killed. It was pristine: Diana had never considered altering it so it could be worn again.
This morning she was in a simple cream short-sleeved cotton blouse matched with a pleated skirt, belted at her narrow waist. She looked like one of the smart Paris wives who had only recently returned north, after spending Easter at their family villas in Provence. They would be back in force in August.
Diana finished her coffee, and gave a slight shake of her head. She still couldn’t quite take it all in; there had been so many changes to her life in such a short time.
It was Douglas who had made it all possible. Douglas, with his patience, his indefatigable patience, who had slowly chipped away at her defences and gently but remorselessly pulled her into his life. And not just her.
There was Stella, too.
Stella had never known her father. Conceived the week before he was killed, for Stella, James Blackwell represented something between a legend and a fairy tale. That was nothing particularly unusual for her generation; almost half her classmates at school in England were fatherless.
Some Day I'll Find You Page 11
