by Lydia Syson
Ernest’s ears began to sing and burn. He felt he might explode. Ernest didn’t know what Victor was getting at, and he certainly wasn’t going to ask, but he knew he didn’t like it. He pushed past him, muttering under his breath.
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
“Going so soon?” said Victor in mock-dismay. “Ah well. Pip pip!”
Keeping his head down as he made his escape, Ernest brushed against the back of an off-duty private, and stumbled away, flinching in anticipation. But the young soldier was too busy with his girl to take the trouble to react. And Victor had vanished. Ernest rejoined the others, and Peggy gave him an odd frown. Luckily Uncle Fred reappeared just then too, and was as eager as Ernest to get back to the farm.
“Did you have a good time?” said his uncle as he held open the van door. “You look as though you might be going down with something yourself. You won’t mess up the Austin, will you?”
“No, no. I’m fine. And I had a lovely time, thank you. It was a lovely birthday.”
Once the engine had started, Peggy asked him outright.
“What did Victor say to you?”
“Nothing much. Just …”
“Just what?”
“Oh, he was showing off about a carrier pigeon he’d found.”
“And …?” Peggy wouldn’t let it go.
“And what?”
“What else did he say?”
“He told me about the man at Greatstone. Blown up, he was. Between his back door and his garage.”
Mum and June and Uncle Fred began to listen now.
“They were talking about that in the Rising Sun too,” said Fred. “Just behind the Jolly Fisherman, weren’t it? They told him the shingle was mined. Any movement, you see. Any movement at all. Shift one stone, you shift ’em all, and BOOM! You’ve had it. Silly sod. Had to take the short cut, didn’t he? Some people just won’t listen.”
Ernest hunched himself back into the corner, on top of the feed sacks, and stared out of the window. Dad had always warned him not to take too much notice of people like Victor. Some people were just like that, he said, always trying to insinuate something. You ought to feel sorry for them, really, instead of feeling sorry for yourself. But it was very hard.
Another story followed: an attempted arrest the other side of Hythe; that turned out to be a scarecrow “signalling” to the Germans. Fred was really getting into his stride now. His next tale was of the LDV on a nightwatch, up the watertower, listening in the dark. Footsteps on the shingle down below. To and fro. To and fro. Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch. Ernest could feel the fear edging up his neck as his uncle built up the yarn with a kind of glee that made him suspicious. Eventually the men decided to go down to investigate. Ernest held his breath. Germans? No, rabbits. Tens—maybe hundreds!—of rabbits, circling the ladder, hopping around, nibbling away. Fred roared with laughter.
Ernest’s mind kept flicking back and forth, from parachutes to washing lines, from spies to rabbits.
The lanes got narrower and bumpier, and the car got slower.
His head throbbed in the rhythm of those horrible words: Nazi-lover, Nazi-lover, Nazi-lover, Nazi-lover. Whatever Dad said, Ernest didn’t think he could ever feel sorry for Victor Velvick.
32
This time Henryk had seen her coming. How could he fail? He hadn’t stopped watching for Peggy from the moment the first faint trace of pink appeared at the window. Long before that he’d made himself ready, creeping out and washing under the moonlight. He wanted to be clean and fresh when she came, as fresh as possible.
Just inside the porch he stood, with a sense of ownership he identified with grim irony. An Englishman’s home is his castle … one of the sentences they’d recited when they first reached Liverpool. Until he came to this church, he hadn’t slept alone in a room since leaving Poland. Tents. Barrack rooms. Camps. And now he had all this to himself. And such a sky to go with it too.
She came early, when trails of mist still hovered low, just above the glassy water, dissolving as he watched. He swung open the door the instant Peggy rounded the corner. Henryk watched her catch sight of him, stop, smile, and then hurry on. He could hardly believe how much he had missed her. He had let himself depend on her return.
“You come back.”
Henryk could have been making a statement or asking a question. It might have been a plea for the future. He wasn’t sure if he had said it quite right. It didn’t matter. There she was. She had come back. He could almost touch her now.
There was something insubstantial about her, ethereal. It was partly an effect of the thin dawn light. Paler, she seemed, more frail. In just a night, a day, and a night. And from the way she stared, perhaps he had changed too.
“Were you awfully sick?” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. It was the beans, you know.” She thrust out a hand, which made him jump, but it was full of flowers. All colors, papery petals on stick stalks, and such a smell.
“Sweet peas,” she told him. He buried his nose in the peppery sweetness, and thanked her. As he took the bundle of stems, his fingers closed round hers, just for a moment. Warm and dry and electrifying.
“So stupid of me. I can’t tell you how … I had no idea.”
“No.”
He had worked it out in the end, once the worst had passed. And then, as his capsized stomach struggled to right itself, he held on to the memory of her sitting next to him, nonchalantly nibbling. Of course she hadn’t known. Just as she had no idea how lovely her mouth was. Nor that he had actually begun to envy the beans as she ate. Or how much he wanted to be feeling her slightly off-center teeth against his own skin. But these were thoughts he had to banish.
“I am fine now,” he said.
“But still … I just can’t believe I was so stupid. Such an idiot.”
“But now it is finished, and we are both better.”
He could take her hand properly and lead her inside. Except somehow he couldn’t.
“Yes, much better, thank goodness. And I would have come sooner … I should have … but we all went to Lydd—to town—for my brother’s birthday. To the cinema. A treat. My uncle had feed to pick up so he drove us in. And they made me go straight to bed as soon as we got home. I wanted to come before. I really did. I couldn’t sleep for worrying.” She looked at the flowers. “I wonder if we can find a jam jar or something. Should have brought one with me. I didn’t think. Just, you know, at the last moment, I saw them. To make up for the beans.”
“Yes.” Reach out now. Go on.
If she were coy, and simpered, and expected it, it would be easy to kiss her hand, and think nothing of it. But there was no trickery like that about Peggy, not that he could see. He didn’t know the rules for a friendship like this.
“I was worried,” she said.
“You must not worry. Come. We must shut the door.”
He backed into the coolness behind, not wanting to take his eyes off her.
“The film was good? How old is your brother?”
“Oh, he’s twelve now. Though you wouldn’t think to see him.” She held out a hand, to show his size, and smiled again. “Do you have a brother?”
“No. Only sisters. I had only sisters.”
It frightened him that when he thought of Gizela and Klara and Anna, he could no longer recall exactly how they moved. How their bodies fit together and worked. They had become like photographs in his mind, trapped and silenced and far away. When he tried to animate the images, their actions were jerky and strange. Arms and legs like puppets, faces colorless and immobile. He could no longer hear the sound of their voices.
“Let’s sit down,” Peggy said, making straight for “their” pew. She settled herself like a guest in a parlor, knees together, bag on her lap.
“Guess what?” she said. “I’ve got cake for you. No icing this year, but cake! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Wonderful,” Henryk agreed, sitting next to her. “Cake is wonderful.”
English
cake was plain and yellow, with never a poppy seed in sight. They used to have cake like that at the aerodrome from time to time, with tea in green cups and saucers. The wireless operators would bring it in, baked by their mothers for “our boys.” Someone had decided that cake was good for morale. Just the ticket, old bean.
She had other food for him too. Milk, strawberries, and a tin of pilchards, and some cold boiled potatoes. She pointed out that the skin is very nutritious. The one good thing about the bean disaster was that he had been left temporarily without hunger, but the sight of more food prompted its return. Henryk was careful not to appear desperate. He hated the idea of being a burden to Peggy.
“Can you stay for long?”
It was her company he craved, anyway, more than food and drink. She brought hope when she came, unloading possibility with each small offering she brought, a sense of a future worth having. When Peggy was there in the church, talking and smiling and busying herself around him, for just that short length of time, he even felt safe.
33
Ernest opened the back door as quietly as he could, and looked out. There was absolutely nothing to suggest where Peggy might be. No tell-tale dewy footprints. No broken grass stems. Just an empty bed, when everyone else was still asleep, and a half-heard click of the latch, which was probably what woke him up.
Still no rain, which was good. The early morning air had an earthy freshness: you could feel the beginnings of the heat that would soon take over, but right now there was no shimmer to it at all. Ernest stepped out and tuned his ear to the dawn. The crazed call of a sedge warbler came from the reeds fringing the ditch that separated farmyard from field, a small yellow bird in frantic argument with itself. So easy to hear, so hard to see.
A thought struck him. It sounded like a random ramble of sounds: a relentless, tongue-clicking monotone, remarks that were constantly interrupted by whistled contradictions. But supposing it was actually a complicated series of dots and dashes, as precise as could be? A code of some kind? This warbler might be sending out a secret message. If only he knew how to work it out. Or maybe—and Ernest’s heart beat a little faster at the thought—maybe it wasn’t a living bird at all, but a carefully disguised machine. A secret device pretending to be a bird, waiting for a passing Fifth Columnist. The enemy within, hidden in the reeds.
He tried to laugh at the thought. He wanted to make light of things, he really did. It almost felt his duty. But with so many new instructions all the time, it was only getting harder. Even June, who’d handed over her coat hangers for the aluminum effort last week with good enough grace, had started to grumble about not being allowed to grumble. Who do they think they are? The mind police?
Again Ernest thought of the parachute. He couldn’t go on pretending he’d never found it. He simply had to go back and look properly. He needed to be absolutely certain. If it hadn’t been for her empty bed, he’d have woken Peggy up to tell her about it today, offered to take her to the spot to show her, and there seemed a good chance they might laugh together about his mistake. But maybe not. Her disappearance brought his doubts oozing back. He had to find her.
Ernest dashed inside to equip himself. Binoculars. While he still had them. Hardly a day went by that Myra didn’t remind Uncle Fred that he was supposed to have handed them in. And yes, he would take his new gun too. The decision make Ernest feel a little taller, and older. This wasn’t just a game.
He had to get a chair before he could reach for his new air rifle. Uncle Fred had hammered up some hooks before they went to the cinema, and the gun already had a place of its own, under Fred’s own shotgun, near the front door. Ernest dragged the chair into position, and climbed up.
Beginning to wobble immediately, he looked down to see that one chair leg was on the doormat, sending him off-balance. Also on the mat was a yellow envelope, addressed to Mrs Elizabeth Fisher in unfamiliar handwriting. No stamp, which was strange. He put it carefully on the hall table where she was sure to spot it and then pulled open the drawer and found the tin of pellets. He had to open the lid carefully, so they didn’t rattle too much. How many would he need? He held one up to inspect it, turning it a little, and watched how it glinted, without menace, the light catching the dull silvery ridges on its skirt. So small. He picked out a handful and shoved them in the pocket of his shorts.
34
Peggy sat and looked at her hands in her lap and his hands in his, and she remembered the scene on the train from the film. Nothing spoken, but so little need for words. Just one person’s hand, slowly, firmly, moving towards another’s, and staying there. Henryk’s hand trembled from time to time, but it did not move. He had been so much in her mind all the previous day that she’d convinced herself he must be thinking of her with equal intensity. Now she wasn’t so sure.
She asked him more questions, steering away from family matters, and he talked of what had happened in Romania and Bulgaria, of passing Constantinople and arriving in Beirut. The Marsh seemed suddenly very small. When he told her about the letter from Gizela, her hands flew to her mouth and Peggy felt herself going white. Cloud white. She thought she might float away, and she gripped the wooden edge of the pew until Henryk gently uncurled her fingers and placed them back in her lap.
“Tell me more about Gizela,” she said at last.
“Yes, I will. I would like to tell you about all my sisters.”
Peggy’s bones unlocked. So she must have misheard earlier; she had misunderstood. His sisters were still safe, after all.
“Gizela is the oldest. Seventeen. No, eighteen. No, seventeen.” Henryk stopped. How could he possibly not know? He stared at the herringbone pattern on the floor, and then sought help from the beams above, eyes blinking rapidly.
“And after Gizela …?” Peggy prompted in a whisper.
“When I left, Klara was thirteen. The month before. A summer birthday, like your brother.”
Henryk swallowed. She waited, intent on the movement of muscles in his cheek and jaw as he began to frame his first sentence, wishing she could speak Polish. Maybe she would one day. Why not? If he could learn her language, she could learn his. It seemed very hard though. The little she had heard him mutter sounded like zips opening and shutting to her. But really she ought to try, and then, when the war was over, perhaps he would take her back to Poland, and she could talk to his sisters in their language. And they would like her more for that. His mother too …
“And then little Anna,” he said. “We always call her little Anna, but she is getting big now. Eleven years old. But our baby.”
There was more. Peggy knew there was more to tell so she kept very still. He wanted to tell her. She wished she knew how to help.
“Her hair … what color …?” she prompted.
“Still fair. Not like me. And each day a different color ribbon. Red her favorite.”
“Straight or curly?” Peggy gestured with her finger, a little circling movement, to help him along.
“Oh, straight. Very straight. In two …” And he mimed two long plaits, his hands almost brushing Peggy’s ears.
“Sometimes like this …” Then he showed how the braids crossed over the top of her head, and Peggy’s scalp tingled.
“I know what you mean.”
He nodded slowly, and looked at her legs. Almost absent-mindedly, he touched her, very lightly, on a kneecap that was scarred from a playground fall five years earlier.
“Always falling. Always a hole in her stocking. And then always trouble.”
Peggy didn’t move. Her lips stuck together as she tried to open them for her next question. One finger went on circling the scar on her knee, sending inexplicable darts of sensation through all her limbs.
“No picture?”
“No. No picture. I have no picture.”
Her mind went back to the letter. She struggled towards safer ground.
“How did you get away from the camp? From Beirut?”
“A few days later another boat came, to take us t
o France. But we weren’t allowed to fight there either. We were like prisoners still.”
“I don’t understand,” said Peggy. “Didn’t France need your help?”
“We didn’t understand too. Of course they needed us. We are the best pilots.”
Henryk straightened his back, and Peggy smiled. If anyone else had said this, she’d have thought it boastful.
“Yes,” she said.
“But instead they put us in another camp. Many, many people were there already. We could not understand them at first. Another language I did not know. Then somebody told us they are refugees from Spain. From the war there. Thousands of them. Whole families and broken families. Children with missing arms and legs. Scarred by burns and bombs. Orphans and widows and old men. Men who had fought to save their country and failed. All with no homes, no country.”
“But why were you there with them?”
“We had no idea. No idea.” Henryk looked grimmer than ever. “Oh, Peggy. We were desperate. In despair, that is what I mean. It is the same? And angry. Truly. We had no uniforms. No coats. No money. Everything tatters, our shoes falling apart, so cold. And still all we heard was that our officers lived in luxury while we starved. All we could fight was each other. While we longed for spring to come.”
Peggy could feel the fury in Henryk, as though the tension in his limbs had affected the air between them. She wanted to say something reassuring, some tender lie: That’s all over now. You’re safe. I won’t let you go hungry or cold ever again. She tried to speak, but her throat was too dry.
“Sorry.” That was all she could get out. “I’m sorry.”
“It was not your fault. It didn’t last forever.”
Of course not. What lasts forever?
“No.”
“After months and months of waiting we were given planes, at last. Terrible machines … no good at all. A Caudron against a Messerschmitt? What a joke. But our joy when we flew again—you cannot believe it—we were like birds escaping from cages. At last we had our chance for revenge and so we took it. But that happiness did not last either. No time at all. You see, we could not understand them and they could not understand us.”
