Break of Dark

by Robert Westall

  Silence. We were all knocked silly by the idea of a regular Saturday hop. Saturday night was the Butcher’s favourite time for the Happy Valley, the Ruhr that is.

  ‘This place sounds like bloody Butlin’s,’ Kit blurted out.

  ‘Watch your tongue, Sergeant,’ said Dadda, more RAF than I’d ever heard him.

  ‘I heard that,’ said the fruity voice, not at all put out.

  That Saturday hop was quite a thing. A sea of floral dresses; the smell of face powder and the swish of silk stockings. Not a bad band, either: three corporals and three LACs and a nice semi-professional touch, even if the music was a bit out of date; provincial. Most of us just sat and watched anyway, and breathed in the females, though Billy the Kid got involved with a red-haired WAAF with an amazing pair of Bristols. And Paul found a guy who owned a motorbike.

  I just kept watching the faces. There were a lot of steady couples, staid, steady couples. Nobody living it up, kicking the place apart, or twitching. The aircrew looked hard-worked, but they had the ruddy look of fishermen or shepherds. Many were quite solid round the middle; if bombers make your guts screw up, the boredom of Coastal Command makes you nibble. They looked middle-aged; quite a number had balding heads. But none of them looked as if he was on the chop-list. It was softot and flowery-smelling, I fell asleep twice. But I wouldn’t go to bed. I was too busy absorbing the possibility of having some sort of future.

  And that’s the way it’s been, the last ten months. It’s not a soft life in Coastal. Try crawling out of your bed in a five a.m. blizzard and trying to keep your perspex frost-free with your heating-hose and fingernails. And our lot have lost three crews in ten months. We often wonder what happened to them. Maybe they met one of those Junkers that get into the north end of the bay; maybe they met a wind that read 120 knots on their API. But that’s the point: we have time to sit and wonder what happened to them, and that’s quite a luxury. We sometimes stay in the air for thirteen hours at a stretch with extra-load tanks, and that’s a lot of time to wonder, while you’re watching the radar screen for the tiny blip that means a U-boat schnorkelling.

  Meanwhile, we too have turned into fishermen and shepherds. We’ve dropped plenty of depth-charges, of course, but as far as we know killed nowt but blossoming white circles of belly-up fish. We met a U-boat once, on the surface off the Skellig, when we were coming home with no depth-charges left. Paul exchanged a few words with it, and it left the scene of the crime rapidly. We weren’t all that bothered.

  Otherwise, we see a lot of sunrises and sunsets from high up, and study the flight of birds. A storm-petrel came through the windscreen once, and wrapped itself round Dadda’s neck. Paul reckoned it had been trained by the Japs in kamikaze tactics. We had it stuffed for the billet mantelpiece. And we fly round in big circles and little circles, just like herring-gulls, but a bloody sight colder. But when we leave a convoy and their Aldis winks ‘thank you’, we feel a bit warmer.

  Everything says we’re going to finish the war here; the forgotten army. They’ve taken away Tinsel and the H2S. Dadda wouldn’t let them pinch Monica. They’ve covered our black paint with a lovely coat of Coastal white, with two black bands round the fuselage. And we haven’t burnt any more crates. Dieter is great; he’s not grown much, but he’s put on weight and got this glossy, all-black coat that makes him look a proper Nazi. Which is a laugh, because he’ll lie down for anybody to tickle his belly. He likes riding in the front gun-turret, slobbering over Paul with excitement. He flies every op; Coastal understand about mascots; they’re nearly all ex-bomber anyway.

  Oh, and we’ve got this new game. Dadda disclosed that his family have a ruined castle and estate at a place in Eire called Castletownsend. We’re all going to live there after the war, as gamekeepers and illicit whiskey-distillers and things. He did a zero-feet raid on the Republic last month, to show us the castle from the air. The Irish authorities complained, but Dadda just told the Wingco he had an Irish passport. I don’t know if any of Dadda’s story is true, but it helps to pass the time.

  Yes, we get a lot of time to think, in Coastal. Think about the old squadron; all new faces by now, nobody left who remembers the end of Dieter Gehlen. Think about all the English ex-schoolgirls filling bombs till their backs ache, all the German schoolgirls making shells. Think about the guts of German mothers in Hamburg, sheltering their kids with their own bodies from the fire-typhoon we started. Think about the craftsmen’s skill in a Rolls-Royce Merlin, and a German medieval cathedral. All those people with all that guts, and our top brass are just turning them all into one great big rubbish tip that’s slowly covering Europe. While we watch seagulls.

  I sometimes think, towards the end of a thirteen-hour flight, that we died after all, that we’re in some kind of peaceful grey Valhalla where good little aircrews go. But where are the rest? Blackham and Reaper and Edwards? And Dieter Gehlen?

  Don’t ask me. It’s May 1944, and I think I’ve got the little WAAF in the radio stores interested.

  Two more pints, please, George.

  Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou

  Angela Burscombe and Biddy Stevenson were friends. They shared a flat, and many mistook them for sisters, because they were both big, brunette girls with bright eyes and fond of a giggle. But they’d only met at the primary school where they taught, and where new kids had a lot of trouble telling them apart. They were friends because they could tell each other most things, but not everything, and they didn’t live in each other’s pockets. They got out and lived it up.

  They were the sort that any sensible man will immediately pursue. As a result, they soon married; and they married two of Flamborough’s coming men, but rather older than themselves. Angela married Peter Wingfield, the writer, and Biddy married Roger Trembling, who was big in computers. The flat-partnership broke up, but the friendship remained. They saw each other, sensibly, twice a week for coffee and chat, and no more.

  There might have been no trouble, if they hadn’t both enjoyed their marriages. Unfortunately they thought that since they enjoyed their husbands so much, the husbands must inevitably enjoy each other too. The two couples got into the habit of dining at each other’s houses on alternate weeks.

  Equally unfortunately, the husbands had known each other at Flamborough Grammar, and cordially loathed each other.

  There was a clash of husbandly life-styles. Peter Wingfield was a genial shambles, with balding head and a great mat of beard that totally hid any collar and tie, in the manner of W. G. Grace. When he got stuck with his writing, he fled to the kitchen and savagely attacked new wholemeal loaves and half-pounds of butter. When he was writing well, he lit fag after fag, and even though he only took one puff of each, and left the rest to smoulder in the ashtray, he wheezed a bit when he ran. And, thanks to the wholemeal bread, he had a paunch; not much of a paunch, but a paunch. Enough for Roger Trembling to poke, saying:

  ‘Why don’t you take up squash and get yourself back into shape?’

  Angela always responded loyally, ‘I like his shape. He’s lovely as he is. Leave him alone.’ But there was a hint of wistfulness in her voice that was acid and asps to the soul of Peter.

  Roger Trembling played squash three times a week, skied every February in Austria, and often tried to pluck folds of flesh off his braced stomach. He also invited Angela to do it. It seemed to Angela that Roger’s stomach was so lean and hard that she never got more off it than a fold of his immaculate white shirt.

  Peter dressed like a shambles too. He had a wardrobe full of new suits, which Angela got him to buy whenever he won some kind of literary prize. Peter dutifully wore them once, then went back to the old corduroy jacket with beer stains that he had worn at college. On the other hand, Roger had his hair trimmed every week, and often wore an immaculate blazer. Privately, Peter referred to him as ‘Action Man’.

  Their homes were also different. Peter had bought a rambling Edwardian semi-mansion with attics and Virginia creeper. He had a keen eye for antiques, bu
t never worried if a thing fitted in, or was too big, as long as it was genuine and good. He also had five cats, which he brought up by the permissive method. On one memorable occasion, Roger put his foot into a piece of mislaid cat dirt, while admiring a Chippendale chair. Peter was also keen on gardens, but loved plants so much that he could never bear to pull up a promising weed; especially after he got ‘into’ Findhorn literature and flower-fairies. Privately, Roger referred to the Wingfield household as ‘the Haunted Mansion’ or more simply as ‘the Jungle’.

  The Trembling house, on the other hand, was flat-roofed, five-bedroomed and stood starkly amidst acres of lawn that would not have shamed Wimbledon. It was known to the Wingfields as ‘Mission Control’. The furniture was all stainless steel and teak, full of edges and sharp corners that dug you cruelly in the thigh unless you were stone cold sober. Peter would frequently amble about for minutes on end, and, when finally asked sharply what was the matter, would complain he was looking for a comfortable place to sit.

  It was Angela and Biddy’s fault, more than they knew. Each babbled happily to the other about her husband’s peculiarities; Roger had bought a book in German on erotic lovemaking, three inches thick, which he kept by the bedside and sometimes consulted; Peter had gone shopping with Angela and absent-mindedly picked up the coal scuttle instead of the shopping basket, and had been halfway round the shops before he noticed. These stories were gleefully received and stored up by the husbands as evidence of each other’s lunacy.

  Every time they dined together, each husband in turn lay in wait for the other with a test. Peter would thrust some cob-webbed or soil-covered object under Roger’s nose, and say:

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  Roger always said, ‘Prehistoric piss pot.’ But after the first time it never got a laugh.

  Roger would retaliate by attacking Peter with some new wonder of science dragged home specially from the research labs. One was a mini-chipped device for taking blood pressure from fingertips. Peter’s blood pressure was alarmingly normal.

  But the worst time was when Roger brought home a chess-playing computer of advanced design. Peter had been a reasonable player at school; he now played the computer with such brilliant, savage idiocy that it began to blink green distress signals. Roger fiddled with it, but it seemed Peter had actually done it some kind of harm. It also turned out that Roger had no permission to borrow it in the first place.

  ‘You’re just not normal,’ snarled Roger, as they sat down to the melon.

  ‘You’re so normal it’s abnormal,’ said Peter, swigging at the red wine in a happy, sweating flush.

  Roger began discussing a new computer which was being programmed to write novels, having been fed all the basic thought patterns of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Proust and Ian Fleming. Roger implied that in five years Peter would not only look like Neanderthal man, but be equally obsolescent.

  It was not a happy meal.

  It was when they got home, though, that Angela said the fatal thing. It was only ten days to Christmas, and she made the unfortunate remark that they had not yet sent Roger and Biddy a Christmas card. And there were none left in the house.

  ‘Don’t worry, love. I’ll see to it tomorrow – I’ve got to go into town.’

  Angela looked at him sharply. It was not like him to be helpful in small matters, like Christmas cards. And he had a look of schoolboy glee on his face she’d learnt to mistrust. But she was busy with Christmas, and she didn’t want to upset him any more, after the bashing Roger had given him. Probably he’d forget; he usually did with small things, and then she could safely do it herself.

  But the next evening, over tea, when she asked him, he said:

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve done that. Consider it done. Worry your head no more, fair lady. Actually, I sent them two.’

  Again she looked at him sharply, but he only smiled.

  ‘Wait and see. Wait and see.’

  They dined at Mission Control the day after Boxing Day. Angela spent a frantic first half-hour, Martini in hand, admiring and surreptitiously looking inside all Roger’s three hundred Christmas cards. Certainly, she thought, the atmosphere seemed cordial enough. Peter couldn’t have done anything too dreadful.

  ‘Your card was most unusual,’ called Biddy, head round the kitchen door.

  Angela broke out in a cold sweat and slopped Martini down a swollen green-and-purple version of the Three Wise Men that made them look like week-old corpses. Biddy hurried across, wiping floury hands on her apron, and held up a positively huge Rembrandt card.

  ‘It was sweet of Peter; it must have cost the earth – we’re thinking of having it framed after Christmas.’

  Even Roger beamed. Peter said:

  ‘Trying to educate the New Illiterate. It’ll be some years before the mini-chip gets round to Rembrandt.’

  ‘Oh, yes, some years,’ said Roger, almost jovially. Full of Christmas spirit. A happy moment, everybody smiling, like the cover of a glossy gift catalogue.

  Then Roger’s smooth white brow creased in a frown. ‘Not like the other thing,’ he said. He took a deep gulp of Martini. ‘Show them, Biddy.’

  Biddy searched carefully among the back ranks of cards for something small and hidden. ‘I didn’t like not to put it up at all. I mean, whoever they are, they meant well. And it is Christmas . . .’ She fished it up and held it out to Angela.

  It was a horrid little card, a mean little card. The cheapest and nastiest little card Angela had ever seen. Holly, robins and bells, and even carol-singers, all crammed into a three-inch square, smudgily printed in viciously dull shades of black and green.

  ‘Look inside,’ said Roger, with thin disgust in his voice. Angela looked. It said:

  From Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou

  ‘Well?’ asked Angela.

  ‘We don’t know any Fred, Alice or Aunty Lou,’ said Biddy. ‘And look what else they’ve written.’

  Angela looked.

  Ever so nice to see you at Blackpool this summer. Will call between Christmas and New Year.

  ‘We’ve never been to Blackpool in our lives,’ screeched Roger. Well, it was nearly a screech anyway.

  ‘Perhaps it came to the wrong house,’ said Angela. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t meant for you, and you opened it by mistake.’

  ‘I thought of that,’ said Roger. ‘No way. I looked through the dustbin till I found the envelope. It was addressed to us all right.’

  ‘It was right at the bottom of the bin. He was out there till after midnight, looking. By torchlight. I went to bed in the end and left him to it. Then he brings this stinking little envelope up to the bedroom and drops tea leaves all over the white bedspread. Acting like he’d found the crown jewels . . .’

  ‘Must have been good exercise for you, old man,’ said Peter. ‘Keep you in shape.’

  Angela silenced him with a look. But Roger did not even seem to have noticed the jibe. He blundered on.

  ‘But who are they? Who are they?’

  Peter took the card from Angela, and assumed a heavily judicious air.

  ‘Well, speaking as a non-computer, a mere scribbler, I would say they are definitely not our sort of people.’

  Roger flinched. Peter continued.

  ‘Definitely your workers, these. About fifty years old, I’d say; Fred and Alice, that is. I can almost see them. Fred in a cardigan, unbuttoned to let his paunch hang out. Shirt done up, but no tie. Balding, and so many wrinkles on his forehead, he could screw his hat on. Fond of his pint. Laughs at his own jokes. Alice . . . Alice is a bit more difficult. Tight-permed, blue-rinsed hair. Blue fly-away spectacles. Big handbag full of snaps of Darren and Tracy and the other grandchildren. As for Aunty Lou . . . thick, grey, lisle stockings and a smell . . .’

  Angela could have screamed. That was exactly as she had seen them too. Was Peter a magician? Or was she just used to living with him, knowing the way his mind worked? He was certainly having a terrible effect on Roger; Roger had turned quite green around the gill
s. But why; why was he reacting so strongly? Then she had a vision. Roger and Biddy with their parties between Christmas and New Year, almost perpetual parties . . . bosses, colleagues – smart parties. And then a ring on the bell and . . . in walk Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou. Instant disaster.

  Only it wasn’t going to happen. Because Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou were inside her own husband’s head. This was the second card he’d sent. She opened her mouth to spill the beans. Then she looked at Peter. And he firmly shook his head at her, with a look that froze up her mouth.

  ‘If they come near here,’ said Roger desperately, ‘I’ll call the police.’

  ‘Oh, darling, you can’t,’ wailed Biddy. ‘It’s Christmas . . .’

  She didn’t tackle him about it until they were drinking their Horlicks. He was sitting in the bedroom chair, wearing a large-checked dressing gown that he must have had since he was fourteen; both the tassels of the cord had unravelled, and one elbow was paling into a hole. She had twice bought him nice new dressing gowns; he had never worn either. But he looked reassuringly harmless in this one; still a fourteen-year-old, wearing a false beard for a joke. Or like an amiable dancing bear.

  She decided on the casual approach. ‘That Christmas card. What a scream. Roger’s face! I could have died. How did you fake the writing?’

  It had been a mean, crabbed script, totally unlike Peter’s wild, generous hand.

  He looked at her; she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.

  ‘I didn’t fake any writing.’

  ‘You got someone to write it for you. Go on, admit it. That was the second card you sent them.’

  He took a deep swig of Horlicks, and stroked the brindled cat on his knee. The brindle pushed her cheek against his face enthusiastically; all the cats adored him; queued up, had fights to sit on his knee.