He skipped lunch – his stomach was still ad all sixes and sevens from the flight – and took a rest in his room at the hotel. He lay on the bed but couldn’t sleep, his brain teeming with questions and suppositions. It was not the glory days that reclaimed him, but the quiet spaces in between.
In the middle of the afternoon he roused himself and followed the receptionist’s directions to the Roman villa. It was only a quarter of a mile away, so he walked. The barman was right, the entrance was right into the embankment beneath the main road, and was still no more than a kind of rickety wooden gangplank over the chalky mud. A well-spoken man in a shirt and tie sat in a portacabin taking a modest contribution towards further work, and handed out a single sheet showing a plan of the rooms.
Spencer was the only person there. Not knowing what to expect, he had imagined entering a house, and the reality surprised him. The gangplank entrance turned into a wooden walkway that ran around the reinforced earth wads of the site, then doubled back on itself to return as a bridge across its centre, some twelve feet above the excavated remains. This meant that the plan was easy to follow, and also that the floors which were the chief wonder of the villa were displayed to best advantage. He strolled and paused, gazing down in awe at strange spiny fish, elaborate swags of flowers and swirling abstract designs that would not have been out of place in an art nouveau drawing room, all made up of an incalculable number of tiny coloured stones. The perfection of the mosaics and the brilliance of the colours made their age even more astonishing.
But it was – he checked the plan – the dining room that really stopped him in his tracks. This was the best-preserved part of the villa, and as well as the floor a six-foot section of one wall had been exposed. The decorations on both floor and wall were pornographic. The floor showed what looked at first like a round, stylised flower with overlapping concentric petals like those of a half-open rose. But on closer inspection Spencer saw that it was a couple entwined end-to-end in mutual gratification. The bodies were all sinuous curves and voluptuousness, the faces – when he could find them – curiously placid. On the walll there were several similar images, paintings rather than mosaics, each accurately and gracefully depicting a different act of love. Once again the bodies were vibrantly sensuous but the expressions of the participants impassive. He wondered whether this was because of some spurious Roman idea of decency – that if they didn’t seem to be enjoying it that made it okay to have porn in your dining room – or because the people in the paintings were models and that was how they’d looked at the time: another job, another day, another dollar . . .
He spent some time gazing at the pictures and then went round the whole thing again to try and regain a less feverish perspective. But he still emerged feeling self-conscious, as if the respectable gent in the portacabin must know which area had absorbed most of his attention.
If he’d thought the Roman villa would take his mind off things he was wrong. Back in his room, with an hour to spare before he had to get ready, he did finally fall asleep and was plagued by the sort of dreams he hadn’t had since he was a kid. Dreams in which sex was both a temptation and a threat, but the only thing you could think about, and there were those goddam’ calm, angelic faces watching him sweat . . . He woke up with a start, excited and ashamed and with a splitting headache, to find he was going to be late.
It was a nice enough evening, but it made him glad he hadn’t opted for the organised trip. He could never have stood the enforced camaraderie, the relentless rehashing of old times because there was nothing else in common. Apart from a couple of senior officers. Mo di Angeli was the only one there he instantly recognised and was genuinely pleased to see. During the welcome drinks they washed up next to one another in the crush.
‘Spencer, son of a gun! Why aren’t you travelling with the rest of us?’
He didn’t want to hurt Mo’s feelings. ‘Couldn’t manage it – a long story.’
‘Not your style either, huh?’ He made a face, and swilled the punch around in his glass as though it were medicine. ‘What is this stuff, cherryade?’
Mo had retrained as a graphic designer after the war and had a little business in his home town, doing layouts for business publications and leaflets, and occasionally indulging himself with a bit of sign-writing.
‘You see that new sign at the pub? No offence but Jeez, what a bummer! Haymakers? I tell you, they look like goddam’ Nazis.’
Along with his Italian accent Mo had lost the soft edges of youth, where shared experience had enabled them to meld together, and acquired a shiny, grown-up post-war veneer – a bit more settled, a bit hardened, still a nice man but getting fixed in his Midwest ways. Spencer was disinclined to raise the past, preferring to let Mo make the running on that one, which he did only obliquely.
‘Not many of us here, considering. Makes you realise how many got lost.’
‘Yes. And how many preferred not to come.’
‘Reckon so? You always were a cynical bastard.’
Spencer was oddly flattered by this retrospective distinction. ‘I was not.’
‘Sure you were. You and that guy who did away with himself—’
‘Frank.’
‘Frank, right, you and he were the watchful ones. Always got stuff going on in your heads.’
Spencer decided to broach a sensitive question, not because he needed the answer, but because the writer in him wanted to hear what Mo would say.
‘Why do you reckon he did that?’
‘Killed himself?’ Mo made an extravagant gesture of ignorance and disbelief saying at the same time: ‘Because Si Santucci did.’
‘That was an accident, surely?’
‘An accident waiting to happen. He was crazy, that one. Dangerous. He hadn’t been in a P–51, he’d a been in gaol.’
‘That’s true. So Frank – your theory is he just cracked up under the strain? Si’s death was the straw that broke the camel’s back?’
Mo narrowed his eyes. ‘Say, what is this, Spence? An interrogation?’
‘I’m interested in what you think.’
‘I think they were a couple of queers, okay?’
Spencer smiled blandly. ‘I guess so.’
They were made a big fuss of by the locals, the Legion and the Parish Council, speeches of welcome were made and only at the very last was the delicate matter raised of funds for the planned memorial. The chairman of the Parish Council said that there were leaflets available explaining the costs involved, and that anyone who felt able to make a contribution, or better still a covenant, should fill in the slip at the bottom and leave it in the box which would be provided for the purpose this evening, at the dance tomorrow, and in the church porch on Sunday.
Mo granted and grumbled. ‘Might have known hard cash would come into it.’
‘We don’t have to contribute,’ Spencer pointed out. ‘We can vote with our wallets. No bucks, no memorial.’
‘You going to ante up?’
‘Yes. Just to show I’m not a cynic.’
‘All right, all right, since I came I guess I may as well chip in . . . Say, when the speeches are finished shall we hit the Haymakers’ and have ourselves a decent drink?’
As the proceedings were winding up, and Mo was making his excuses to the coach party. Spencer sought out Mrs Cornforth among her fellow workers in the kitchen.
‘That was great food, ladies, thank you.’ They declared that it was their pleasure and they were glad he’d enjoyed it. He approached Mrs Cornforth.
‘There was something I meant to ask you this morning.’
‘Ask away.’
‘You said Davey had been in trouble – what sort of trouble?’
‘With the police, so I hear. He was a proper tearaway. It’s such a shame because he was a lovely little lad.’
Spencer could hardly believe it. It was impossible to link the Davey he remembered – so eager to please, so straightforward and affectionate – with the delinquent ‘tearaway’ of Mrs C
ornforth’s description.
In the saloon bar of the Haymakers’ he’d have ordered a Scotch, but that they were obliged for politeness’ sake to accept a round on the house so he amended it to a beer.
Mo chugged down half a pint before smacking his lips and saying: ‘Don’t get me wrong back there, I got nothing against queers. They want to play for the other team, that’s their business.’
Spencer agreed that it was.
‘So anyway, Spence, you married?’
‘Ten years.’
‘Childhood sweetheart?’
‘Matter of fact, yes.’
‘Me too, me too . . .’ Mo shook his head with a reflective, salacious chuckle. ‘Jeez, but we had some good times.’ ‘You were the expert,’ said Spencer. ‘I never knew anyone who could get the girls like you.’
‘Did I ever . . . I tell you, I saw one or two at that bunfight tonight. There with their husbands, you know? Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths all of a sudden, but they weren’t talking to me.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘Hell, no, I’m a happily married man. Same again?’
Mo got in a couple of Scotches this time, and then asked: ‘What happened to that lady you were seeing so much of back then? The widow with the kids?’
‘I understand she got married and moved away.’
‘You going to look her up?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Yup,’ sighed Mo, who was now mellowing by the second. ‘Yup, that’s right, it was all a long time ago . . . But I intend to enjoy myself at the dance tomorrow night!’
The next day dawned perfect, and Spencer drove up to Church Norton in brilliant sunshine. The early summer light had that pristine quality that he remembered from before. His schedule had the meeting time for veterans and officials as eleven o’clock, but he arrived a few minutes early and there was no one there as he parked on the edge of the airfield and got out.
His first instinct was: They don’t need a memorial. This was it. The fields of bright new corn, and the hedges full of dog roses and blackthorn. Around the few remaining Quonsett huts, now used as barns, the long grass was bright with willowherb and campion and buttercups and cow parsley – names he remembered from Janet telling them to Ellen as they picked straggly bunches. Some of the runways were still there, roughened and narrowed by time but still running straight and true between the crops. Someone was walking a dog along one of them. It barked joyously. In the resonant silence that followed he could hear the birds singing.
The locals began to arrive, and then the coach. There was another round of handshaking and shoulder slapping and then they were led off on a circuit of the airfield. Remember this, remember that, this was where such and such was . . . Mo was in the thick of it this time, and in his element, full of stories and wisecracks, playing the cheery Yank for all he was worth. Spencer preferred to keep to the edge of the group, at the back. From time to time on the tour he paused to let the others get ahead, and turned to gaze around. Each time he felt the ground like a presence, it seemed to breathe, the grass and the corn stirred softly in the sun. These English fields, placid yet secretive, had grown back over the past and would keep it as it should be – hidden and safe.
The tour finished where it had begun, on the apex of the gentle hill between Church Norton and the next village, from where you could see the Norman tower of one church and the pointed steeple of the other. The president of the British Legion outlined what they had in mind, there was some discussion of the plans. Then they observed two minutes’ silence in memory of those who had died. During the silence a little breeze got up and eddied round them as they stood there with their heads bowed, carrying the warm scent and whisper of the fields.
Spencer attended the dance that evening more from a sense of duty and a spirit of journalistic enquiry than from inclination. Mo was yet again the man of the moment and did not disguise his disappointment in his friend’s dullness.
‘Come on, Spence, shake a leg! There’s a room full of great-looking women here just dying to show their appreciation for what we did in the war.’
Spencer held up his hands. ‘Count me out, Mo, you’re doing it for both of us.’
This much was true. Mo jived, jitterbugged, rocked, rolled and reeled tirelessly, jacket and tie soon discarded, his face gleaming with perspiration, his rotund frame pivoting and swaying on his implausibly trim and mobile legs. Spencer watched as mature matrons and giggling girls alike were subjected to the di Angeli effect and, as always, fell under its spell. Local husbands and boyfriends, amiable but envious, stood aside as Mo whirled from one partner to the next. Former top brass, steering their partners round the perimeter of the hall in a more stately measure, tried to ignore this impromptu floor show but it was hard when the band encouraged it by upping the ante, hurtling mercilessly from ‘In the Mood’ to ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
At ten o’clock Spencer left them all to it. The perfect day had given way to a clear, still night, but at the end of May it was as yet not completely dark. He walked round the hall to where there had always been an iron kissing gate that led to a footpath over the fields. The gate, happily, was still there, and he went through it and walked a couple of hundred yards down the path with the music fading behind him. The grey light, the fledgling stars, the distant music – he seemed poised between several worlds, belonging in none.
As he went back to the car he resolved to set the alarm early again in the morning and speak to Hannah whose face already he could no longer picture in detail.
‘Hallo,’ she said drowsily. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Pretty well. This morning’s the church service, and then we’re detailed off for lunch in various houses. I can’t remember where I’m supposed to be going, but I shan’t starve – the fatted calf’s been killed around here.’
‘It sounds fun. I almost wish I was there with you instead of watching The Lucy Show.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘You sound a bit flat. Are you all right?’
‘Sorry, sugar, it’s early, I’m not properly awake yet.’
‘But you are glad you went?’
‘I guess so. Plenty of good material.’
‘Well, that’s the main thing.’
He thought he detected the merest edge in her tone. ‘You know me, I don’t believe there’s any purpose to be served in going back just for the sake of it.’
‘No.’
‘Tell you what,’ he changed the subject, ‘there’s a terrific Roman ruin right near where I’m staying. Fantastic mosaics and wall paintings, half of them porn.’
‘Did you say porn?’
‘That’s right, like a manual of positions, in the dining room. You’d love it.’
‘Think we should try it here?’
‘What, the pictures or the positions?’
‘Both, tiger . . .’ She growled. By the time he hung up he felt they’d got back in touch with each other. The trouble with the phone was it implied an intimacy that couldn’t be properly realised so half the time hearing the other person’s voice wound up doing more harm than good.
He’d managed to stay on the sidelines till now, but in church they made it clear that no backsliding would be tolerated. The churchwardens pretty well frogmarched him to the front, where Mo raised a hand and indicated he’d kept him a seat.
Mo leaned against him and stage whispered: ‘Where’d you get to last night, you missed all the fun!’
‘That was the general idea.’
‘It was a riot, I tell ya.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
There had been more activity in the church since he’d been here on Friday – the English and American flags and the standards of the men’s and women’s branches of the British Legion hung above the chancel, the altar had some kind of prettified embroidered cloth draped over it, and on the shelf in front of each pew there were order of service sheets. Partly to dissuade Mo from communicating any further indis
cretions, Spencer picked the sheet up and studied it. If it was to be believed there was a lot to be got through. Both National Anthems, four hymns, prayers, thanks and addresses by this person and that, a presentation by the school, a sermon . . .
His face must have showed something, for Mo leaned towards him again. ‘Yeah,’ he muttered throatily. ‘My sentiments exactly.’
The vicar announced the first hymn from the back of the church and they all rose, bellowing out ‘All People That on Earth Do Dwell’ as the choir entered. Pretty much the same mix of people, Spencer noticed, apart from a couple of younger men, but they’d smartened their outfits up a bit since the war: dark blue gowns that fitted properly, with little white fully jabots at the neck for the women. As they processed by they beefed up the congregation’s singing appreciably, but there was no one whose voice or appearance could have held a candle to Rosemary’s.
The service wore on. In spite of his misgivings it held Spencer’s attention. The sense of occasion, the music, the experience held in common and individually remembered – even Mo blew his nose loudly at one point. These were good, kind people. Spencer was moved.
The stirring of emotion may have made him more receptive, but round about the third hymn he heard it. The hymn was one that in common with most of his compatriots he didn’t know, so like them he was standing in silence, following the words on the service sheet with a suitably attentive expression. And because he wasn’t singing, he heard her. Somewhere in amongst the swell of voices there was hers – rich, melodious, unmistakable, a tad more chanteuse than chorister.
He looked over his shoulder, briefly, but there were rows and rows of people, the church was packed and he spotted no one he knew except for a couple of peaky-looking ladies from last night, and Mrs Cornforth, trilling lustily away.
During the sermon he tried again, looking round under the pretence of smothering a cough, but only succeeded in attracting the attention of the nearest church warden who crept forward and asked if he’d like a glass of water. Horribly embarrassed, he declined. After the sermon came an invitation to stay behind for coffee, then the National Anthems, another hymn, more prayers and the blessing, and a final hymn during which the choir processed out.
The Grass Memorial Page 56
