by Rose Tremain
But now, with a swoon of terror, she knew he wasn’t going to come home. He was never going to come home. On this day, the 16th of June 1944, he had died.
Lucy got up and ran to Patricia’s house and beat on the door. Simon opened it and Lucy fell into Simon’s arms. ‘He’s gone!’ she cried out. ‘I know it! I feel it! Geoffrey’s gone, Simon!’
She broke down and sobbed and Patricia came and put her arms round her and round Simon. They let her cry for a long time, then they sat her down on a sofa and Simon gave her a glass of brandy. He kneeled by her and said: ‘We were going to come and see you, but we didn’t because there’s still hope, Lucy. We’ve seen this before: planes limping home . . . after we’d almost given up. And Geoffrey’s a brilliant flyer. We know he was still alive at nineteen hundred hours. He was in the Caen–Falaise area. He’d been hit in the tail but he radioed in that he still had buoyancy and had a good chance of making it across the Channel . . .’
Lucy stared at her friends.
Still alive at nineteen hundred hours.
Now, it was nearly nine o’clock and she could see it all as clearly as though she had been watching a motion picture: the burning Typhoon goes into the sea. It sinks down the fathoms, turning over and over, and Geoffrey’s body falls out of the open cockpit and begins its own slow descent, with his arms outstretched.
How deep was the sea? How many minutes did it take for the body to reach the ocean floor and lie still, among the starfish?
The farm of La Charité, south of Caen, France, June 1944
Hoeing peas in the field which bordered the Caen road, Gaston heard the plane and looked up.
The sight of the Typhoon in the distance thrilled him. They’d been seen in the skies for ten days now. The pilots, British and American, flying low, would wave at the French farmers in the fields. The waves said: It’s all right. We’re on your side. You’ve got nothing to fear from us. The liberation of France is coming!
This one was still quite far away. It banked and turned and at the top of the turn, the engine seemed to stutter for a moment, but then down it came again and began to approach the boundary of La Charité, and Gaston could now see anti-aircraft shells exploding in the sky. The Boche were firing at the plane.
Gaston leaned on his hoe and stared up. He wanted to wave at the beleaguered plane – I’m on your side! – but he knew he was too far away, as yet, to be seen by the pilot. He took off his cap.
Then, at the corner of his vision, he saw something coming towards him down the Caen road, and he didn’t recognise at first what this was, because the heat in the air made far-off things shimmer and break apart. Then, he recognised it as the pony-cart Antoine had driven out in earlier, to take tomatoes and marrows to their neighbour, poor Madame Marzan, who could no longer care for her own vegetable plot.
Gaston raised his cap, to wave to his father in the pony-cart, to wave to the British pilot. Though the roar of the Typhoon’s engine afflicted him, he thought optimistically of the time that was coming, when the war would be over, when the Germans would be gone and all would return to a sweet quiet at La Charité, leaving him and his father alone to work and prosper. And he longed for this – for the skies to be empty, for his heart to be still.
Again, he heard gunfire. The plane seemed to bounce and shudder, as though the pilot might have lost control of it. More shells exploded in the air. Gaston threw down his hoe, jumped the shallow ditch and stepped onto the road. The plane dropped lower and began to follow the line of the road. Then, from under its wings, bright flashes appeared. The plane was firing its guns.
Gaston gaped. The attack on the Typhoon was clearly being mounted from behind it but now, the pilot was strafing the road ahead. Fountains of earth and stones burst upwards as the shells hit. With no thought for his own safety, Gaston bolted towards his father in the pony-cart. He could hear the horse whinnying in terror. Then, he saw Antoine climb out of the cart and try to run towards the ditch, but he didn’t reach the ditch. Bits of the road rose up and danced, momentarily, around Antoine and flung him on his face.
As Gaston stumbled on towards his father, the plane banked again and turned and flew westwards, heading for the sea.
Southwold Beach, Suffolk, England, June 1976
The light drains from the sky and the sea appears grey and flat, but the air is still warm.
Lucy and Ray’s friends, Peter and Monica, own a beach hut and are preparing a simple supper for them and for Hannah, who sit on the hut’s little veranda and sip white wine.
Ray says to Lucy, ‘You know, I’ve never known the sea so warm here. Today would have been an ideal day for you to try it.’
‘I’m sure it would,’ says Lucy.
‘I mean,’ says Ray, ‘it honestly barely felt cold for a moment. I know you always think it’s going to be freezing, but today it wasn’t.’
‘Perhaps I’ll try it next time,’ says Lucy.
‘Yeah, but you won’t,’ insists Ray. ‘There’ll always be some reason why you can’t get near it. And it’s a bit mad . . . after all this time.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Ray,’ says Hannah. ‘It doesn’t matter if Mum never goes into the sea again in her whole life.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter, in any significant sense of the word. It just strikes me as a bit bizarre, because I think Mum could conquer this, if she tried.’
‘She does try.’
‘She doesn’t. She just sits there. She could put a toe in the water, just a toe, to see what it felt like, but she won’t even do that.’
‘No,’ says Lucy. ‘Ray’s right. I don’t try. I’m still waiting.’
‘Waiting?’ says Ray. ‘Waiting for what?’
‘Just waiting.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. Waiting for Geoffrey to come back from the dead, or what?’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say,’ says Hannah.
‘Yes, it is,’ says Ray. ‘I’m sorry. I just get . . . annoyed with it all sometimes. Things should be over when they’re over, but I’ve lived with this for twenty years.’
Silence falls on the little veranda and there are only the sounds of Peter and Monica making the supper, talking quietly to each other. Lucy lights a cigarette and says: ‘I know I’ve said this before, but I do sometimes think that something will come, that something will happen . . . I mean, you hear about this, about people being cured of their phobias and fears, don’t you? I’ve read about it: people who are afraid of things for years and years and then a day comes and they realise, they’re not terrified any more. They can face it, whatever it is.’
‘I expect it’s because they’ve spent some time with a psychiatrist, who has helped them to conquer stuff. And I don’t know why you’ve always refused to do this.’
‘What can a psychiatrist tell me, Ray? I’m afraid of the sea – repelled by it – because Geoffrey’s plane went down into it and his body has lain there, unburied, for thirty-two years, and I know that if I went swimming, I’d feel as though I was treading on Geoffrey’s face. How can anything a psychiatrist says alter that simple fact?’
Ray turns away. Lucy sips her wine. The sighing of the sea suddenly seems louder than before. After a moment, Peter comes through with a dish of crudités, sliced salami and olives.
‘Fodder,’ he says. ‘More coming. All rather simple. Pretend you’re in France.’
The farm of La Charité, south of Caen, France, June 1976
By the time Gaston wakes from his siesta and goes looking for his son, Paul has unearthed the entire canopy of the plane’s cockpit.
Sweating in the afternoon sun, he crouches down and touches the glass, then tries to wipe it clear of the earth that clings to it. Below the glass, he can now see a lumpen shape, and he thinks that this is the shape of the dead pilot, bone and dust now, but somehow held together by his helmet and his flying jacket.
What he feels is a mingling of shock and thrill.
He looks up and sees Gaston coming towards him. He w
atches his father’s face. Gaston says nothing and Paul says nothing. Gaston comes and stands near his son, looking down at the plane in the earth. Then, he buries his face in his hands. ‘No!’ he cries. ‘No!’
Paul leads him away. They sit down in the kitchen. Paul finds a bottle of Calvados and pours a shot for Gaston. He waits in silence a long while. Gaston drinks the Calvados and stares out at the room, as though the room might be a place he’d never visited before.
Eventually, he begins to talk. His voice is choked and quiet.
‘That day in June,’ he says, ‘the day Pappi died on the road, I carried Pappi’s body home in my arms. I laid him out here, on the table, and he was still warm and blood was still leaking from his wounds. I could do nothing. All I did was kiss his face. His face hadn’t been touched. The wounds were to his spine.
‘I stroked his hair. I howled like a fox.
‘Later, when the sun was beginning to go down, around eight o’clock, I left him and went out to get a breath of air, and to try to think what I could do. But I couldn’t think of anything to do. I was alone now. And I was all muddled and conflicted in my head, because Pappi had been killed, not by the Germans, but by a Typhoon – by a British pilot, who was meant to be on our side. And I thought, The world is finished for me now.’
Gaston holds out his glass and Paul refills it with Calvados. Tears begin to roll down Gaston’s cheeks as he says: ‘I’ve kept the damn thing a secret for all this time, because of that. Because of my anger. Because, after that day, I’ve never been happy and calm in my mind again. I know it was wrong of me. That pilot should have had a proper burial, with honours. He was as brave as the next man, and I knew that. With the flak coming at him, he was confused, that’s all. He mistook Pappi’s cart for a German jeep, or some damn enemy truck. But I couldn’t forgive him. I’ve never forgiven him. I did what I did and that’s the end of it.’
Gaston weeps. Paul lays his hand on his father’s bowed head.
‘Tell me what happened next, Papa,’ he says gently.
Gaston fumbles for a handkerchief, blows his nose and says: ‘It was when I went out to get that breath of air, around eight, that I heard the plane again – the Typhoon. I looked up and there it was, that murdering plane, and it was coming towards La Charité again, but this time it was on fire.
‘I cried out. It was coming lower and lower all the time and I thought it was going to take out the house and Pappi’s body in the kitchen – everything.
‘I shouted and screamed at it. I swore blue murder at the air. If I’d had a gun with me, I would have fired it, to make sure the pilot who’d killed Pappi paid with his life.
‘But it didn’t touch the house. It sailed over it, with flames streaming behind, like a comet’s tail. Then it fell. It just plunged into the ground, in the middle of the water-meadow. It went into that muddy earth, and the impact was so great that the earth took it and seemed to swallow it up. The flames were snuffed out. Everything ended for it in that last fall – for the pilot and for the plane. There was a little smoke, not much, some fragments of blackened metal. The field swallowed it all.’
Solange comes home from her visit to Caen and piles her shopping on the kitchen table. When she looks at the faces of her husband and son, her hand flies up to the silver crucifix she wears round her neck.
‘What’s happened?’ she asks. Yet Solange’s voice is so quiet that the question almost isn’t there.
Lucy and Ray’s house, Westleton, Suffolk, June 1976
Ray takes the call from the French Embassy in London. The Chargé d’Affaires is both formal and apologetic. In elegant terms, he outlines the strange circumstances: the rediscovery of the Typhoon, the dating of the crash, the identification of the pilot, the remorse of the farmer, in whose field the plane lay buried for so long. The French State, he says, wishes – in the near future – to hold some commemoration ceremony for a brave British serviceman.
Ray thanks him for his courtesy. He sits down and calls Lucy to his side and takes her hand and says: ‘They think they’ve found Geoffrey. He didn’t go down into the sea. He went down into a field south of Caen.’
Lucy is mute. Her brain feels as though somebody had thrown a black cloth over it. She stares at Ray.
‘No,’ she says, after a while. ‘He told Control he was heading for the Channel.’
‘Yes, heading for it,’ says Ray, ‘but he didn’t make it. His plane fell into a field and apparently the impact was so great, the earth just closed up around it.’
Lucy reaches for a cigarette and Ray lights it for her.
‘I don’t know what to do . . .’ she says.
‘Well,’ says Ray, ‘the French are offering to pay for a funeral in Normandy – with full military honours. You may want to go to this. Hannah and I will be with you, of course. You can invite as many people as you like. Geoffrey’s RAF friends? Simon and what-was-her-name? The French just need a little time to make the arrangements.’
Lucy smokes. She raises her head and looks out of the window at the fine summer afternoon and she thinks, It would have been an afternoon like this, with a clear sky and the birds singing in the hawthorn, and there he fell and rested, and the grass grew over him and the seasons came and went and the frost hardened the earth around him and sealed him in.
‘How do they definitely know it’s Geoffrey?’ she asked.
Ray cleared his throat. ‘Erm . . . his plane, Lucy. His flying jacket. Papers . . .’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, of course. Those things just . . . endure . . .’
‘Do you think you can bear to go to Normandy, to see him buried – the remains, I mean? They say he’ll lie alongside some of the RAF men he knew.’
‘I want to see him buried,’ says Lucy. ‘I want him to have a proper coffin . . . and a flag draped on it. Geoffrey loved the flag. But there’s one thing I don’t understand, Ray. Didn’t anybody see the plane go down? Why didn’t someone dig Geoffrey out?’
Ray gets up and begins to pace around the room. He wishes Hannah were here to help him with this moment.
‘One man knew,’ he says quietly. ‘His name is Gaston. Apparently Geoffrey’s guns killed Gaston’s father by mistake on the Caen road. So he let Geoffrey and the plane just lie there, swallowed up by the field. He thought nobody would ever find them. He feels remorse now, but none at the time. I suppose that’s how it was in nineteen forty-four.’
The British Cemetery at Bayeux, north-west of Caen, France, July 1976
The short service is conducted by a French priest, assisted by an English rector from the Protestant church in Bayeux. The Mayor of Bayeux and Deputy Mayor attend, as do the Mayor of Caen and his wife. A small contingent from a French regimental band accompany the hymn-singing and then play an old English wartime song, hastily learned: ‘We’ll Meet Again’. A bright sun shines on the thousand white gravestones of Bayeux. A local photographer walks quietly around, taking pictures.
There are other French people there, some in Army uniform, and Lucy has no idea who they are or why they’ve joined the gathering, to bury a long-dead English pilot. She looks round the faces, but recognises no one aside from the few old friends who have come with her and Ray from England.
She has been handed a rose, to throw into the coffin, once it’s been lowered into the ground. She and Hannah walk side by side to the grave’s edge to throw in their flowers, then they cling together as they walk away. Lucy watches other people approach the grave and let the roses fall. It’s done, in every case, with reverence and precision. Each mourner walks to the grave, throws in his flower, inclines his head, and withdraws. The band begin their slow rendering of ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
Then, one man, aged sixty or so, Lucy guesses, and dressed in a Sunday suit, comes forward. He isn’t carrying a rose, but a bouquet of wild meadow flowers. He is weeping. He stands, looking down into the grave. Then he kneels and reaches down and places his flowers on the coffin. And, at once, Lucy knows who this is.
; When the ceremony is over, Lucy makes her way towards this man. She touches his arm. ‘Vous êtes Gaston,’ she says. ‘Je suis Lucy.’
Gaston bows to her. Then he raises his hands in a gesture that says, What has happened is inexpressible in words.
Yet Lucy wants there to be some words. In her halting French, she tells Gaston that she is sorry, very, very sorry, that Gaston’s father was killed by her husband. ‘If he had known . . .’ she stammers, ‘he would not have fired the guns. I know he would not have fired.’
‘I believe that, too,’ says Gaston. ‘I believe it now. But when I saw my father fall, in the middle of a summer afternoon . . .’
They stand, face to face. Gaston clutches Lucy’s hand. Then, he says, ‘I hope you can forgive me, Lucy. You lost your husband, the father of your daughter . . .’
This is brave of Gaston. Lucy sees that the man is still fighting back tears, and she reassures him that he is forgiven. She wants to say that the image of Geoffrey lying in the earth in Gaston’s field is preferable to the one she has lived with for thirty-two years, of his drowned body decaying on the cold ocean bed, but she knows her French will tangle on this complicated sentence, so she only says again: ‘I understand why you did what you did. I understand it.’
They clasp each other’s hands. The feel of Gaston’s rough hand holding tight to hers is strangely comforting. There is something eternal in it. And at the edge of their vision, they are aware of Hannah and Paul standing quietly and talking together and Gaston looks over at them and says: ‘We are fortunate, Lucy, that our young people are untouched. See how beautiful they are?’
‘Yes,’ says Lucy, ‘they are.’ But she knows the encounter must end now; Gaston wouldn’t be able to bear another minute of it. She nods to Gaston and turns to leave, but as she turns, she says: ‘Gaston, you said your father died “in the middle of the afternoon”. Can you remember what time it was?’
