Recovery
and
The Return of Ethan Hart
Two Novellas
Stephen Benatar
For
Henry Fitzherbert
and
—naturally—
for John Murphy
Recovery
1
Okay. Don’t panic. You’ll soon make sense of this.
And there, in that window, your reflection.
Young. Clean shaven. Hair dark blond.
T-shirt, jeans.
Pockets!
Oh, but for heaven’s sake, containing what? Just a tissue and a silver hip flask (empty, yet so well-handled that the chasing’s pretty worn) plus the snapshot of a woman who’s at present unfamiliar. Nothing else. No billfold. No credit cards. No change. You guess you must have lost your jacket.
Left it behind you someplace.
But…only try to think now. Where exactly are you?
Exactly you’re outside a narrow building in Foley Street W1 (since you’ve now moved along from that barbershop window, taken a step or two to the right, and there’s a street sign overhead: City of Westminster).
London, then.
The front door of the building is open—ajar—could you be the one who’s neglected to close it? Maybe you rent one of the offices? Maybe you were visiting? Maybe you’d just stepped back into the sunlight and then…wham! This! Where am I? Or more to the point—who am I?
The door is green and dingy. Beyond it you see pale blue walls; navy blue lino. The offices listed comprise that of a textiles company on the first floor, a school of fashion on the second—and, yes, you gaze at the plate with a mixture of nervousness and validation—a private detective on the third.
You ascend the steep and narrow staircase. Bare wood. Loafers would resonate; your sneakers make no sound. On each of the three landings the walls remain pale blue. Grubbily pale blue.
The detective’s name is Newman. “Good evening,” you say, when he opens his office door—your watch has told you that it’s nearly six. “I know this is going to sound a little odd…” And then you stop.
You’re American!
American!
You concentrate on the man before you. The guy could still be in his thirties; but later on you learn he’s forty-four, a youthful forty-four; tall, lean, roughly your own colouring. Grey-suited; smart. You’re patently a stranger to him.
His office breaks with the general theme of blue. Cream walls, grey carpet, green drapes. Plants on the windowsill. A David Hockney print.
Filing cabinets, reference books, a computer, cafetière—
My God, though. I’m American!
I sit across the desk from him. On my way up, of course, I’d been hoping he would say I’d only just left—and that he’d been on the point of chasing after me with my jacket.
“Have you tried the floors below?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Textiles? A fashion school? I don’t think they sound very much like me.”
“How do you know what sounds very much like you? Perhaps you’ve been doing a spot of modelling. You’re working your way through Europe?”
“Oh, yes. Sure.” I watch him fiddle with a paperclip. We’ve dismissed the possibility of my having been mugged. A mugging might account for the amnesia but I don’t have any bruises; nor did I need to pick myself up off the sidewalk; nor would any mugger have left me with my watch. “Anyhow,” I say, “at least it was providential that if this had to happen it should have been outside the office of a private dick.”
Newman concentrates for a moment on the pulling open of his paperclip. “Mightn’t it have been more providential,” he asks, “outside the entrance to a hospital? You see, I can’t help thinking it’s a doctor you require…or even a good night’s rest. Not a detective.”
He has a kind face; attractive manner. Yet rejection is still rejection, however pleasantly it’s couched.
“Okay. Supposing you’re right? Where’d you suggest I get that good night’s rest?”
“That’s why I said a hospital. I could have said the embassy. But there’s also the question of whether or not you’d be better off sedated.”
After three seconds or so, I get to my feet. “Apparently,” I say, “there’s something one never forgets—even with amnesia. Everybody likes to be paid. But I thought that once I’d found my jacket… Or have you forgotten? This watch is a Rolex!” My voice betrays an odd blend of sarcasm and swank. “Yellow gold; eighteen-carat. Costs upwards of nine thousand dollars.” I sound like a salesman.
He looks a bit nonplussed. Suddenly he grins.
“How do you know all that?”
This reaction is disarming. I remove my hand from the doorknob. “You’re right. It is sort of weird, isn’t it?”
“You don’t remember buying it?”
“No, nothing like that. Clearly I’m a guy who’s very well-informed.”
He laughs. There follows a slight pause.
“I’m sorry,” he says then. “You know, it wasn’t the money I was thinking of.”
I don’t respond.
“No, that isn’t wholly true. But what is true is that I was also worried about my not being the person best qualified to help.”
“And I had this hunch you might be. The person best qualified to help.”
“Well, as a detective I, too, am a great respecter of hunches.” He holds out his hand and with a rueful smile indicates the empty chair. He says, “I have a flat in Golders Green and you’d be welcome to its spare room.”
So naturally I sit down again and he makes us both a cup of coffee. Strangely, even before I’ve tasted it, I realize that I don’t take sugar; in the same way, for instance, I haven’t forgotten that the year we’re in is 1990. (Though plainly there can’t be any hard-and-fast rule: until I’d heard my own voice I’d taken it for granted I was English.) “So what are we going to call you?” he asks. “My own first name is Tom.”
“How about X?”
“No way. How about Tex?”
I pull a face. “Do you really see me as some aw-shucks, bowlegged cowboy?”
He only smiles. “Now, where’s that snapshot you mentioned?”
I produce it from my back pocket. He studies it a moment. “Have you any idea how old this is?”
It’s certainly black-and-white. It’s certainly creased and shabby. I suppose that, earlier on, my aim had been only to recognize the face. Apart from that, I hadn’t noticed much.
He hands it back. “Look at the hairstyle,” he says. “Look at the line of the dress.”
He’s right. I guess it can only have been pure shock which—on the sidewalk—had prevented me from seeing. “Second World War,” I murmur.
“Or possibly straight after.”
“But that’s crazy. Why would I be toting around the picture of some girl who by now must be an old woman?”
“Your mother, perhaps?”
“Oh, come on. What normal guy carries a pinup of his mother? Well, practically a pinup?”
He regards me in a thoughtful way.
“I reckon you’re probably in your mid-twenties, yes?” I’ve already told him I’ve caught up on my reflection. “So, if you were born some twenty years after the war, why do you have a wartime snapshot in your pocket? And the likelihood is, too—because of the church behind her—that she’s British. How does that tie in with the fact of your not being?”
How indeed? I gaze again at the woman’s picture as though the answer to his questions can be determined in her face. But then I get distracted by something which is surely more deep-seated than her prettiness; and suddenly I find myself wondering, with stra
nge irrelevance in view of all my problems, what might have been her circumstances around that instant when the shutter closed.
2
“Trixie, why not save your film for something special? This is sheer waste.”
“Oh, bollocks, Roz. Don’t hold yourself so cheap. Come on, just flash those pearly whites.”
That’s rich. Me hold myself cheap. I know damned well how she got hold of that film. I’ve seen the chap who gave it to her. Preferable, if you ask me, to pay the price on the black market. Or better—far better—to use that ex-RAF stuff, even if they do say that half the time it doesn’t work.
Anyhow, being the soul of obedience, I smile like the Bile Beans girl and although I don’t exactly flash those pearly whites I snatch up one side of my frock, strike what I hope is an alluring pose and for a moment imagine an interesting new me on the cover of Picture Post.
“Oh, that’s nice, hold it,” she cries; and then, picture taken, with quick change of emphasis: “Yes, that’s nice! Right in front of the church, too! Supposing the vicar saw? He’d think that Betty Grable had come to Suffolk.”
“Well, if he’d really think that, let’s go in and offer him a second chance.”
To go in is the whole purpose of the exercise. I’ve wanted to do this ever since the first weekend she and I came here, which was nearly two years ago, in the summer of ’43—but both on that occasion and the ones which followed (Trix being a Philistine) we never got round to it. I hadn’t learned to be assertive.
So now it could be something of an anticlimax.
But it isn’t.
I think the first thing that strikes me is the radiance. Except for the west window the stained glass has all been blown out by enemy action and—as though deliberately to compensate—the light can now flood in through wholly clear replacements, emphasizing the loftiness of the nave, the slenderness of the pillars, the fine proportions of the roof. I wish I knew all the names, because for someone who enjoys looking round old churches I’m pretty unversed in the terminology. I suppose I’m a dabbler who likes the inscriptions and the pews and the paving stones: the connection with past lives. Along with the stillness and the sense of awe. The splendour.
There’s a magnificent and brightly coloured pulpit. There’s also a wonderfully elaborate organ case and a tall painted screen celebrating some of the saints and angels. It’s sixteenth-century but touched up in Victorian times. A typed card charmingly informs us that St Jude—as restored—became very like the rector.
I’m admiring this delightful screen when I hear Trixie talking to someone. This turns out to be a gum-chewing American airman, boyish-faced though burly and bull-necked.
“Excuse me for butting in,” she’s saying, “but I couldn’t help overhearing. Sounds like you and me are in the same boat. Being dragged around to get a bit of culture by our educated friends!” I feel I’d like to slosh her.
“Our boring, educated friends!” returns the airman. “That is—no, lady, I’m sorry—I certainly didn’t mean yours; I meant that highbrow over there.”
The fellow whom he indicates smiles vaguely at Trixie but continues to give his main attention to a small wooden man in armour who apparently strikes a bell on every hour. “Say, Walt, come here a minute. This little guy is getting all set to do his stuff. Any second now.”
“Hey, Roz,” shouts Trixie, “you don’t want to miss this.”
I cross over to where the three of them are grouped; there’s no one else in sight but even so I tell myself crabbily that the church is much too full.
“Come on—hurry! This is Roz,” says Trixie, while I’m still ten feet away. “And I’m Trix.”
“Glad to know you,” says her big, good-humoured new acquaintance. “I’m Walt. And my friend here is Matt.”
He’s hardly spoken when the little man in armour strikes the bell.
And the highbrow laughs.
As he does so my churlishness begins to fade. His pleasure is infectious. Besides—it occurs to me I would have missed out but for him.
“Cute,” says Walt. “And you’d always know this guy was English.”
“Why?” asks Trixie, so willing to enjoy the joke she’s already started giggling.
“Reminding us it’s teatime. And there’s a nice place for tea we noticed on our way to be religious. You ladies care to join us?”
I’m about to decline but Trixie says, “We’d love to!” and glares at me no less tellingly than if my careless talk were costing lives.
She and I know the Sugar Loaf Tearooms. Their bread and carrot cake and soda scones are all delicious and the bread doesn’t even have that greyish tinge. We’re obliged to queue for a table. The teashop has a holiday atmosphere—not unexpected in a seaside resort on the first warm Saturday of spring. It’s the twenty-first of April. The noise level is high and becomes even higher, breaks into cheering and applause, when a waitress—poor woman—drops a loaded tray. (Tearooms for the moment have lost all their gentility. Thank God.) The building is one of the few in Southwold that survived the fire of 1659 and the timber beams speak of precisely that: survival. Indomitable spirit. It’s a good place and even without the Americans is probably where we’d have ended up.
When at last we get our table, conversation becomes less superficial. We already know they’re stationed at Halesworth, some eight miles away, but now we hear more of the details. They’re members of the 5th Emergency Rescue Squadron. They specialize in air-sea rescue work. Walt talks with enthusiasm about their lifeboat-carrying B-17s, their CA-10 Catalina amphibians and in particular their P-47 Thunderbolts. For a minute I wonder if he should be telling us all this but then I realize that at this stage it can hardly matter. He also tells us—probably sensing the need to recapture Trixie’s interest—about the time last August when Glen Miller came to Boxted. (They had moved the short distance to Halesworth only this January.) Trixie wants a rundown on every piece of music that was played, and descriptions not simply of the late major—no one still believes, unhappily, that after all these months he can be referred to any longer as just missing—not simply of him, but of almost every member of the band. While Walt does his best to satisfy her I take the opportunity, surreptitiously, to have a good look at his friend.
Matt’s full name is Matthew Cassidy. Before, in the church, it hadn’t occurred to me he was especially handsome; only that I liked something about his face. But now I must have got my eye in, for handsome he undoubtedly is. Coarse fair hair—though not as short as you’d expect an English officer’s to be; blue eyes, straight nose, firm jawline. For what I think must be the first time, I really know what ‘clean-cut’ means; even his wrists and hands seem to exemplify it. I am twenty-four and probably have never felt so stirred by the way a man is put together.
Or am I allowed to dignify this and say that of course his whole personality must have contributed? That I’m speaking of the full package?
Walt exhausts the charms of August 6th and of the sweet strains flooding through the main hangar on that golden Sunday afternoon. “We were sitting on the wing of a B-24 that was being serviced—you remember, Matt? And, ladies, I don’t mind telling you, it was swell but it sure made us feel a little homesick.”
“Yes, I’ll bet,” I say. “But at least you’ll soon be getting back there, won’t you? Though do you realize: you haven’t told us yet where home is?”
“For him, Connecticut,” says Walt. “San Francisco, for me.”
“Oh, then you must know that song!” cries Trixie. She starts to sing it. “‘San Francisco…open your golden gate…’” Heads turn towards our table and she giggles and feigns bashfulness. “I remember Jeanette MacDonald singing it in that film with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and the earthquake. I suppose the song’s called ‘San Francisco’. I can’t remember what the film is.”
“‘San Francisco’,” Walt supplies and we all laugh. I get the passing thought that it was calculated (Trixie is by no means the dumb blonde she pretends, any more
than I’m the brainy brunette she also claims) but it’s still quite funny.
“And I once read ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’,” I say to Matt. “So I’m well up on where you come from, too.”
This time it’s only him and me who laugh. Trixie is too busy saying to Walt, “I liked that film; I found it ever so inspiring. Spencer Tracy’s in the one we’re going to see tonight. It’s called ‘Without Love’.”
“Well, is that right? We’ve been wanting to catch up on that movie for months. Didn’t you say so just the other day, Matt?”
“What?”
Walt has to remind him meaningfully of what he had said so emphatically just the other day.
“Oh, sure,” Matt confirms. “I’ve been boring everybody senseless!”
We arrive at the Electric Picture Palace in time for the full programme—and bypass the longest queues by going in the dearest seats and needing to stand on the staircase for only a few minutes. The full programme comprises a second-feature, the news, Food Flashes, trailers, a Pete Smith Speciality, a medley of tunes on the theatre organ… I’m always pleased to get my money’s worth and so, I find out now, is Matt, “even down to your God Save the King,” he shamelessly confesses. But Trixie and Walt decide not to see the end of the big picture (so that we’ll have longer in the pub) and Matt and I fall in obligingly.
“You didn’t mind?” he asks, as we walk together a short way behind the other two—who proceed first arm-in-arm and then, soon after, arm-round-waist.
I shake my head. “But I’m not the one who’s been so frantic to catch up with it.”
“In fact, I have an admission.” I’m sure he already surmises, from the little he’s drawn out of me, that he isn’t really spoiling my enjoyment. “I found it talkative and dull.”
“Oh, what a letdown! I’m truly sorry.”
“And irritating! All those ‘by gums’ which were clearly meant to be so full of charm!”
“I know! You sat there almost waiting for the next! And what about her proud and tearful memory of her dying husband—who ‘grinned that grin of his’? I think I’d even have accepted a couple of extra ‘by gums’ in exchange.”
Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart Page 1
