Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart

by Stephen Benatar

  In the morning we find a message from Trixie that’s been pushed beneath our door. It’s folded around an enclosure.

  “I told some fibs last night. I loved Roz but I was jealous. It just didn’t seem fair. I told you how she got pregnant. I didn’t say how she’d already had the baby by the time I stopped hearing and how full of it she was. That’s why I pretended I couldn’t find this second letter—not even sure now why I kept it. It was me who didn’t stay in touch. You see, I never answered her, not either of her letters, just couldn’t face the thought of it. And also, what was really mean, I never told her that I had that picture of her boyfriend, perhaps she never knew I’d taken it. But I didn’t for one second think he’d gone and ditched her—not like she did—knowing old Roz it was probably just some silly hiccup, not that blinking Marjorie she always talked about, and nothing like my own case where I knew I didn’t stand a chance. Anyhow I thought I’d got over all this long before last night. But I can’t pretend as how I got much sleep…”

  Her message finishes by saying she won’t be at work today, or tomorrow, because she’s off to Yorkshire for a short break. She asks us to give Roz all her love when we finally find her.

  “When?” I say. “I guess she means if.”

  I’m pretty certain Tom will contradict me. But he doesn’t. He remains silent.

  “Should we leave Trixie some flowers?” I ask. “Or wine? Or chocolates? I mean, as well as a bit of cash, naturally.” I feel happier now about suggesting further outlay.

  Anyway, Tom would soon have come up with the same suggestion. “Yes, we’ll definitely find her something.” He means alongside the originals of my father’s snapshot and the letters, all of which he wants to get photocopied.

  I’m surprised.

  “Photocopying on a Sunday?”

  “No, but I was wondering. If the room isn’t taken, why don’t we stay over until Monday? That would mean we could enjoy a nice relaxed Sunday by the sea, yet still get back to London in plenty of time to see Herb Kramer…” But here his voice tails off; his attention elsewhere. He has now opened Rosalind Farr’s second letter—which, to some extent, I seem to have been fighting shy of.

  “This one,” he says, “is dated March 5th, 1946.”

  As Trixie had implied (but I’d forgotten) it’s a happy letter. Yet the penultimate sentence possesses a poignancy that leaves us silent for a moment.

  “‘It will be wonderful to see you and we’ll have tremendous fun, just make it soon.’”

  I’ve been standing at the window, staring again into the branches of the horse chestnut. “Oh, hell,” I say.

  “Well, it wasn’t your doing.”

  “No. Then why do I feel as though it were?”

  “Because you’ve got a name like Cassidy. Which probably means you’re a Catholic. Which probably means you have a Catholic conscience.”

  He puts his hand round my shoulder.

  “Which probably means, in short, that all of it—absolutely all of it—is your doing!”

  14

  I wish I could have stunned him with a new dress, preferably something long. (But at least he’s never seen my cobalt blue, which I wore to the Troc in 1939.)

  I wish I could have had my hair done.

  I wish I could have stupefied him with my jitterbug. (Or anyway, I mean, have had the fun of being able to fantasize a little.)

  No, forget all the rest of it. I wish that as soon as we’d got there we could simply have enjoyed ourselves.

  Because everything’s laid on for our enjoyment.

  The dancing takes place in the main hangar, which is festooned with crepe paper. Balloons are hung at the entrance to the base and Chinese lanterns brighten several pathways. The refreshments are extraordinary, not just the profusion but the variety. Naturally I exclaim as much as anyone and hope that once I’ve tasted them I may even start to feel hungry.

  Fat chance.

  I’m not the only one without an appetite. You see them everywhere: the couples who are either clinging in barely concealed unhappiness or else putting on an act. I, too, am putting on an act.

  I hate it.

  And I resent Matt for appearing so very much as normal.

  We walk out of the hangar into fresh air. From somewhere comes the unmistakable scent of wallflowers. Can someone on the base have made a little garden?

  He’s not aware of it, he says, but that isn’t to say it hasn’t happened. “You’re not cold, are you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Yet after that great heat in there…” He offers me his jacket. “Wiser not to risk a chill.”

  Who cares about a chill, I want to ask. Who cares about being wise? He puts the jacket round my shoulders. I don’t trust myself to thank him. The last thing I want right now is kindness.

  We stroll a short way in silence. Not holding hands. Not linking arms. Nothing.

  “Rosalind?” he says. “I am going to see you again, aren’t I?”

  “On Monday, you mean, when your train leaves? Oh, yes, I’m pretty sure they’ll let me get away. And if not…I’ll come anyhow.” But the smile I give doesn’t in the least negate my briskness.

  “You know that isn’t what I meant.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugs, and suddenly I see that, after all, he too has been pretending. “I’ve got to try to work things out.”

  “Why? What is there to work out? You don’t owe me anything. You’re engaged to a nice girl back in Connecticut and I knew that all along. It’s been fun, I’m glad to have known you, Matt. We’ll have to write to one another and, who knows, someday you and your family may come to London or I and mine may come to New York and—”

  “Sweetie. Please don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Listen. Just answer me one thing. Will you miss me when I’m gone?”

  “Oh, Matt.” My voice quavers, treacherously.

  “No, but what I mean is—how much will you miss me?”

  “Darling, this is pointless. Let’s go back and dance.”

  “No, it isn’t pointless… Because… Well, you see…”

  I give up every effort to be bright and brittle and to hold him at a distance.

  “You know how much I’m going to miss you. But do you really want to make me spell it out and have myself in tears? That would be a fine way to finish, on a night so obviously intended to produce only pleasure and high spirits. You almost have to laugh: the band playing ‘The sun has got his hat on’ while nearly everywhere you look…”

  “I love you, Rosalind.”

  “There! Now see what you’ve done.” I fumble for my hanky.

  He doesn’t let me—pushes my evening purse aside. I mumble that his shoulder will get wet; he doesn’t seem to care. Eventually I have to pull away. It would hardly be romantic to wipe my nose against his shirt.

  “But, Matt, do be sure that what you decide is what you really want. We’ve known each other for three short weeks. Heightened atmosphere of wartime, of wartime coming to an end. It’s two years since you’ve seen Marjorie. Maybe one can forget a bit in two years but the minute you set eyes on her again—”

  “Now you make it sound—what we feel for one another—” (because I had finally let on, a second or two before my nose began to run), “now you make it sound like some starlight-on-the-ocean holiday romance.”

  “I only want to be sensible. I only want to be fair.” But how fair is it to come out with what I now come out with? “I shall love you, Matt Cassidy, until the day I die—and beyond that, too, if I have any say in the matter, but—”

  I don’t get any further. Suddenly he lifts me off my feet and whirls me round. “No! No buts! That’s all I wanted to hear. Don’t say another word.” He kisses me, ecstatically. “And now let’s go in and dance!”

  What’s more, I perform one or two pretty nifty pieces of jitterbug in the shortish time remaining. I’m only surprised the other dancers don’t give up a
nd stand in an admiring circle—allow us room to show off our agility. They always do in films.

  “Oh, you’ll love America!”

  We’re on our own again and once more riding in a jeep. I can’t think how he’s pulled it off, considering the number of men there are at Halesworth.

  “You might also get to care for Britain,” I remind him.

  “I already do. Though I still can’t say a whole lot for your coffee.” There’s hardly any alteration in his tone. “You spoke earlier about a fine way to finish off things—wasn’t that the way you put it?—on a night so obviously intended to produce only pleasure and high spirits.”

  I look at him and start to smile.

  At that, he takes my hand and lifts it to his lips. He has avoided touching me till now; is evidently much fairer than I am. “Have you ever been to The Red Lion? In Southwold?”

  I tell him that Trix and I have had drinks there a couple of times.

  In fact I might have been scared to go back with her. I remember her, on that last occasion, queening it at the bar and adopting an ultra-refined accent in which to order pink champagne. She hadn’t made herself very popular. “Someday,” she’d said, “I’m going to run a little place like this. Waitresses and porters and chambermaids all at my beck and call. Yes, someday! You’ll see.”

  But I don’t mention this and he completes what he was saying. “Well, the desk clerk may be getting his forty winks but I guess if I make it worth his while he won’t mind losing two or three.”

  “Oh, you Yanks. You think mere money can accomplish anything.”

  “No. If I thought that, I’d book for tomorrow night, as well.”

  But suddenly he has to brake, to avoid something which dashes out in front of us. We think it was a fox.

  “No,” I say, “I’m sure it was a fox. It had to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Like calling out to like. It heard the voice of its brother.”

  15

  “Where did Trixie say he came from?”

  “New Haven.”

  “No, over here,” I say. “Which U.S. base?”

  “Oh. Halesworth.”

  “Yes, Halesworth. Would it be much off our route?”

  He looks it up in the guidebook. “Airfield built in 1942—43, intended as a bomber station,” he reads. “Only eight miles from Suffolk coast. Ideally placed for escort fighter operations.”

  “Why?”

  “Range, I suppose.”

  As we approach Holton, the village near which the base was built (two miles out of Halesworth), I find it a moving experience to be driving through this flat East-Anglian countryside where so many of my compatriots served during the war. I think of all those young men who flew up into the skies nearly half a century ago, so many of them never to return.

  “But please don’t imagine you’re going to absorb the flavour of an airfield,” warns Tom. “I gather that most of the land has gone back to agriculture, that a good portion’s now given over to turkey farming.”

  We discover there’s one small omission in the guidebook. Part of the perimeter has provided the council with a special course for novice lorry drivers.

  And, yes, of course it’s sentimental, but there’s somehow a sadness in seeing the destruction of any place where life’s been lived intensely. It’s possibly worse when you can still distinguish outlines. An employee of the turkey farm, a stocky and grizzled man with bow legs, leads us to those spots where the main runway would have been and the control tower and the hangars.

  “Two thousand yards long,” he says, pointing to the runway—you can just make out the traces. “And then, of course, the Nissen huts…funny to remember there was accommodation here for some three thousand.”

  He’s made quite a study of it, points out where the T2 hangars would have been. “Did you know Glen Miller came to Halesworth? 6th August 1944. A Sunday. But a busy day for Major Miller: Boxted before he came on here.”

  We’re standing maybe at the very point where he’d played. It isn’t hard, for a moment, to hear ‘Moonlight Serenade’ or ‘String of Pearls’ flooding that main hangar, drifting out across the airfield.

  But then you remember that you’re now on a turkey farm and that facing you is a pool of evil-smelling effluent.

  We leave the hangar site and start walking towards what was once the Admin block—though, frankly, I’ve lost interest. The sooner we return to London the better. I make a last attempt to feel my way into my father’s shoes…this stranger’s shoes; to experience one fleeting second of what he himself may have experienced. I close my eyes and try to will something to come to me out of the past. But no. Nothing. I open them and find I’ve walked on some wallflowers. Wild—incongruous—defiant: even in competition with the effluent they give off a warm and spicy smell. I meet Tom’s amused, inquiring glance and shrug self-mockingly. “Okay, you’re right. I should have had more sense. But I bet you anything he brought her here at some point. And probably to hear Glen Miller.” Unexpectedly, the notion gives me pleasure.

  At some point as we’re driving back to London I think about the half-brother I have never met. I wonder which side of the Atlantic he may now be roaming.

  16

  In the garden and just outside our window there’s a pink-blossomed horse chestnut. I lie in bed on Monday morning and gaze into its branches and at the sky beyond…and think why can’t the sky be gloomy. The time’s just after six and Matt is still asleep and looking peaceful. It’s a pity to wake him but selfishly I want to. I trace his brow with my forefinger. Yet he only stirs and smiles and turns over and I haven’t the heart to persevere. I’m not sure what I do have the heart for: certainly not the drive back to Halesworth, the chaos at the railway station, the journey home with Trixie, the greetings, questions, commiserations. I don’t know how I’m going to get through any of that. Not the next few hours, nor even the next few days. (Or weeks. But returning to the farm will undoubtedly be the worst: the place where Matt brought me back after Cambridge, just a fortnight ago, and where I felt so close to him and proud. The place where he and Walt collected us last Tuesday and where both Trixie and I sang as we got ready. The place where only the day before yesterday they’d come to pick us up for the dance and where I’d last seen all those familiar surroundings—seen them in his presence. Yes. Returning to the farm will be the hardest.)

  But I had been wretched, of course, when they had picked us up for the dance—would it help to remember that?

  And at least—from the time I had wept onto his shirt and my whole situation had so miraculously altered—I think I had made the most of every moment. Every precious moment.

  That is, until the previous evening. At dinner. When the truth had suddenly hit me.

  In fourteen hours he will be gone.

  True, we still had the night ahead. But I wanted a whole lifetime of nights ahead, of days and nights ahead, and I wanted it now. Suppose that anything should happen to him? After six years of war one was attuned to the possibility of accidents, of people never coming back. Suppose Matt should become one of those buried statistics in some government file, or a name in the local press, or an inscription on a war memorial—how deeply, when it really came down to it, how deeply had I truly cared about Baker, Blogg and Bolton? Or even about their loved ones? Their families?

  I knew last night that Matt felt just as miserable as me but at least for him there are all the distractions of homecoming to lessen the misery. I almost wish there weren’t. In my heart I want him to feel every bit as lost as I do.

  Scarcely a noble sentiment…and in fact I only admit to it as I gaze blindly into the branches of the horse chestnut and look mournfully at the squat brown radiator below the window. Yesterday Matt had spread out our washing along this as though he were mounting an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert. He several times sought my views—and my compliments—on the matchless skill of his presentation.

  Then I really do wake him. We ought to be out of bed
in half an hour.

  Breakfast isn’t a lot of fun. Indeed it’s pretty awful. Will I ever again, I wonder, be able to come back here when I’m on my own or with anyone but him?

  (Perhaps it’s just as well, I tell myself severely, I am obliged—and by the law of the land!—to return to the farm.)

  Anyway, this could be the last time I shall ever see The Red Lion. My days in Suffolk must surely be coming to an end.

  But we’ve hardly driven twenty yards when vague splutters occur and I think I shall be seeing it again quite shortly: apparently Matt’s forgotten to give the engine any water. We don’t go back to the hotel, however; there’s a charlady who’s been polishing a shop window and it’s easier to ask her for some. Afterwards Matt returns the empty jug, punctiliously deciding against leaving it on the doorstep when the door itself is open—although it certainly isn’t yet opening time. But on his way out he pauses. And then, presumably at some inquiry he’s just made, the woman must have gone to fetch her boss, because an elderly man now emerges from the back and smilingly unlocks the glass top of a table. Evidently a showcase. In spite of my depression I wonder what I may be missing and hastily get down from the jeep.

  “Go away,” says Matt. “You’re spoiling the surprise.”

  “Ah, then? Is this the young lady in question?”

  Cadaverous, stooped and sparsely ginger-haired, the owner doesn’t seem to know me, despite my having been here with Trix on maybe five or six occasions. It’s a fascinating place, full of secondhand trinkets and pictures and family photographs; books, cutlery, gramophone records, ewers, basins, wireless sets; all sorts of things from threepence to ten pounds. It’s this incredible price range which makes you feel that potentially you could unearth huge bargains.

  All you have to do is scavenge.

  For Matt, though, there hasn’t been time. And since he’s shooing me away so peremptorily I still can’t see what’s drawn his attention.

  But then he says, “Oh well, since you are here, you may as well help. This gentleman has been kind enough to interrupt his breakfast…” And he reveals to me the object he’s been looking at.