‘Only for my own interest.’
‘Must have been old Anstey, the Public Auditor. It was the Anstey vault.’
‘Well, I’m not going down again to look – not for a superintendent’s wages. But I don’t reckon it was Anstey. Anstey’s memorial was desecrated too. And I’ve seen a painting of him, in old age – a thin, elegant old gent, with lots of frizzy grey hair.’
‘What I saw hadn’t got grey hair.’ I shuddered at the memory. ‘Who d’you reckon it was, then?’
‘The only memorial that wasn’t desecrated was Thomas Dore’s.’
‘The honoured and paineful schoolemaster and benefactor of this parish . . .’
‘Still publickly rebuking vice . . .’
‘And discretely practising virtue . . . God, I feel sick. I’d like to blow the place to smithereens and him with it.’
‘Nasty thing, repressed sex,’ said Sergeant Watkins. ‘We were shown a lot of that at Bramshill College. Prefer a pint of beer and a game of darts, meself. Don’t fret, Geoff. He won’t get loose again. I’ll have a word with the vicar. He’ll believe us . . . nobody else would.’
I took good care of Dorinda after that. Eventually, she got so she could walk into a church again; if I held her hand tight. She did that just before we got married. Which was the last day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux.
The Dumbledore
The 1960s were a restless time for me. The trade went from bad to worse. The Americans, Dutch, Germans came in like locusts, buying up everything in sight. People like Clocky Watson threw it to them by the armful, the crateful, the container-load. Then when the cupboard became bare, people like Clocky invented helpful new categories: Victoriana; bric-à-brac. They even renamed 1920s tat ‘art deco’.
In 1960, the poorest thing in my shop was a Regency wine-table, faded, but good value at ten pounds. In 1970, the worst thing was an Elvis Presley EP, in a greasy thumb-marked sleeve. That was ten pounds, too. If there are fools who’ll pay . . .
My marriage changed, too. Dorinda inherited her father’s estate, and we moved out to Barlborough. From being a nice relaxed rich girl, she was transformed overnight into a fully paid-up member of the landed gentry: took to wellies and quilted jackets, and talked endlessly about the cost-effectiveness of the home farm. Clocky Watson wasn’t the only one who could’ve bought me up ten times over.
I worked like hell to make my way as a dealer. When we moved to Barlborough, I turned nearly every room in my old place over to antiques: good antiques. I could afford a full-time girl assistant. I was getting a name.
None of this impressed Dorinda. She allowed that I had business sense; she could use my help full-time with the estate. She wondered out loud at parties whether it was worthwhile my keeping on the shop. After all, we weren’t pushed for pennies, and the shop kept me away from the children so much while they were growing up.
Once, at a party, I heard Lady Daresbury say, ‘Dorinda’s husband will get you a grandfather-clock. Such an astute little man, with a good eye.’
I struggled mightily to be more than Dorinda’s husband. I did absurd things, like keeping one room at the shop furnished as a bedroom/office. Dorinda noticed, with a cocked eyebrow, but said nothing. She’d become very territorial herself; understood the need for territory in me. Twice, when we’d had really bad rows, I spent the night there.
But my main cure, in those restless years, when it all got too much, was to get into the Merc and drive into East Anglia. Looking for antiques, I said, and I always brought good stuff back. I had a lot of contacts there, and the farmers didn’t know the value of what they had. You could get a Georgian dining-table and six chairs with carver for the price of the new vinyl three-piece the farmer’s wife had her eye on in Downham Market.
But East Anglia meant more than that to me. I never took that turn beyond Melton Mowbray, into the Vale of Catmose, without my heart lifting. The sweeping fields of green corn and yellow mustard, lifting up into the sky, made me think irresistibly of flying. Then I’d pull off on to one of the disused airfields, and walk down the broad, cracked, weed-speckled runway, and feel free. The great spans of the hangars were still there then, though given over to storing grain. The control-towers still stood.
I only realized I’d been looking for East Cardingham when I got annoyed that I couldn’t find it. It was always a joke in the old days; that it was easier to find East Cardingham from the air than the ground. Easier to get to it from Berlin than from Norwich. That every crossroads near East Cardingham had five roads leading into it and six leading out, none at right angles, let alone a signpost.
I got so mad in the end that I called at North Tewsham public library to check their Ordnance Survey maps. I was just getting stuck in with the grey-bunned, grey-stockinged chief librarian when a voice I knew said, ‘Who wants East Cardingham?’
I spun round.
‘Section-Officer Edmunds, I presume,’ I said with great mock formality, to hide a rising excitement.
‘Squadron-Leader Ashden, to the life. You’ve let your hair grow.’
She was not the same; sixteen years had seen to that. But I liked her better. The slimness of youth had given way to the slimness of discipline. The red hair that had emerged in a page-boy from under the WAAF cap was now swept up off her neck. She wore spectacles; but when she took them off, her eyes were just as big and beautiful as ever. We gave each other a chaste hug, cheek to cheek, under the eyes of her grey-haired superior. The boys in blue still had a memory of glamour in ’61 – enough to stop her getting the sack on the spot.
I took her out that evening for the best dinner I could find, and heard her story. She’d married a travelling rep, and got rid of him for adultery. She’d kept the house, kept her figure and lost her way. She was very frank about it. When she asked me how I’d done, I shrugged her off with a detailed account of the antiques trade. I got on to old times pretty quickly, and got pretty tight. Afterwards, we sat on with brandies, till she arched her brows teasingly and said, ‘D’you want to see East Cardingham, then?’
‘You know the way?’
‘I still drive out there sometimes. I think I’d better drive.’
She slid easily behind the Merc’s steering-wheel. ‘Nice crate . . .’
The entrance looked just the same in the headlights. In the dark you couldn’t see that most of the glass had gone from the guardroom windows; that long dead grass grew against the guardroom door.
She drove round the perimeter track and parked on No. 1 runway, letting the headlights run out at full beam along the concrete, picking out the ruts and valleys with long shadows. I even glanced up at the sky nervously, expecting the first Lanc to get the green flare and come roaring and trundling in. Or a Jerry 88, on an intruder sweep.
She locked up the car for me, took an old RAF hooded torch out of her handbag and led the way, letting the beam flicker here and there, like an usherette helping you find your seat in the cinema. I couldn’t help wondering how many nights she’d come here. She led me straight to the old Mess. As I touched Chalky White’s painting of Lancs taking off, over the ante-room fireplace, and the paint flaked off on my finger like powder, I grew in awe of her, as if she were a high-priestess of some old religion.
We even found the Adjutant’s ashtray – an old aluminium thing, advertising Gold Flake. Somebody had put their cluddering great foot on it, but it was the Adge’s ashtray all right. The one we’d stared at, while he tore us off a strip.
I was still clutching the ashtray like a sacred relic when she asked me in for a nightcap. I staggered across her doorstep, still babbling about the wonder of the bloody ashtray.
‘Gin-hand-hit, Squadron-Leader Ashden?’ She still had the cockney barman’s accent to perfection. Had any time passed at all? When she brought the drinks, she’d let her hair down, and put an RAF officer’s cap on top of it. Chalky White’s second-best cap . . .
She’d always been Chalky’s girl, till the night he got the chop over Darms
tadt. She was Chalky’s girl, but we’d all fancied her. We were still waiting for her to get over Chalky and pick somebody else when the War ended and we all went home.
So she’d never got over Chalky. Come back here when her marriage broke up, to be near him. I could see Chalky so clearly in my mind’s eye. Always laughing; and twitching between the laughs.
Her blouse was starched and pale blue, like a WAAF officer’s shirt; I hadn’t noticed before.
I moved rather unsteadily towards her. ‘D’you still miss him?’ Her eyes were very close; she wasn’t wearing her spectacles.
‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t. I hadn’t thought of him for sixteen years.
There seemed nothing else possible to say. I put my hands on her slim shoulders . . .
After that, I always rang her, the night before I came over into East Anglia. It couldn’t have been much of an affaire, from her point of view.
But as she said, it was a lot better than drifting into middle-aged librarianship.
I don’t know how long it might have lasted if I hadn’t taken the short-cut that day, past Lower Wendlebury. I’d known Wendlebury nearly as well as East Cardingham, because I’d been liaison officer with the Yanks. My fighting war had been very short. Most of May, 1940. Flying Blenheim Mk IIs against the German breakthrough at Sedan. Going out in a flight of seven, including two new-boys, and coming back with four. That last time, I’d come back with one engine smoking glycol, a headless bomb-aimer at my feet, a wounded rear-gunner, and a very large piece of shrapnel in my leg. I don’t remember much about it, except the wind blowing a gale through the shattered cockpit-cover, and my gunner shouting, ‘Break right, for Christ’s sake, he’s coming again.’ We got back at zero feet, and the crate fell apart around us as we landed, which saved the bother of scraping us out like sardines out of a tin.
Anyway, I’d saved the gunner, and when I got out of hospital they gave me a gong and posted me as liaison to East Cardingham. You can’t fly a big bird with half your thigh-muscle gone.
Anyway, I was taking this short-cut past Wendlebury one rainy dusk in 1962, when I saw a series of mounds rearing up over the perimeter fence. Suddenly uneasy, I turned the Merc and drove in to investigate. God, it was awful. They’d been tearing up the runway with bloody great bulldozers. And that was some runway; the Yanks had laid concrete four feet deep to carry their big birds, their B-17s. Whoever had started demolishing it seemed to have bitten off more than they could chew, and abandoned the attempt half finished. The pieces of concrete rose up thirty feet high; indestructible, unless you were prepared to pay a million to have them chewed into manageable pieces. The Quonset-huts, the guardroom, the control-tower, hadn’t proved so tough; they were gone, flattened.
Who could have done such a thing? I felt outraged, personally violated. I didn’t mind the airfield being sown with wheat; or the Sunday driving lessons, given by nervous men to their nervous wives, where once we’d set off for the Happy Valley. I didn’t mind the hangars being full of grain instead of bombs, or the courting couples having it away in the control-tower on wet and windy nights. That was a dignified decay . . . but this! I felt my way back to the past was being destroyed; as if my lungs were being torn out. I went on staring down that ravaged runway for a long time, thinking the blackest thoughts I had ever known. Remembering Major Stepanski and Captain Con O’Connell and Big Tex, and the way they died. This was their memorial, not that horror of white tombstones outside Cambridge. This was where their souls still came to fly . . .
I suppose that, being so upset, I didn’t really think where I was going when I drove on. My mind must have picked up the old route in the dark; the route I’d so often travelled with them to whoop it up and forget, in the very limited fleshpots of Upper Wendlebury. There’d been a caff called the Dumbledore.
I drove up the main street for the first time in sixteen years. The street-lighting seemed the only thing that was different: low black-and-white thatched cottages, the same cat crossing the road in front of my wheels, in the same blasted place.
And then I gasped, and slammed on the brakes.
The Dumbledore was still there.
The same garish neon light the boys from the base had fixed up on VE night, saying ‘The Dumbledore’ in big Hollywood handwriting. In the yard at the side were parked two Jeeps, with AEF white stars still visible on their bonnets. A big Buick command-car, and even a Dodge thirty-hundredweight pickup . . . And the juke-box was still playing . . . the sound of Glenn Miller’s ‘American Patrol’ came to my ears, right across the little windy square. The windows were lit up, but the place looked empty. I walked across, tried the door, then pressed my nose against the glass.
It hadn’t changed. The tall bar-stools were still there, with their red leatherette tops; only the cross-bars, where people used to put their feet, were worn down into sickle shapes with time. There was the same old Coca-Cola advert, with the pigtailed girl playing the piano, and a nice young guy with short back and sides and a two-piece suit smiling down at her and turning her music. There was the three-bladed duralumin airscrew from a B-17, the Camels advert, the one for Lucky Strike. Same brown lino, worn in the same places, by the bar-counter . . . Not all the primitive neon lights, pinched from the maintenance hangars, were on. The place was full of shadows . . . there was Con O’Connell’s chair with the Reb flag transfer on the back, and there was the corner where Tex used to sit on the floor, great legs bent up higher than his head. Tex and Little Charlene . . .
Then a door opened at the back. And she came through, silhouetted against the light. Hair back in a blonde pony-tail with a pink bow, seersucker dress, bobby-sox and white plimsolls. Little Charlene herself. Charlotte Hamlin really, but Tex always called her Charlene.
I tapped on the glass of the door to get her attention, but she passed, silent on plimsolled feet, circling the room, touching this and that; pausing at the part of the bar where Tex used to pick her up and set her down. Again I tapped, harder, hammered on the glass. She looked in my direction, but her eyes were blank; she looked straight through me. Then went on her way, touching things, like an automated doll in a glass cabinet. Finally, she went through the lighted door to the back; the door shut, leaving me with the shadows again. In the shadows, the record finished, the pickup arm swung over like a hand from a tomb, and the scratchy sound of ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ filled the English night.
I felt I was going mad; had the sight of the airfield runway unhinged me? Was I seeing ghosts – the ghost of a café? I staggered to the side yard and sat in the driver’s seat of one of the Jeeps – that was solid enough, not a ghost. Though the seat was soaking with rain, and the windscreen-wipers had rusted through, and the licence said 1945.
I don’t blame myself for what followed. I had to find out what the hell was going on. So I went round the back, like we always did, for a Bourbon whiskey when the Dumbledore was closed by the old British licensing hours. I hammered on the back door; hammered and hammered. At last, it opened. Little Charlene stood there; it was Little Charlene. But closer, now, I could see she was no ghost. There were lines on her face; not many, but it made her thirty-four and not eighteen any more.
‘It’s Geoff,’ I said gently, to her still, still face. ‘Geoff Ashden – from East Cardingham.’ Her expression didn’t change; she didn’t recognize me. ‘I was a friend of Tex,’ I said.
Then she raised her right hand.
It had a gun in it; a Colt .45 – Tex always carried a pair in cowboy holsters when he went over Germany. And that gun wasn’t a ghost either; she had to use both trembling hands to lift it, and by the time it was pointing at my belly, I realized I’d better presume it was loaded . . .
I just made it behind the Dodge pickup before she fired. I heard the bullet whang off the Dodge’s cylinder-block. She fired in my general direction five more times, till the gun was empty. I could hear the bullets cutting through the assembled vehicles with that pecul
iar noise a bullet makes piercing thin metal.
Then, her face still expressionless in the quiet lamplight, she closed the door and went back inside.
After five minutes, when I was sure she wasn’t just reloading, I crawled out from under the Dodge, and dusted myself off.
I was in the middle of a small town, and she’d fired six shots, enough to wake the dead. And nobody had come. The lamplit streets were as empty and yellow as ever. There were lights on in all the house-windows (it wasn’t more than seven in the evening) but nothing stirred. Silence. It was as if Wendlebury had turned its back on the Dumbledore; was pretending it didn’t exist.
I decided I needed a stiff drink. There should be a pub called the Duke of Suffolk up West Street. I tried it, more in faith than hope.
But when I staggered through the door of the bar parlour, there was Tom Watkins behind the counter, polishing a glass and looking nearly as grey-haired and pot-bellied as his father had in 1943.
‘Good evening, Squadron-Leader Ashden,’ he said with a triumphant grin. ‘The usual?’
‘Make it a double,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been to the Dumbledore.’
He had been smiling; but now his face went curiously still.
‘What the hell’s going on up there?’ I asked.
He looked round the bar, as if to make sure it was empty; then he gave me my drink, and took one himself, a lot bigger one than he used to, and said, ‘It’s a long story, Squadron-Leader.’
‘You remember Tex?’ he said. ‘Big Tex?’
I nodded, took too big a swig of whisky, and nearly choked. He waited for me to wipe my eyes, then said, ‘Remember the night we heard they got the chop?’
Should I ever forget it? The crew of the B-17 called ‘Lizzie Borden’. The real-life Lizzie Borden had been an American axe-murderer in the 1920s. You may know the rhyme?
Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.
Antique Dust Page 13
