‘Probably not.’
‘It’ll cheer you up. Come on, be a sport.’
Bea checks the time. She has to drive the Group Captain to Andover Station. She feels herself being stripped naked by the would-be airmen. The mature ones, those who have started shaving, call her the Ice Maiden. She is not deliberately aloof but they are just boys who have never done anything and probably won’t now... not with the way the everything is going.
That evening, Joan drags Bea to the mess. Orderlies in white waistcoats serve schooners of sherry on trays. A raw-boned Flight Officer called Maureen puts Jack Jackson’s big band records on the gramophone. It is romantic dance music but that is all anyone wants. Joan says Bea should find herself a nice young man.
‘Why should I?’
‘Because we might be at war but life’s for living. We’ve got to carry on, Bea.’
Joan accepts an offer to dance from a gauche trainee pilot, barely out of school. They join a circle of officers and wives and invited local worthies, all done up in Sunday suits and party frocks. Bea watches from a corner table, alone. A slushy Anne Shelton record is put on, all about losing a lover.
Bea wants to leave now. The tobacco smoke is getting to her. She steps outside to breathe clean air. A full moon is lighting the expanse of Salisbury Plain, empty and desolate. Bea thinks only of Arie, what he is doing at this exact moment under the stars of the vast, unknowable sky.
The blackout curtains cannot shut out the noise of people laughing. The bar is doing great business. Everyone is wearing a brave face, not wanting to think about what is in store. Bea should not have come. She begins to walk back to her billet.
‘Not leaving, are you?’
Bea turns and tries to locate whoever had spoken to her from between a row of poplars, silver against the inky blue night. It is a warm, confident voice, full of authority and familiar with command. A man steps from the shadows. He is an officer, a Flight Lieutenant, tall, open-faced and smiling.
‘Stuffy in there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Sir. It is rather.’
‘I was watching you. I was going to buy you a drink then you left.’
‘I’m afraid it’s a little too crowded for me.’
‘And I bet you wanted to be on your own.’
‘Well, it is such a beautiful night.’
‘Missing him, are you?’
‘What do you mean, Sir?’
‘Come on, we’re all in the same boat.’
He offers a cigarette and lights it for her. They sit on a slatted metal bench within earshot of the forced gaiety they had left behind. Bea steals a glance at her admirer. He is older than the rest. Late twenties. There is a look of battle about him... eyes never still, always waiting for the next enemy.
‘You’re Beatrice Bowen, aren’t you?’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘Your father’s a brass hat.’
‘What if he is?’
‘That puts the wind up some people round here.’
‘Well, it shouldn’t. And what’s your name, Sir?’
‘Francis Wrenn. I’m teaching these oiks how to fly. But not for much longer.’
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘Back to bombers, thank God. See some action.”
They return to the mess. Francis Wrenn dances embarrassingly close. Joan gives Bea a leering thumbs up behind his back. The boy pilots look on over their pint pots. They keep their mouths shut. That much they have learned.
Bea asks Francis why he was watching her.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘I never saw you.’
‘You’ve never seen me for weeks.’
Bea senses something happening within her – a feeling of being released from a kind of widowhood. She is suddenly young again. And wanted. Most extraordinary of all, she is absolutely sure Arie would not mind.
The music fades. The evening ends. Francis walks her back to her room. He does not kiss her that night. But from then on, they spend every available minute together.
*
They get weekend leave and drive to the Wrenn family home in Shropshire in Francis’s little brown and cream Austin 10. He asks if she is happy.
‘You know I am.’
That is the truth. He is not Arie... but who could be?
It is a long journey. Cows lie drowsy with heat in the shadows of orchards grown heavy with fruit. Fields have burnt yellow under the parching sun and the beds of rivers run dry.
Francis turns off the road at last and onto a grassy track between stands of beeches, thick with olive-green leaves, motionless in the warm evening air. They bump along by hedges of hawthorn then cross a cattle grid to a gravelled drive.
And there is Bea’s first sight of Garth Hall, washed in the golden light of the dying day. Soft pink roses climb on wires strung across its great oak frame and a wisteria with a trunk thicker than a man’s thigh, twists out of the earth by the front porch. A piano is being played. Bats fall and flit from under the eaves and all the windows are open to catch whatever breeze night may bring.
Bea can only gaze and smile. For her, nothing about Garth is new or unexpected. It all feels so familiar... just as the embassy courtyard in Prague had done.
This is a place she was born to find on a path only she could tread. A calm comes over her. To Bea, the spirit of this house is real but intangible, like the scent of a flower. She feels herself being welcomed by those who had gone before. They bid her to stay awhile, as they had done in their time.
‘Bea? Where are you? Come and meet my family.’
They are greeted by Lavinia, his father’s sister, prematurely grey and in a beige stockinette frock showing a neck reddened by the day’s sun.
‘You are most welcome. Francis wrote to say how wonderful you were.’
Bea feigns embarrassment. His father, the old judge, approaches and bows his white head, darkened by a black cap at many an assize. He shakes Bea’s hand with judicial formality and examines her with unblinking eyes. Bea knows she is already on trial. Later, at supper in the drawing room lit by oil lamps and candles in polished pewter sconces, the talk is of war. Nothing else is on anyone’s mind.
Francis Wrenn is the family’s last hope of continuity, a young life wagered against a single pull of a German trigger. His father wants to know if Hitler will invade.
‘Looks like it. The French ports are solid with German barges all stuffed to the gunnels with military equipment.’
Lavinia says the Germans have already started bombing England.
‘Somewhere in Surrey was hit only last week and they say there are German planes flying over us to spy out the docks in Liverpool.’
The judge knows Bea’s father is high up in the Air Ministry.
‘What is his opinion of what’s happening?’
‘I’ve never known him this worried. The situation must be very bad.’
It has been a tiring day. Bea is excused with a slight headache. Lavinia shows her to a guest room off a long landing. Bea lies naked on an iron bed. The drapes hang unmoving by the open window. The night is lit by moon and stars. She cannot sleep. She thinks of Prague and guns and planes with bellies full of bombs. But most of all, she sees the face of a child whose blood was on her hands.
Francis is walking across the lawn with his father. Their words carry like cigar smoke.
‘Have you asked her, my boy?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Don’t you think you’d better get a move on?’
Do they talk of her? Is it her life being mapped out? Does she mind... does she care? No one has a future anymore. There is only now.
*
After breakfast next day, Francis walks Bea through the shaded rides of Garth Woods. The birds are silent and the black pebbles in Pigs’ Brook are scarcely damp. Francis leads her up to St Mary and All Angels, through grass dried to straw in the relentless heat. But it is cool and quiet inside the church. His warrior ancestors lie in vaults bene
ath their feet. Those who did not come back from the Crimea or France are remembered in white marble tablets on the unadorned walls. Bea sits in the Wrenn family pew. Light filters through the stained glass window above her and spreads like a rainbow across the aisle.
‘If the Nazis invade, we’re finished Francis. I’ve seen what they do.’
‘We may only have a short time.’
‘Does that make you afraid?’
‘I could lie and say it didn’t.’
‘I feel quite hopeless... as if nothing we could do would be enough.’
‘Well, I’m damned if I’m giving in.’
‘No, we don’t have any choice.’
‘Look, Bea... you must know by now what I feel about you. It’s as if I’ve known you all my life... from that very moment I first saw you.’
‘That doesn’t make much sense.’
‘Maybe not but I could be dead in a few weeks. That’s what doesn’t make any sense.’
They walk into the churchyard, shielding their eyes from the glaring sun. Bea’s in a sleeveless cotton dress, navy blue with small white dots. She is fair skinned and burns easily so Lavinia has lent her a boater. They wander between the ivied tombstones, set under spreads of sycamores and yews which darken the day.
Bea finds the stone of Mary, laid to rest in 1811, aged three or thirty – it is crumbling to dust to they cannot be sure. But her inscription can just be finger traced.
Death, like an overflowing stream,
Sweeps us away, our life’s a dream,
An empty tale, a morning flower,
Out, down and withered in an hour.
They are kneeling, face to face, in new mown grass by Mary’s grave. They kiss by silent, mutual agreement. Then his hands move down her shoulders and around her waist. Bea lies back and draws him closer to her and feels how much he wants her. She unbuttons her dress and parts it. Francis, made child again, takes her breasts and dares to touch the inside of her leg which is silkier than swansdown. In a moment more, she frees him to come into her and his body bucks as if electrified. He moves urgently and crudely and it is over quite quickly. She smiles and kisses him and they lie together on that airless, windless day, as still as those around them, holding hands under the mourning trees.
It was then Bea agreed to marry him for she could not turn the corners ahead on her own.
Chapter Thirteen
McCall was crossing the rehearsal studio when a sudden pain like a boxer’s jab to the kidneys collapsed him to the floor. His head hit the concrete and he lost consciousness for several seconds. He came to, bleeding badly and confused enough to think he had been caught in an explosion. A duty BBC nurse dressed his wound in the first aid room and said he had symptoms of pleurisy. She drove him to hospital where he was given intravenous antibiotics and his chest drained.
‘You should never have started work this soon after pneumonia.’
Evie rang McCall after calling Bea and hearing he had ignored all medical advice and returned to London. She was owed a few days leave and found him in the flat he rented near Shepherd’s Bush Green, alternately shivering and sweating and still coughing up blood. She surprised herself by how worried she was.
‘You look dreadful, McCall. I’m taking you back to Shropshire.’
Evie stayed at Garth for two nights, making sure Bea did not have to cope alone. For this, Bea was grateful and a warmth developed between them.
Francis had decamped to the dacha and was sleeping there. His irrational behaviour and mood swings alarmed Bea more each day. Yet still she put off making the call she knew to be inevitable. But she stood over McCall while he rang his programme editor and said the hospital doctors had ordered him to convalesce for at least two more months.
Bea desperately wanted Francis coaxed back to the house. McCall, still weak and anaemic, set off after breakfast. A sharp wind cut through Garth Woods and the yellowing lakes of new daffodils beneath the beeches and oaks that seemed so constant but would crash to earth in their time like all else. Francis was huddled by the dacha’s open stove in his overcoat. He glanced up as McCall entered but showed no sign of recognition.
‘Hello, Francis.’
‘I’m cold.’
‘Let me stoke up the fire, then.’
‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’
‘Of course we have, Francis. I’m Mac... Mac, you remember?’
‘Have you brought any biscuits?’
‘Yes, and I can make us some tea, if you want.’
Francis appeared slightly afraid. He had lost weight, too. The food cupboard was open and McCall saw mouse droppings by a slab of ginger cake Bea must have brought. He stacked the wood burner with dry logs and put extra sugar in Francis’s mug. Francis took it without a word of thanks and stared into the flames. The Eumig had been set up on the table and several boxes of film left opened alongside more aerial photographs of German cities he had helped to destroy.
‘How do you manage to sleep on these chairs, Francis?’
‘Sleep? I can’t sleep any more.’
‘You could if you moved back up to Garth.’
Francis ignored him and went stiffly towards the projector. He tried to lace in a reel of film but his fingers could not co-ordinate. McCall helped him.
The box was marked Hamburg, July 1943 : Onboard camera, Operation Gomorrah. The screen remained black for the first few frames then erupted without warning into a thousand silver star bursts as cascades of high explosives and incendiaries fell from the aircraft’s bomb bays and erupted far below.
McCall noticed Francis’s hands tensing and jerking involuntarily as if he was back in his cockpit again and petrified about being shot down into a real hell. Fires beyond counting raged out of control. From the camera position many thousands of feet up, they seemed to spread like runnels of molten milk, bubbling into a devastating tidal wave of destruction. This was a biblical revenge, an inferno of awesome intensity, fed by oxygen sucked from the atmosphere and converted into yet more hurricanes of flame.
And so it went on. In such a burning sea of stones, nothing could have survived... no house, no person. No hope.
‘People just melted... sank into the tar of the streets where they lived.’
‘It must have been a nightmare.’
‘I could feel the heat in my aeroplane.’
McCall switched off the Eumig and led Francis back to his chair by the stove. The once indefatigable Francis, the gallant Boy’s Own hero of McCall’s childhood, appeared exhausted by remorse. Here was a reckoning from the other side of history.
‘Try to think of happier times, Francis... all the good you’ve done in your life.’
‘I adored her, you know.’
‘You mean Bea?’
‘Do you know how beautiful she was?’
‘Of course – I’ve seen the photographs.’
‘She was mine. I’d have given her anything she ever wanted. Denied her nothing.’
‘She knows you love her, Francis. Why don’t we go and tell her again?’
Francis’s gaunt, unshaven face shed its weariness. He became as happy and trusting as a child. In a moment more, he and McCall walked through Garth Woods, hand in hand, as they had so long ago.
*
They got Francis undressed with a deceitful promise of chocolate. McCall had never seen him without clothes before, never seen him so reduced, so vulnerable. The flesh on his flanks and arms was withered and pale, his genitals shrunk to those of a boy.
Bea managed to slip his pyjamas on and persuade him into bed. Doctor Preshous arrived and asked him some insultingly simple questions – where was he, who else was in the room, what date was it? Francis struggled to answer. To witness his confusion was unbearable.
Bea followed McCall downstairs and they sat in silence either side of the kitchen table till the doctor joined them.
‘I’ve given him an injection. He needs to sleep.’
‘What do you think is wrong with him?’
/>
‘A sort of dementia, I’m sad to say.’
McCall said Francis had just described some wartime experiences in great detail so how could he be demented.
‘What happened years ago will be clearer than the events of this morning.’
Bea said they should have given him a bath.
‘They’ll do that at the hospital, Mrs Wrenn.’
‘Hospital? Why’s he got to go to hospital?’
‘For everyone’s sake, not least yours.’
‘But I’ve managed with him here so far.’
‘The good days are going to get fewer, I’m afraid.’
‘Why? What’s going to happen?’
‘He’ll decline quite rapidly to the point he won’t even know who you are.’
The doctor left and McCall put his arm around Bea’s shoulder.
*
Bea wanted McCall to take her into Garth Woods to pick the daffodils with which she filled the house each early spring. There was comfort in normality. Neither spoke much. Huge dark clouds threatened a downpour and the wind carried the mewling cat-cries of buzzards hunting the church field beyond the trees.
They had gathered armfuls of flowers by the time the storm struck. They took shelter in the dacha. McCall rekindled the stove with a few sticks and tidied away Francis’s papers and photographs. Bea made coffee. The rain drummed against the dacha’s tin roof, beating a retreat from all they hoped would never end.
‘I can’t put him in a home, Mac.’
‘But he’s going to need proper professional care.’
‘It seems so utterly... disloyal.’
‘You heard what the doctor said.’
‘I’ll have Mrs Craven to help.’
‘She’s not a nurse, Bea, and you’re not as young as you were.’
‘After all these years... what a dreadful way for everything to finish.’
Life, as they had always known it, was close to the end.
‘If it’s any comfort, he told me this morning how much he loved you.’
‘I know he does but it’s like there’s someone else inside him – some awful stranger.’
‘That’s not the real Francis.’
‘It’s the names he calls me, Mac.’
‘He said you were a spy, didn’t he? Why should he say that?’
A Place Of Strangers Page 8
