The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She stared at him. “And you tried to stop him?”

  It took him a while to answer, but finally he said, “They’d killed one of the chickens. Dogs do that. They don’t know any better.”

  She frowned. “So what did you do, Willy?”

  He sniffed. “I grabbed the whip from him. I hit him with it – I wanted him to see what it felt like. Even if you’re a dog . . .”

  She stopped him. “You mean you struck him first?”

  He stared at the ground. “Maybe. But he was beating the dog and she had done nothing to deserve it.”

  “Other than killing a chicken . . .”

  He pouted. “It’s in their nature. I said, that’s what dogs do.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. And you shouldn’t beat an animal – it’s not right.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She reached out for his hand, and held it gently in hers. “The problem is, Willy, that you started this fight, you know. You struck him, and he’ll just say that he was defending himself. You know how these things work, don’t you?” She suspected he did not.

  He looked confused.

  “If you hit somebody, he can hit you back?”

  Annie sighed. “I think we should leave it, Willy. I was going to go to Bill Edwards about this . . .” Bill Edwards was the village policeman, brought back out of retirement because of the war; too tired to exert authority, he relied on friendship to police his patch. “But now I think I shouldn’t.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. I told you I didn’t want any fuss.”

  “But you promise me that you won’t provoke that man again. You promise me that?”

  He crossed his heart – a childish gesture – but one that signalled to her that he had understood.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  Later that night, when Willy had gone to bed, Annie talked to Val about what had happened. She expressed the concern that the young man’s lack of judgement could cause difficulties. “Any sensible person would have known not to interfere in something like that,” she said. “Farmers and their dogs – you stay out of it, even if it’s hard to do. And a man like Ted Butters . . .” She shook her head. “You don’t go laying into him.”

  Val felt she had to smile. “I don’t suppose you do.”

  “Willy has a strong sense of right and wrong,” Annie continued.

  “Even if he hasn’t much sense about anything else,” said Val.

  Annie looked disapproving. “He does his best,” she said.

  Val decided to change the subject. “I’m going out tomorrow night,” she said.

  “With the other land girls?’ There was a group of five land girls billeted in a big house on the edge of the village.

  “Yes,” said Val. “We’ve been invited to a dance.”

  Annie took up her knitting. She had been working on a sweater for weeks and was frustrated at not finishing it. “Very nice. RAF?”

  “The Americans,” said Val.

  Annie smiled. “They say they have tinned peaches. Have you heard that too?”

  Val had not. “Nylons, some say. And chocolate.”

  “I don’t think men should give girls nylons,” said Annie. “Chocolate is one thing, but nylons . . .”

  “If I see any tinned peaches,” Val promised, “I’ll bring some back for you.”

  Annie laid down her knitting and closed her eyes. There was a look on her face that was half longing, half ecstasy. “Just imagine – a bowl of tinned peaches with a drop of cream. Just imagine it.”

  “You never know,” said Val.

  Annie opened her eyes. “Don’t be too late. Will they be bringing you back home with the others?”

  “They will,” said Val. “They have a lorry. It’s ever so bumpy, travelling in the back of it, but they’ll bring us right to the door.”

  It was not a large dance. She, like the others, had been to larger ones at an RAF base twenty miles away, but what made the difference here was the catering. The US Air Force may have been looking around for extra supplies of fresh eggs, but there was no shortage of anything else. Two trestle tables, laid with red gingham tablecloths, were laid out with things that had long since disappeared from the shelves of British groceries, or had never been there in the first place. And there were tinned peaches, but in bowls now, and she could not think of a way to get some back to her aunt. She could wrap one in a handkerchief, perhaps, but without its syrup it would not be the same, and it would stain her dress anyway. So she thought of her aunt as she helped herself to three peach halves, savouring their sheer deliciousness and wondering how one might describe the taste and the sensation accurately. There was the sweetness, of course, but there was something else – a slight roughness on the tongue that gave them their characteristic texture. Or perhaps she should not mention them at all, but simply say that the food was good, and leave her aunt to imagine the rest.

  She looked out for Mike, who had driven her home after the egg incident, but although there were only twenty or so officers there she did not see him. She felt a pang of disappointment: she had assumed that he had been behind her invitation, and now she was not sure. Perhaps she had been too quick to imagine that there was something there when there really was not. Perhaps she was just another young woman to him, nothing more than that – the girl who rode over with the eggs and clumsily dropped them all over the place. Perhaps he felt sorry for her. Americans were rich – they had so much – and the British were so poor now, scrabbling around for enough food to eat, counting every round of ammunition, every drop of fuel. She thought: What do we look like to them? Poor cousins who were exhausted by a long fight against the local bully and must now be helped to finish something they could never have completed by themselves.

  After the guests had been there for ten minutes, he arrived with another two officers. He was in uniform, as a few of the men were, the others being in civilian clothes. He made straight for her, and briefly took her hand, in what could have been a handshake or could have been something else. He held it, though, and only dropped it when he went to get a drink for both of them, and as she watched him cross the floor towards the bar she thought, with pleasure, that she had been right – he had invited her. It was him.

  They had organised a small band – two saxophones, a trombone, and a percussionist. This quartet now struck up, although people were still helping themselves to plates of food and were not ready to dance. She sat with him on a small sofa that had been put along the side of the room and sipped at her drink, conscious that her dress, of which she had been proud until then, was almost dowdy by comparison with what some of the other women had managed to produce.

  But he said, “I like that,” and gestured to the dress. “It’s pretty.”

  She lowered her eyes. She was not sure whether she should say that she liked his uniform. There were so many bewildering uniforms now and a compliment directed at a uniform could seem flat, or even sarcastic.

  She struggled to think of something to say and ended up asking where he was from.

  “The United States of America,” he replied, and laughed.

  This helped. “Oh, I know that.”

  His eyes were bright, as if he were amused by something. “Just making sure.”

  “But where in America? It’s a big place, isn’t it?”

  “A place called Muncie, Indiana. It’s not right in the middle, but it’s heading that way. Mid-West, we call it. You heard of Chicago?”

  She gave him a look of mock reproach. “Of course I’ve heard of Chicago.” She was trying to think where Chicago was. Was it near Los Angeles?

  “Well, Muncie, Indiana isn’t all that far from Chicago – a few hundred miles. Chicago’s there . . .” he jabbed at a point in the air, “and Muncie’s down here.” He made another jab.

  “I see.”

  “It’s not a very big town,” he continued. “But we’ve got some great things going on. You know those glass jars for preserving fruit? You know them?”


  She nodded, although she thought the glass jars he was referring to must be much bigger and better than the ones her aunt used for making jam in the blackberry season.

  “We make those in Muncie,” he said. “Invented there. Those famous jars. There’s the Ball glassworks. You heard of them over here – the Ball family?”

  She had not.

  “They’re generous folks,” he continued. “They helped build a college, and a hospital. My mother knew one of the sisters from that family – not very well, but she knew her. She lived in a big mansion near the river, and you know what? She believed in fairies. She was real keen on fairies. She had a whole library of books about them and pictures on the wall and so on. Fairies flying around, sitting on bushes, doing everything really. I guess she was hoping to see one herself some time, but she never did, poor lady.”

  She was wide-eyed. This was a world so far from her own. Glassworks. Mansions beside a river.

  Mike took a sip from his glass of beer. “We’re nothing to do with the glass business,” he said. “My dad runs a dry goods store. We sell clothes, but most other things too. Sewing machines, some kitchen stuff.”

  She asked him what he had been doing before the war. “I was at college in Indianapolis,” he said. “I was studying engineering. They wanted me to finish that first, but two of my friends were enlisting and I thought that if they were going then so should I. You could say that Uncle Sam called.” He took another sip of his beer. “But I’ll go back after all this is over. It won’t be long now.”

  She seized at this. People clutched at everything – any scrap of comfort they encountered. Rumours abounded: there were new weapons, on our side; the Germans were running out of oil; their own people were rioting because they were even more short of food than we were; somebody was planning to shoot Hitler and the war would come to an end that way. Every fresh story gave a few moments of comfort before being discounted.

  “It’s not going to be long?” she asked.

  He seemed so confident. “No. We’re hitting them hard – and your boys are too. That’s my job, you see. We fly those planes over and take photographs, so we know what’s going on. We’re a reconnaissance unit.”

  She had a slight sense of being made party to information that she should not know, and she changed the subject. “That tune the band’s playing – do you know what it is?”

  He listened. “‘Speaking of Heaven’,” he said. “Glenn Miller played it. At least, that’s what I think it is.”

  “I’m bad at songs. I like them, of course, but I get them mixed up.”

  “I find I remember the words,” he said. “It’s not much use, of course, because I can’t sing. But they stick somewhere up there.” He tapped his forehead. “Speaking of heaven, once I found an angel . . . and then I forget what comes after that.”

  She glanced at him. She had been too shy to look at him properly. She lowered her gaze to the glass in her hand. This could not be happening, but it was. And that, they said, was how it always happened: you were not expecting it; and then it happened, and you were in love. Just like that. She thought that was why they used the expression falling in love, because it was sudden, and unexpected, as a fall is, and it was very much the same feeling, of sudden powerlessness as gravity took hold of you, as love does; love and gravity were very similar: equally strong, equally irresistible.

  Over the two weeks that followed, he saw her eight times: twice when she went to the base to deliver the eggs, and on other occasions when he managed to get a few hours away from the base in the evenings and came to the house in the village. As an officer, he was allowed to be away from the base when not on duty, and his evenings were free as photographic units rarely flew at night. Annie liked him, and would tactfully leave them alone in the small sitting room, on the pretext that she had to go out and Willy would have to accompany her. Willy was bemused, but was won over by a book that Mike gave him on the identification of American planes.

  “He’s nice, that American pilot,” he said. And then, with unfeigned interest, “Do you really like him, Val? Are you sweet on him?”

  “I really like him, Willy. He’s kind, isn’t he?”

  “Is he from Texas?”

  She smiled. “No, he’s from a place called Muncie, Indiana. It sounds like a really nice place. He’s shown me some photographs.”

  He had a camera and what seemed to her to be an unlimited supply of film. He developed this in the same darkroom they used for their reconnaissance shots, and he said there was no cost involved. “I get the film cheap and the chemicals are there anyway, so I slip mine through when the guys finish with the spools from the planes. Nobody minds.”

  He was generous with his time. He took a portrait photograph of Annie, who dressed especially carefully for the sitting, wearing her best dress, a dress she had not worn for fifteen years: a silk shift in the flapper style. “It makes me look ridiculous,” she said. “Mutton dressed up as lamb.”

  “You could never look ridiculous,” he said.

  Val liked that. Mike knew what to say, she thought. They said the Americans had good manners, and they were right. Those things they said about Americans boasting and smoking cigars was all invention, she thought. People were jealous because they had tinned peaches and lots of fuel and because they did not look hungry, the way so many English people did.

  He took a photograph of Willy in his suit, which was too small for him and pinched about the chest and shoulders. Willy was pleased with the result and framed it, placing it on the chest of drawers in his room. Val wanted to tell him that people did not put up photographs of themselves – it would be considered odd to do so – but then realised that perhaps it was not so odd if you had nobody else to display. And Willy had nobody, unless you counted her and Annie: there were no girlfriends – he was too shy for that – and she knew that the other young men from the village, although kind enough, laughed at him behind his back.

  Mike did not. He said, “It’s a shame that Willy can’t get to the States. He’s a hard worker and he could get somewhere in Indianapolis. We have a big plant there that makes medicines. You ever heard of Colonel Eli Lilly?”

  “Is he at the base?” Val asked.

  Mike laughed. “No, he was a colonel in the Civil War. He came back from the South and started making medicines back home. They built it up and now there’s a big place that has hundreds of people working for it. Chemists, doctors even. But there are jobs for all sorts of people. Drivers. Guys who work on the machinery – the tubes and vats and things like that.”

  “I’m not sure if Willy . . .”

  “Maybe not. But if he met a nice girl who could take care of him, he could get by just fine.”

  She looked at him and knew, at that moment, that if he asked her to marry him, she would accept without hesitation. Muncie, Indiana was a long way away, and there would be things about it that would be strange to her, but that would not matter if Mike was with her. And that was all she wanted: to be with him.

  On one occasion, when he was unable to get away from the base, he sent a card to her, delivered by an airman. She opened it in her bedroom, her hands shaking. It was in his handwriting: To my sweetheart, it said. The sweetest girl in England. From Mike, the guy who thinks of her every minute of those longs hours of flying. Every minute.

  She slipped it under her pillow and that night, waking up in the small hours, she took it out, switched on her light, and read it again and again before she tucked it back under the pillow and dropped off to sleep smiling.

  ❖ 5 ❖

  It was on a Saturday evening that Willy brought the dog back to the house. Willy worked all day on Saturday – Sunday was his only day off – but he came back on this occasion slightly earlier than usual. Annie was listening to the wireless and Val was cooking when he came into the kitchen and announced that there was something outside he wanted them to see. Annie asked if it could wait – her programme had twenty minutes to run – but Willy said that it wo
uld be best if they came right away.

  The dog was in the small garden behind the post office, tied to a leg of the wooden bench on which Annie sat in fine weather.

  Annie exchanged glances with Val, who rolled her eyes. “Whose dog is this, Willy?” she asked. She thought that she already knew the answer, but asked the question anyway.

  “It’s one of the dogs from the farm. He’s the young one. His mother is the one he uses for the sheep.”

  Annie nodded. “I thought as much. And why is he here, Willy?”

  Willy said nothing for a while, but then he burst out with his explanation. It was a torrent of words, a rambling imprecation.

  “He beat him this morning. I saw him. He told me to mind my own business, but he hit him with a stick because he’d been barking. So I’ve brought him here. I knew you wouldn’t mind – and please say it’ll be all right. Butters went off somewhere with one of his pals and I was there by myself, so I untied him and brought him here. I left a note for him on the kitchen table. I said, Your dog’s run away and I don’t know where he is. I said that I’d look for him and bring him back if I saw him, but I won’t. So can he stay here, Auntie? Please. He wants to stay – I can tell he does. I’ll feed him and he’ll be no trouble.”

  He drew breath once he had finished and looked at her imploringly. Annie bent down to pat the dog’s head. He whimpered, and tried to lick her hand.

  “You see,” said Willy. “He likes you already.”

  She straightened up. “We can’t have a dog, Willy. You’re out all day long and I’m busy in the post office. I can’t take him in there. You know that.”

  “He’d be no trouble. He’s not a noisy dog. He’s very quiet.”

  Val moved forward. “He could come to Archie’s farm. He used to have a dog. He said something the other day about missing him.”

  Annie frowned. “You’d have to ask him first.”

  “I’ll take him with me on Monday and see what he says. Will he run alongside a bike?”

  Willy told them that this was how he had brought him home. “He’s got strong legs. You tie a bit of string to his collar and he’ll run beside the bike for miles. Give him a rest now and then, but otherwise he’s fine.” He looked at Annie. “So, can he stay until then – just two nights?”