In the early days at the station, when I was first posted, almost the only man I knew was O’Callaghan. He was a pilot with a French mother and an Irish father, with the result, they used to say, that he spoke French with an Irish accent. I personally never spoke to him in French. It was hard work to speak to him at all.
I do not know how I came to make friends with O’Callaghan. When you spoke to him he ran away. His soft, dreamy, very blue eyes were always shy.
“A good film?” you would say.
“Quite good.”
“Have a good trip?”
“Quite good.”
That was all.
In those days the weather was very bad. For several nights together there would be no operations. In the early evenings O’Callaghan and I would go out together.
“What shall we do?”
“A flick?”
“What you like.”
Whenever he answered you, O’Callaghan smiled in a dreamy, captivating way.
One evening we were standing in Mullins’s bar. We were having a drink and eating a ham sandwich. It was late and the bar was very crowded.
“Why, hello!” the girl said. “Why, Cally!”
“Hello,” O’Callaghan said. He looked like the shyest person I had ever seen.
The girl was dark, almost swarthy, with curly black hair.
“Well, for goodness’ sake, Cally, where have you been hiding yourself?”
O’Callaghan smiled.
“But it’s my birthday!” she said. “Introduce me.”
She was a little happy.
“Introduce,” O’Callaghan said. “This is Françoise.”
“Part French,” she said. We smiled at each other, but she turned her eyes away almost immediately to O’Callaghan and smiled at him.
“A drink, for your birthday?” he said.
“I really shouldn’t. I’m with friends.”
She had a drink in her hands. She waved the glass and showed us her friends, in the far corner of the bar. They waved back to her.
“I’ll get the drinks,” I said.
I went away to the bar and came back, after a time, with two sherries and a light beer.
O’Callaghan and the girl were leaning against the wall, talking in French to each other. It was true: O’Callaghan spoke it with a slight Irish accent.
“Happy birthday,” we said.
“It was really my birthday yesterday.”
“I’m sorry,” O’Callaghan said.
“That’s just like him,” she said to me. “He forgot me. He forgot my birthday. Oh, Cally, where have you been? Why do you hide yourself away from me?”
O’Callaghan only smiled, very dreamy and shy.
“And stay here!” she said. “Every time I come near you, you move away.”
She rested her arms on the wall, one each side of O’Callaghan, so that he could not move away. She smiled and you could see that each minute was getting a little happier.
“Oh, Cally, I’m your girl, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I make the planes you fly in, don’t I, Cally?” she said. “Isn’t that right, Cally?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Those long Stirlings. Those long kites,” she said.
I went away to get another round of drinks. When I came back O’Callaghan and Françoise were talking French again. For a minute I let them go on talking. They were talking of some place in France they had known as children — the old lost France, long before the France that had fallen. And as they talked, the girl grew visibly happier, but on O’Callaghan’s face, for the first time, there was a curious sort of wistful bitterness.
“I haven’t bought a drink for your birthday,” he said, and walked away to the bar.
When he had gone, the girl looked up at me.
“His father is still there,” she said. “They’ve got him in a concentration camp. You see?”
I felt suddenly that I knew all about O’Callaghan: why he was flying, why he was always so far away, why there was bitterness on his face. I knew too something about the girl. At the aircraft factory, making Stirlings, she thought of O’Callaghan, who flew them. She spoke French with him; she thought of the France they had known and was happy.
O’Callaghan seemed to be a long time buying the drinks, and at last the girl left me and went over to the bar. She found him talking to the barman there, and when she came back with him, her arm was round his waist.
“Oh, Cally, you bad person, you bad person,” she said, “why do you hide yourself away from me?”
O’Callaghan only smiled and looked his old shy self again.
Two nights later they pranged him over Hamburg. They blew him to pieces because he came in too low, machine-gunning the lights because his bombs were gone. It was hard to believe so fierce an attack by so shy a man.
After that I often looked out for Françoise. Every night I was in Mullins’s bar I used to look for her, hoping to tell her how it happened. I wanted to tell her that it was moonlight and that, by some chance, someone had seen him go.
But I never saw her and now, at last, I have given up looking. Instead I think of her happy face, the way she and O’Callaghan talked of a France that had gone, and the winds that seem now more than ever to be her own.
“Oh, why do you hide yourself away from me?”