Later, about two and a half hours after Tony had been a living and breathing presence, and after they had finished their toast, Patrick got up and nodded to Frank to follow him. Frank was happy to leave the mess. The Dodger was recounting his two near misses and one probable. Everyone else was quiet, but the Dodger hadn’t noticed.
It had not been a good mission. True, they had lost only Tony whereas the other squadron had lost two, but the Fortress fleet had been badly mauled, losing a third of their strength. At the debrief the wing commander had been more than usually crisp and critical, describing the bombing as wilfully and shamefully inaccurate. Many Fortresses, meeting heavy flak around the airfield, had veered away or climbed above it and dropped their bombs anywhere. At one point the only planes near the airfield were the covering Spitfire squadrons, with nothing to cover. Then, because of their avoidance of the target, the bombers had failed to form defensive and defendable formations on the way back. Spreading out over northern France and Belgium, they made easy meat for the Luftwaffe. Our own encounter before reaching the bombers, the wing commander said, was because the diversionary Typhoon attacks had not worked as intended. That is, they had worked but only too well, taking the Germans so completely by surprise that by the time they reacted the diversions were over and the real attack was about to start. Thus, the bombers and escorting fighters had flown into a stirred-up hornets’ nest.
Patrick waited for Frank in the mess entrance, by the table where their letters were laid out. It reminded Frank that he still hadn’t written to his mother. Patrick picked up a couple of letters.
‘Two for Tony. One from home, by the looks of it, the other –’ he turned it, studying the postmark – ‘unclear. Feminine hand, wouldn’t you say?’
Frank looked at the neat, well-rounded script.
‘He has – had – a girlfriend,’ said Patrick. ‘We’ll have to send them back with his things. Wondered if you could give me a hand with that.’
They walked through the huts to Tony’s, which he shared with five others. The cloud had thickened and there was a fretful, inconstant breeze. The windsock alternately stiffened and sagged and the usual airfield activities – planes and all manner of things were endlessly moved, anchored, hidden, worked on, moved again – seemed piecemeal and subdued.
‘Not something we normally do, I know,’ continued Patrick. ‘Clerks in the station commander’s office see to it. Miserable job. But I know his people, you see. Wouldn’t want anything to go to them they wouldn’t want, nothing upsetting. Bad enough losing him but then to find – well, you never know what, something in his stuff they’d rather not have known about – makes it even worse. Affects the way they remember him.’ He held up a folded canvas bag. ‘Got this from the station office. I have to make a list and you have to witness it, if you wouldn’t mind. Best get it over with while the others are still in the mess.’
The hut, with its narrow iron bedsteads, plain table, standard lockers, hangers for uniforms and cylindrical coke stove, was identical to Frank’s: clean, efficient, cheerless. Tony’s bed was at the far end. Gingerly at first, they emptied his bedside drawer, then his locker, then the pockets of his clothes. Next they took his pyjamas from the bed and stripped it. Everything belonging to the RAF they stacked at one end of the bed, everything personal at the other. His uniforms and kit would be returned to stores, his possessions sent to his next of kin. They worked slowly, with none of the impersonal briskness of the clerks, who were used to it. It felt unpardonably intrusive, almost illicit. They separated the personal into two piles, the smaller comprising things they decided not to return, or were unsure about: non-issue underclothes, an opened packet of contraceptives with one remaining, a magazine of women modelling underwear, a dozen or so opened letters in the same feminine hand as the one they had, an RAF notebook in which were pencilled a number of incomplete poems, or perhaps versions of the same poem.
Patrick leafed through it. ‘Didn’t know he wrote poetry. Did you?’
‘No. I didn’t know him well.’
‘His father does, or did. Published, I think. Question is, would he have wanted his parents to see them?’
‘Depends what they’re like, I guess.’
Patrick shook his head over the pages, without looking up. ‘Pretty much the sort of thing most of us would do if we allowed ourselves to lapse into verse. Sincerely felt, no doubt, but sincerity is never enough, is it? Sadly.’ He held out the book. ‘Want a look?’
‘I never read poetry.’
‘Don’t like it?’
‘Can’t read slowly enough.’
Patrick closed the book with a smile and put it on the NOK pile, along with photos, pen, cash, address book, wallet, cheque book, ties, shirts and socks. ‘I think they should see it. They’d probably want to. They may not know he wrote and for them sincerity is probably more than enough, poor folk. But these are more of a problem.’ He held up the love-letters. ‘Awful thing is, I half want to read them. If I didn’t at all I’d be happy to flick through them and check there’s nothing too upsetting for his parents. But because I have a prurient interest in seeing what it’s like for other people, I’m reluctant. Such an intrusion.’ He smiled.
Frank, who had never sent or received a love-letter, was equally reluctant and probably more curious. It touched on his other secret, his virginity. ‘Shouldn’t we just send them back to his girlfriend, along with today’s?’
‘Still have to look inside to get the address. But if that’s all we do, I suppose it’s all right.’ He put them down without opening any and picked up Tony’s brown wallet, taking out the picture of a smiling blonde girl wearing a roll-necked jersey. ‘Lucky Tony. Or was.’ He put it back and counted out some pound notes. ‘Three quid here, plus the loose change in that jacket pocket. That makes three pounds seven and nine. Note and witness it.’ He replaced everything and sat staring at the pile. ‘Hope whoever goes through my stuff when my number’s up will be as considerate as us.’
Frank was surprised and dismayed. ‘You reckon it’s coming, then?’
Patrick smiled again, almost indulgently. ‘Would’ve today, but for you.’
He didn’t like to think of Patrick as vulnerable. He could accept his own vulnerability – was only too well aware of it – so long as there was someone who wasn’t, someone dependable who would keep him up to the mark. He picked up Tony’s uniform dress shoes. ‘But that’s the same for all of us, every time. There’s always someone who gets someone else out of trouble.’
‘I’ll give the love-letters to the clerks. They’ll know what to do. Must be a drill for it. Drill for everything in the RAF.’
Afterwards Frank went to his hut and wrote to his mother. He had intended to go fishing but there wasn’t time now. He would have caught a fat trout and taken it to the colonel, or, at least, to the colonel’s house. Vanessa would have received it with surprise and admiration, they would have eaten together, themselves alone, and then – but then he imagined the distancing brightness of her switch-on hostess’s smile, how desirable yet unapproachable she was in her stockings and smart clothes, the enigma of her appearance in the darkened window. He tried to imagine being in bed with her but he couldn’t, not with any particularity, partly because he couldn’t imagine what that was like with anyone and partly because, in his mind, she was forever withdrawing, closing the door, fading like the light outside the hut window.
Those stockings, hard to find in England now, must surely have been given her by someone. Most likely an American serviceman. It was impossible to imagine she had no admirers and he hated to think of her with them. He couldn’t be the only virgin in the RAF but it felt like it, from the way the others spoke. This secret, like his fear, he nursed closely. It was even more shameful – fear was at least understandable and, he was sure, privately shared by many. But being a virgin made him feel he was living under false pretences, pretending to be a man without having fully qualified. He feared being killed without having done it, as if even in death he would be incomplete. Tony had done it, clearly. That must have made it easier to die.
It ought to have been easier to get rid of his virginity than his fear. He had tried a couple of times in Canada and once nearly succeeded – perhaps he would have if he’d stayed. Since arriving in England he had had only one chance to try again, during a couple of days’ leave in London between finishing training in north Wales and joining the squadron in Kent. He had taken a room in a hotel near Paddington station that smelt of damp carpet, stale cigarette smoke and old dust. Someone on the course had said there were plenty of prostitutes around Paddington and that the more exotic and desirable-sounding high-class call girls were available there. During two days of lonely and frustrated discontent, feeling more homesick than at any time since docking in Liverpool, he had failed to find any high-class call girls. Indeed, he had no idea how to go about it, assuming that the names and telephone numbers found in call-boxes were not what his informant had in mind.
He roamed the streets without result, identifying women he thought might be prostitutes but then avoiding them. The drabness of the city, the bomb sites with their peeling walls of half-demolished buildings, like private indecencies made public, and the hunched, pale penury of many of the women, diminished his desire and made him question why he was doing it at all. But he carried on, stubbornly. Late during the second evening after an air-raid that had had happened mainly somewhere else, a girl’s voice had called out from an alleyway by a pub that was closing. ‘Got a light, love?’
He saw a pale face in the dark and felt in his pocket for his matches. ‘Guess I have.’
‘Are you American?’
‘Canadian.’
‘I like Canadians.’
As he went to strike she cupped his hands in hers and pulled him into the alleyway. ‘Mind the blackout. Coppers come round here at closing time.’ The flare showed a thin face with a prominent nose and a fringe of dark hair. Her cigarette was mostly smoked already, little more than a fag-end. She turned her head as she exhaled. ‘You got anywhere we can go?’
‘I’m in a hotel near here.’
‘Which one?’
He told her, aware now that he was merely experimenting with himself. Once the prospect ceased to be abstract, an imagined scene with an imaginary woman, all desire left him.
‘Cost you more,’ she said. ‘’Long as you can get me in. Otherwise it’s here. Don’t have a place of me own.’
The hotel desk was not manned and, from what he had observed, a challenge was unlikely anyway. Most of the other guests seemed to use it as a place of assignation. She stood looking round as he closed and locked the bedroom door. ‘Don’t give you room to swing a cat here, do they? What’d it cost?’
He told her.
‘Blimey.’
She wore a blue high-shouldered jacket that was too big for her and a tight green skirt. Her shoes, which had probably been cream, were worn and scuffed, her thin legs bare. There was a new smell in the room, which he assumed was her.
She looked at him. ‘Pay in advance, I’m afraid. No reflection, I do it with everybody. I have to. Some men think they can help themselves to what they want and do a runner.’
She took off her clothes as if for an RAF medical. Her underclothes were a washed-out grey and she was as skinny as a stick. She was the first naked woman he had seen, apart from photographs surreptitiously passed around at school, and he stared with more curiosity than desire. She lay on the narrow bed. ‘Come on, then, let’s get on with it.’ She smiled with what was probably intended as teasing encouragement. Some teeth were missing, others discoloured. ‘Not shy, are you?’
He undressed and squeezed onto the bed beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder and began fondling him. He could smell her hair when it fell across his face. He carefully removed it from his mouth and nose. He had never felt less aroused.
‘Bit knackered tonight, are we, love? Been having a bit too much of it?’
‘Let’s talk for a while.’
She let go and sat up. ‘Talking’s all right, I don’t mind that. Still cost you, though, ’cos it’s still my time. Got any fags?’
He took his cigarettes from his battledress trouser pocket, found a tin ashtray on the window ledge and sat on the bed with her.
‘Senior Service, I ain’t had one of these for ages,’ she said. ‘Don’t ’alf cost, don’t they? I thought you’d have some American or Canadian ones.’
‘Can’t get them over here. Not in the NAAFI anyway.’
‘I had a packet of twenty once, off of an American. Peter something, they was called. Whole packet, I had.’
‘Peter Stuyvesant?’
‘Yeah, something like that. My old man works in the NAAFI. He gets fags what fall off the backs of lorries, like.’
‘Your father works in the NAAFI?’
‘No, me husband. In Malta, he is. Good riddance. Hope he stays there.’
‘Does he – does he know what you—’
‘What I get up to? No need, is there? I don’t know what he gets up to. Don’t want to, neither. Anyway, a girl’s got to put a penny in her purse, hasn’t she? Starve to death if I lived off what he sends me. Right old Scrooge, he is.’
They talked through two cigarettes each. She lived in Bayswater, which she said was not far away and meant she could walk to work. They had no children and lived in her mother-in-law’s rented house. She had always lived in Bayswater and had never been to any other part of London except to Notting Hill sometimes, for the market. She would like to go to America or Canada ‘with all them big swanky cars and polar bears’. Her mother-in-law was nearly deaf and blind and was anyway away with the fairies most of the time and had no idea whether she was there or not. It was a relief to get out of the house.
She stubbed out her second cigarette. ‘Time I got back to work if there’s nothing going on here, then.’ She flicked his penis and grinned. ‘Wouldn’t mind a few more like you. Easy money.’
She dressed swiftly while he counted out the money. ‘Ta, love. Get a good night’s sleep. You’ll be all right in the morning.’
He began to dress. ‘I’ll show you down. It’s a bit—’
‘’S all right, know it like the back of me ’and round here. Sleep well.’
The door closed, leaving him relieved but restless and discontented. He half dressed and then, hearing no one about, crept along the corridor to the toilet, where he masturbated, proving to himself that it was indeed still all right. When he returned to his room and reached for another cigarette he found she had taken the packet.
Later that evening Frank left the letter to his mother in the post room by the station office, then sauntered over to the mess. The moment he entered, he wished he hadn’t. It was crowded and noisy, awash with beer and thick with smoke, the bar almost hidden behind the crush of blue serge uniforms. The Dodger was at the piano in the corner, with a group around him banging their glasses to the bawdy version of Lili Marlene he was thumping out. He was probably a gifted pianist – Frank was no judge but had heard him in more reflective mood playing long passages of classical music from memory – who seemed to prefer clowning. Lili Marlene ended with a great shout by virtually everyone in the bar. Frank was about to withdraw but the Dodger spotted him.
‘Moose – Moosey, old lad!’ he shouted, holding up his arm. ‘Owe you a pint for that Hun. Come and have a pint.’ He stood abruptly, brimming with beer and good fellowship. His chair fell over behind him. ‘Lemme get you your pint. Always pay my debts. You the same for me next time.’
He came over and put his arm round Frank, then barged a way for both of them through the massed shoulders and backs to the bar. There was more singing, in which Frank pretended to join, then an argument as to whether brunettes or blondes were more likely to be goers. The Dodger made the case for redheads and was interrupted by someone who shouted that he said it only because he was ginger. The Dodger protested that gingers were always being got at, someone emptied someone else’s beer on his head to help his hair change colour, then there was a call for British Bulldog. Frank, jostled and quiet in the clamour, tried to look engaged while thinking of Tony’s blonde girlfriend and wondering who would break the news to her. The RAF would inform only NOK of a death and if Tony’s parents didn’t tell her – assuming they knew about her – she would simply never hear, unless the RAF returned her letters to her, with a note. As the teams formed up for British Bulldog he saw again Tony’s briefly flailing arms as he struggled to get out of his cockpit before the flames engulfed him.
He slipped out of the mess into the welcome dark and fitful gusts of rain. It was more wind than rain but occasional drops peppered his head and face refreshingly. He wanted to stretch his legs and so walked past the huts and across the wet grass towards the airfield perimeter. A lane ran parallel the other side of the fence, partly screened by a belt of young conifers. It was normally quiet, with just the odd cyclist, tractor or horse, but as he approached he heard the subdued growl of multiple engines on low revs. When he was close enough to see through the trees he made out the high black bulks and shaded blackout lights of Army lorries rumbling along nose to tail. Another division heading for camps near the coast, presumably, one of many recent and seemingly endless convoys, sometimes taking days and nights to pass. The Day, the invasion of Europe, the opening of the second front, must be close.
The lorries were canvas-backed Bedford three-tonners, probably an infantry division. Through a gap in the trees he made out the faces of young soldiers, crammed onto benches in the backs, festooned with rifles and kit, lolling at unlikely angles, dozing or comatose, their heads resting on each other and rocking to the movements of the lorries. None spoke and the eyes of those who were awake stared dully at the vehicle behind. It was a vision of a catacomb of corpses, thrown in anyhow.
He left the convoy to its destiny and headed at an angle across the airfield towards the dispersal areas where Spitfires rested on their tail wheels, long noses pointing towards the scurrying, moonlit clouds. There was virtually no chance of anyone flying now but still their ground crews lay huddled beneath them, wrapped in groundsheets. He walked past unnoticed, following the perimeter to where the ground dropped away, revealing, in daylight, a full view of the Romney Marsh. It was a solid dark mass now. Above it the clouds alternately obscured and displayed ever-changing spaces of lighter, fading sky. Frank stood, the intermittent fine sprays of rain wafting like blessings against his face.
Eventually he turned to continue his walk but after a few yards he stopped, assailed by the smell of cigar smoke. ‘Rather you walked round me than over me,’ said Patrick. ‘Don’t much fancy being trampled by a moose.’ The dark clump ahead moved as Patrick stood, his cigar cupped in his hand. ‘Often sit here last thing, clear the mind, pollute the lungs. Wet bum tonight.’
‘I almost walked into you.’
‘Unforgivable to light up, of course, especially for the squadron leader. But I’m careful and no one’s ever caught me at it before.’ He cupped both hands to his mouth and the stub glowed within them. ‘I guess there are worse sins,’ he added after exhaling, ‘not available to us.’
‘They were to Tony.’
‘Yes, if fornication’s a sin. Not sure the RAF would have a view on that, unless it were fornication between ranks. Anyway, good luck to them, poor sinners both. Take it while you can. He won’t be doing much more of it, that’s for sure. Unless there’s fornicating in heaven.’
‘I was close to downing that Yank.’
‘I know, I saw you were, saw you lining up. That’s why I intervened. Understandable, felt the same myself, but it won’t do, not while there’s still Germans to shoot down.’
‘What will happen about it?’
‘Nothing. That is, we’ll put in an official complaint, they’ll deny it, bums on office seats will shuffle paper between them and we’ll all forget about it. Except his people and his girlfriend, of course. But they won’t be told; they’ll assume he was shot down by the Luftwaffe. Better that way. Even worse if they knew.’ He bent and pushed his cigar stub into the grass, grinding it with his boot. They walked on, side by side.
‘Had enough of the mess tonight?’ said Patrick.
‘I just – well, yeah, I guess so.’
‘Too much for everyone, sometime or other. We all need some escape.’
‘Except the Dodger. Seems to suit him.’
‘Horses for courses. Some escape by immersion, diving deeper, never thinking about it. Others like you and me have to come up for air now and again, sit on the bank, take a few breaths.’
‘I didn’t realise you did.’
‘That’s the thing about being in, you don’t notice those who climb out. Talking of banks, sitting on, how’s your fishing going? Any luck?’
Frank soon found himself talking about the colonel and Vanessa. It was an unexpected relief.
‘Enigmatic,’ said Patrick.
‘She is, yes. I don’t get what’s going on. Something is, but I just don’t get it.’
‘I meant him, your colonel. Sounds as if he knows more than he’s letting on, keeping something back.’
‘Maybe, maybe.’ Frank hadn’t thought much about the colonel. ‘Maybe they’re both spies, trying to get information out of me.’
Patrick laughed. ‘Pretty disappointing Mata Hari, leaving you alone with her father.’
Frank was in bed before the British Bulldog players returned. They were noisy enough but too bruised and tired to be rowdy and there were no pranks or high jinks. The hut fairly swiftly settled down and soon the only sounds that came to his ears, as he lay awake wondering again whether he would die a virgin, were those of sleeping men and the distant rumble of the three-tonners.