By ten o’clock, ops were on: a rubber factory in Hanover. The weather in Suffolk was good, but by midday ops were scrubbed. The high winds that 409 had met on the way to Bremen were circling around a deep low-pressure system that had settled on central Europe. The Met men predicted foul weather in Germany, becoming abominable later. 409 was stood down for two days. Urgent servicing could be done. Cameras could be installed. Aircrew could get pissed.
None of this made any difference to Rollo. He had been driven, in Rafferty’s car, to the aircrew assessment center, and now his head was being X-rayed from five different angles. An ear, nose and throat specialist had decided that his sinuses and associated cavities deserved closer scrutiny.
“I’m just a passenger,” Rollo told the X-ray technician. “I’m not going to fly the bloody plane. What’s all the fuss about?”
“It’s about your cranial orifices. You know how your ears pop when you go up a big hill? Some people can’t fly because their head won’t tolerate changes in pressure. The pain sends them berserk. Now, keep absolutely still, please.”
Rollo was placed in a waiting room while they developed the plates. A medical orderly came in and asked for a sample of his urine. “If that’s got anything to do with sinuses, my plumbing is in big trouble,” Rollo said. The orderly nodded soberly and went away.
Time passed. Rollo practiced holding his breath, and got up to twenty seconds. A male nurse opened the door and called his name. Rollo followed him down a series of unfamiliar corridors and finally arrived at a dental surgery.
The dentist was as big as Rafferty but far friendlier. “Just as well we took these snaps, Mr. Blazer,” he said. He held up the X-rays. “I’ve never seen such sinuses. Perfect in every respect! Nothing to worry about there. But here …” He pointed to the end of the jawbone. “Just look at that wisdom tooth! I mean to say, it’s in a bad way, isn’t it?”
“Oh, hell and damnation,” Rollo said.
“Better have it out, don’t you think? We certainly can’t pass you as fit to fly with that tooth. Have it out, old chap. What you haven’t got, can’t harm you. That’s the RAF’s dental policy”
Rollo took the X-ray from him. The wisdom tooth had roots like an oak tree. He desperately wanted to discuss alternative solutions, but his mouth had stopped working. He was trapped.
The obvious thing for Silk to do was get a haircut. His hair was so thick that it bulged out around the sides of his cap. Hazard kept telling him it needed cutting. But the barber on the base was a butcher, so that meant driving to Bury St. Edmunds, where there was a man who understood hair. Too bad he didn’t understand people. His hobby was collecting postage stamps. No: his real hobby was talking about them, endlessly, tediously. Silk forgot about a haircut.
He had a golf club, good condition, one previous owner, collided with a Hampden in eight-tenths cloud over Krefeld. If he could find a golf ball he could whack it around the aerodrome. He was scrabbling in the back of a drawer when he pulled out a photograph, several photographs, some taken outside a cathedral, others at a wedding reception, and one taken during a briefing by Pixie Hunt at RAF Kindrick. Pixie of the piercing eyes. Well, Pixie was gone. They were all gone. Silk burned the snaps in an ashtray. “I don’t wish to discuss it,” he said aloud, to nobody.
He drove out of camp in the Frazer-Nash. “Nobody left it to me,” he said. “I won it in a raffle. Kindly leave the room.”
He stopped at the first village he came to. It had a pub, the King William, and he wanted a pint of beer, but if he went inside they would all look at him, at his wings, at his face, and nobody would say anything until some stumpy-toothed, bald-headed farm laborer came up to the bar for a refill and said, “Day off today, then?” And Silk would agree, he wasn’t actually flying at that particular moment, and the man would say, “I was at the Somme, you know. Not like this, it wasn’t.” You couldn’t go into a pub without meeting a boring old fart who told you how lucky you were, not dying of trenchfoot at the Somme.
So Silk went to the village shop instead. Bought a small loaf, two apples and a bottle of milk. Sat on a bench at the edge of the village green. It was a big green, and some boys were playing cricket. How frightfully English, he thought. Pub, church, cricket, and here comes a haywain with a couple of immensely patriotic cart-horses. The batsman took an almighty swing and hit the ball higher than the elms. It fell about ten feet short of Silk and bounced over his head. A boy came running.
“This place is worse than Bremen,” Silk said.
The boy fetched the ball and trotted back. “What’s Bremen like?” he asked.
“Not cricket.”
The boy looked at him, decided not to risk another question, and returned to the game. The sun shone, the church clock sounded the hour, and another bloody haywain came around the corner. Silk felt totally out of place. He tossed the food into the car and drove away.
After a mile or so he reached a wood. Nothing majestic; just a tangled mass of silver birch, ash, sycamore, a few beech, the occasional oak. He liked trees. He enjoyed watching the top branches wave in the wind and hearing the whispered conversation of the leaves. That was a thoroughly sentimental idea and one which he would never have mentioned to his crew. They were in Newmarket, flashing their half-wings at floozies in pubs. He’d seen enough uniforms for a while. Enough floozies, too. A gap in the wood looked as if it might be a track, so he turned into it. The Frazer-Nash mowed down grass and thistles, and after fifty yards he stopped. This was as good a place as any to eat his lunch.
Food made him drowsy. He curled up in the back seat of the car with his hat over his eyes and fell asleep.
The usual dream came along. He half-rolled the Wimpy, a pointless maneuver and strictly forbidden by the manufacturers. Now the kite was upside-down and everything was falling off the instrument panel: first the boost gauges, then the flap control lever and the altimeter and the air speed indicator and more; they all dropped to the roof. Without them, he couldn’t land. But he didn’t care. He’d had this dream many times before, he knew that landing was impossible when inverted, so there was no point in worrying. One small problem. How to drop the bombs? Damn things were a nuisance, get rid of them. He pulled the jettison control lever and it came away in his hand. Fat lot of use that was. He dropped it and it fell past his face. Damn. They’d make him pay for it. He’d signed for this kite, and what you lost, you paid for. Sure enough, here was the Engineer Officer, poking him, what a mannerless bastard. Silk took a long time to wake up, and it wasn’t the Engineer Officer. It was Zoë. Well, that couldn’t be right. He let his eyelids close. Back to sleep. “Come on, Silko,” she said. “Hit the deck.”
Gradually he became completely awake. She was kneeling on the front seat, looking like an angel who had missed too many hair-dressing appointments. A rather weather-beaten angel. In a grubby green sweater with a hole in the elbow. “That’s the navy,” he said. “We never hit the deck. Our batman wakes us with a nice cup of tea.” He sat up and scratched his ribs. “It is you, isn’t it?”
“What an asinine question, even by your standards … Oh, look. Milk.” She drank from the bottle.
“You never used to touch the stuff.”
“Things have changed. You’ve changed. You’ve got more lines than Clapham Junction.” She traced the map of his face with her fingertip. His face enjoyed it.
“This is a thumping great coincidence, isn’t it?” he said.
“No. Quite the opposite. Let’s go for a walk.”
They took a path into the wood, and Zoë explained. She said that she had been looking for Silk. First she found out that 409 was at Coney Garth; then she hung about the area, hoping to catch sight of him. She had a push-bike, and today she’d seen the Frazer-Nash and hoped it was him driving.
“Of course it was me,” he said. “Nobody else drives it.”
“Somebody else might. Remember how you got it.”
“Goodness. You have changed.”
She had followed the car on her bike, lost it, seen it leaving the village, lost it again, and searched the lanes without much hope—he was probably miles and miles away—until she noticed the wheel marks in the grassy track.
“Bluebell, the Girl Detective,” he said.
“Don’t laugh. It’s taken me ten days.”
“Zoë, my sweet. What’s wrong with the telephone? Call the Officers’ Mess. Send me a postcard. Ask at the Main Gate, and I’ll come and meet you.”
“There’s something else. I’m on the run from the police.”
That had to be a joke. “Dear Zoë,” he said. “I’m finding it very difficult to concentrate right now because, in the words of the popular song, as time goes by, woman needs man and man must have his mate, that no-one can deny. Certainly not me. But it’s never as simple as that, is it, and in a nutshell, I haven’t got a French letter on me.”
“Poor Silko,” she said. “Why are men so slow? I was ready the minute I saw you in the car. And the only protection I need is your tunic to lie on. Forest floors can be dreadfully lumpy.”
Already they were undressing. “Later, you must tell me about the police,” he said. “Much later. Next month will do.”
Later, of course, was too soon; as it always is. The keener the desire, the quicker the anticlimax. One quick glimpse of paradise from the mountaintop, Silk thought as they walked back to the car, and then God tips you over the edge. Still, better than no glimpse at all.
He put her bike in the back of the car, reversed to the road, and drove until they saw a tea garden. A small girl brought a large teapot and a plate of scones with a jar of plum jam.
“It’s been nearly a year,” Zoë said. “Feels like ten.”
“He might be a prisoner-of-war. Cock-ups do occur. It’s not impossible.”
“He’s dead, Silko. I knew as soon as I opened the door and saw the adjutant. Stone dead.”
“Where did you go?”
“London. Albany. You didn’t write.”
“Couldn’t think what to say. You weren’t interested in the squadron, and anyway life was just ops, and more ops. You didn’t write, either.”
“I had too much to say. Life became very messy, Silko, and it was all my fault. First, I was pregnant. No surprise. God knows Tony tried hard enough.”
“I did my little best, too.”
“What! Never.”
“The baby was born in March. Anthony Charles Hubert. Greedy little savage. Chewed on my breasts until they were raw. I’d got engaged to Hubert at Christmas, he was a fighter pilot…”
“Big mistake. They’re cowboys.”
“Well, he’s a dead cowboy. Shot down over France. Then something strange happened to me, I began to hate the baby, so I gave it to Mummy.”
“Makes sense. She’s the one who wanted it.”
“And Mummy’s living in Dublin, so there aren’t any problems about food rationing. Or bombing.”
“No? Jerry bombed Ireland twice. By mistake, of course. I’m told it doesn’t hurt so much when you get accidentally killed.”
“Hey.” She rapped his knuckles with a knife-handle and he spilled his tea. “If you know my story so well, you tell it.”
“Zoë, you’ve ruined these trousers.”
“I’ve cleaned them. What a shambles you are, Silko … Anyway, after the baby went away I met a wonderful Norwegian pilot called Rolf and we both wanted to marry and a week later—gone. Failed to return, nobody knew what happened. That was when I decided I must be a jinx popsy, and I gave up men. Then I met someone at a party who asked me to work for a refugee charity, raising money. He was a Czech count and they had nice offices in Belgrave Square. The chairman was a Polish baron and I worked for the director. He was a Hungarian prince. They made me treasurer because I’m English and according to law … I can’t remember the details and it didn’t seem to matter because it was a charity and nobody was working for pay, we were raising lots of money for a really good cause, I just signed documents when I was asked to, a pure formality they said, and about a fortnight ago I turned up and the office was empty and all the money had gone. It seems that I’d authorized it. The police were banging on the front door, so I did a bunk through the back window. There’s a warrant for my arrest.”
Silk made a guess, and said, “How much is missing?”
“A quarter of a million pounds.”
He winced. His guess had been twenty thousand. “When you say you’re on the run…”
“I’ve got Rolf’s revolver. He was supposed to take it whenever he flew, but he gave it to me, in case I got attacked in the blackout. I drove to Suffolk and ran out of petrol and when a policeman asked to see my identity card I told him to stick ’em up.”
“You actually said, to a British bobby, ‘Stick ’em up.’”
“Yes.”
“Bizarre. Was it loaded?”
“Probably not. How does one find out?”
“I take it he stuck them up.”
“Yes. So I stole his bike. That’s it in your car. He wasn’t a real policeman, just a Special Constable. They don’t count, do they? He was quite small, too. I managed to lower the saddle. That was lucky, wasn’t it?”
“And where are you living?”
“I’ll show you.”
They drove back, past the aerodrome, up narrow lanes, into a dirt track that led eventually to a small, broken-down bungalow overlooking a lake. Marshy scrubland was all around. No house was in sight. “I think people used to come here to shoot duck,” Zoë said, “but the bombers scared the ducks away.”
They went inside. There was a hole in the roof and a strong smell of mildew. The only furniture was a sagging sofa, covered with blankets. He saw a revolver hanging from a nail, took it down, checked it. Empty. A cardboard box had some tins in it. “Pilchards,” Zoë said. “I’m getting rather sick of pilchards.”
“Can’t your mother do something? She’s got millions. Or that peculiar Dutchman, Flemming Thingummy.”
“Vansittart. I think he’s gone to Holland to be a spy.” She picked at what little was left of the wallpaper. “Anyway, what could he do? I transferred the money, I’m guilty in law, even if someone pays it all back. I’m bound to be arrested.” The last bit of wallpaper fell. “You’re awfully clever, Silko. Can’t you think of something?”
“I’ve got one idea. But we’ve already done that.”
“Ages ago.”
“True, true.”
“Let’s say it was an air-test. To make sure none of the screws were loose.”
“What a clever, beautiful girl you are.”
The sofa creaked, but none of its screws came loose. A Wimpy on its final approach made the windows vibrate. Silk and Zoë had heard it all before, and they concentrated on enjoying themselves, since the rest of the world wasn’t being much fun.
Rollo lay on a bed. The dentist sat on a tall stool, watching him. The male nurse stood alongside.
“The body is a wonderful machine,” the dentist said. “Take blood, for instance. First it cleanses the wound, then it coagulates and seals up the hole in the body, and all the while it keeps searching for hostile bacteria which may have taken the opportunity to sneak in, and if it finds any, it bumps them off. Meanwhile, of course, the blood is also engaged in its epic journey around the body which keeps us alive. Man has invented nothing so clever as blood.”
Rollo leaned sideways and spat a heavy gobbet of the stuff into a basin. The nurse came forward and wiped his mouth with a towel and went back to his place.
“I almost forgot to mention another quality of blood,” the dentist said “It’s non-toxic. You can swallow it quite safely”
Rollo was very tired. The anesthetic had almost worn off but he was dozy. There was a hole in his jaw the size of a bucket, and he kept having to empty it.
“And here’s another thing,” the dentist said. “Is it pure chance that blood is red? The perfect symbol for danger, isn’t it? The body has a good reason for everything, and that includes color. Imagine yellow blood. Or green! Well, duty calls. Give him another aspirin in thirty minutes,” he told the nurse, and left.
There was nothing to look at but the ceiling. Nothing to hear but the thud of his pulse. One side on his face felt as if it had been clubbed. Rollo grew accustomed to the pain. Without realizing it, he drifted into sleep, and woke up choking on blood. After that he knew there was no point in trying to stay awake. If his body disagreed, it would wake him up, choking and spitting. That was another thing blood was good for: waking you up. The dentist had missed that one. Rollo dozed off again.
The room was in dusk when he opened his eyes, not because he was choking, but because the nurse was lifting him by the shoulders, making him sit up. Automatically, Rollo spat into the basin.
“Jolly good,” the dentist said. “Look: we’re going to put a couple of stitches into that cavity. Knit the edges together. Try to stop the bleeding.”
Rollo got off the bed. He raised a finger. Big speech coming. “What’s the rush?” he said. “I’ve still got a pint left.” They were kind enough to smile, although they had heard it before. They had heard everything before.
The signal came from Command and said: Report King’s College Cambridge 1800 hours in civilian clothes. Authority: R.G.T. Champion, Group Captain.
Skull got the Lagonda filled up with RAF petrol and wore the only decent suit he had, an Irish thornproof tweed of such a dark green that it looked almost black. Two years in uniform made him feel naked without a hat, so he borrowed a bowler from the adjutant. His sudden release from Coney Garth turned the day into a holiday. He sped west and was in Cambridge by three o’clock. He strolled along the Backs and enjoyed the calm beauty of the university during the Long Vacation. Cambridge was at its best without undergraduates, Skull thought. A pity it couldn’t be a permanent arrangement.
At six he walked into King’s, and the Porter’s Lodge installed him in the room of an undergraduate called Cooksley, reading medicine. Skull had a bath and he was browsing through Cooksley’s books when Champion knocked and came in. “We’re dining at High Table,” he announced.
“I bet you didn’t know that bone marrow comes in two colors, red and yellow,” Skull said.
“Here’s a gown for you.”
“Not striped, you understand. Either red or yellow. The red marrow makes blood cells. That’s reassuring, isn’t it?”
Skull followed him. “How the blood cells escape from the marrow and enter the arteries was not revealed. Possibly in the next chapter.” He noticed that Champion’s suit, of charcoal-gray flannel, had been generously tailored to enhance the shoulders. “You look bigger,” he said. “But of course you’re a group captain now.”
Champion said, “We’re here to meet a chap called Butt. David Bensusan-Butt. You’ve never heard of him. He’s only twenty-seven but he’s private secretary to Professor Lindemann and Lindemann is Churchill’s personal adviser on weapons and science and the like. This means that Bensusan-Butt is in the Prime Minister’s office. He’s a civil servant but they’re not all stupid and Bensusan-Butt’s got a brain like Battersea Power Station. He’s a King’s man. That’s why I got you both here, away from London. He’ll be more relaxed here.”
“Relaxed about what?”
“Good question. Bomber Command has plans. It needs to be twice as big, maybe four times as big. However, we’ve got enemies in the War Cabinet. My spies tell me that Lindemann has ordered Bensusan-Butt to do a deep analysis of Bomber Command and award marks out of ten.”
Skull was introduced to the man and they talked briefly, not about the war. Skull got an impression of warmth and wit, of an intense energy, and of someone who knew exactly how each sentence would end before he began it. Then they went into Hall and were seated too far apart for conversation. Skull thought: Champion wants to run the show. This should be interesting.
When dinner ended, Champion did not linger. He led his guests to his rooms, which were much more spacious than Cooksley’s. Champion’s influence had evicted a professor of clinical biochemistry. Such raw power both impressed and depressed Skull.
“No piano, I’m afraid,” Champion said, and murmured to Skull, “Mr. Bensusan-Butt is an excellent pianist.”
“Purely for pleasure,” his guest said. “Some play squash, I play Haydn. Incidentally, can we drop the Bensusan? Butt is enough. David is even better.”
“Splendid,” Champion said. “I’m Ralph, and Skelton is … well, Skelton is Skull. Very apt. He’s my tame brain in the field of battle.”
Skull had been adjusting the blackout curtains. Now his head turned slowly. “What did you call me?” he said.
Champion should have apologized, but he had only recently been made up to group captain and he could not apologize to a flight lieutenant. Instead, he bustled about, offering drinks: brandy, port, whisky, Madeira?
“I wouldn’t mind some coffee,” Butt said.
“Of course. Skull, be a good fellow and make some coffee.”
“No.” It was said calmly but firmly.
Champion frowned. “Are you allergic to coffee?”
“No.”
Champion looked at Butt with mock-despair. “Mutiny. Is it like this in Downing Street?”
Butt smiled. “We are all mutineers in Downing Street. The Prime Minister gets restless when he is surrounded by harmony. War is not a harmonious business.”
“Well, Bomber Command has never shirked a chance to stir up trouble.” Champion went into the kitchen and filled a kettle and put it on the stove and came back. “People forget that Bomber Command has been operating against the enemy since the very first day of the war. Whenever the weather allowed we’ve hammered him in his own backyard. No other Service can claim that.” He went out. Rattling and clinking were heard. He came back with a loaded tray. “No coffee. Is tea all right? As I was saying, the Command hasn’t had full credit for its efforts throughout almost two years. Shipping strikes, Nickels, Gardening, and then the Battle of Britain which was really two battles. The fighter boys did their stuff but who sank all those invasion barges? Every Channel port from Antwerp to Dieppe-Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne—all through last summer, night after night, walloped by Bomber Command! And when Hitler dropped the first bombs on London, it wasn’t Spitfires that flew to Berlin the next night and gave the Germans a fright. Which is what Bomber Command has been doing ever since. Night after night. Is there a Focke-Wulf aircraft factory in Bremen? Fine. We’ll send a hundred bombers and blast it. That’s just what we did last January. Target destroyed. What’s next? And so we’ve continued. We know Nazi Germany is suffering. You can’t drop a four-thousand-pound blockbuster on Bremen without giving Hitler a headache.”
Butt poured the tea. “I have a feeling that was a preamble,” he said.
“Throat-clearing,” Skull said. “Delete paragraph one.”
“If you double the size of Bomber Command, you quadruple its destructive power,” Champion said, “How? By overwhelming the German defenses. Quadruple the size of Bomber Command and you can utterly devastate the German war machine …” He raised a hand to dramatize the point. “… without the need for a land invasion of Europe.”
Butt sipped his tea.
“That’s the view from the top,” Champion said. “But it’s the squadrons that do the real work, isn’t it? 409 Squadron at Coney Garth is one of the best. What is their formula for consistent success? Our eminent sleuth has the answer.”
Champion meant to flatter. Skull felt he was being patronized. This made no difference to Skull’s answer but it sharpened his tone of voice. “There is no formula,” he said, “because there is no consistent success.”
“That’s the trouble with academics,” Champion said. “They will quibble about words. If you don’t like ‘consistent,’ how about ‘conspicuous’?”
“The term I most dislike is ‘interrogation,’” Skull said.
“It’s what we do to pilots after an op,” Champion explained to Butt.
“It’s what we don’t do to them,” Skull said. “Interrogation suggests a degree of mental toughness. A rigorous examination of performance. That’s not what happens. A crew’s report is accepted at face value, and rarely challenged. Interrogation is a poor method of measuring success.”
Champion had an instant answer. “Then it’s just as well we don’t depend too heavily upon it. One infallible indicator of Bomber Command’s effectiveness is the enemy’s response, and I don’t think that even you, Skull, would dispute the evidence of flak damage which our bombers bring back.”
“Yes, it’s evidence,” Skull said. “But of what?”
“That the Hun has been stung! We’ve laid waste so many of his cities that flak, searchlights, night fighters are top priority over there!”
“Oh, I doubt that. The Russian front is Hitler’s top priority.”
“And Russia desperately wants us to keep bombing, to take the pressure off her. When the other man gets mad, you know your punches are hurting, and I’ve seen the German newspapers. They get very upset at Bomber Command.”
“Proves nothing,” Skull said. “Our newspapers made gloomy reading during the Blitz, but they didn’t make the German bombers any more effective.”
“Thank God for that!” Champion was brisk; he seemed to be enjoying the exchange. “You were in London in the Blitz?” he asked Butt, who nodded. “So was I. Skull was in Scotland … Ask any Londoner, Skull. He’ll tell you whether the Blitz was effective or not. Bombing hurts, old chap. It’s already hurt Berlin. Given time we’ll flatten it.”
“Hitler didn’t flatten London.”
“He made a mess of it.”
“Of a small part of it. Measured on the map, only one yard in ten of Greater London is covered by a building. Inevitably, most bombs fell in the ninety percent that is open space.”
“Such as railways? All the London termini got hit. Does your open space include churchyards? That would explain all the Wren churches that we lost. Did the Germans waste those bombs?”
Skull took his glasses off and polished them with his tie. “It begs the question,” he said, and squinted hard at Butt, “that this war will be won by bombing churches.” He put his glasses on, and made a little act of locating Champion. “Ah. There you are.”
“Well, it certainly won’t be won with debating tricks,” Champion said. “There’s nothing tricky about high explosive. If the Luftwaffe can destroy Coventry, we can destroy, say, Hamburg.”
“Coventry wasn’t destroyed. Just because Goebbels says so, doesn’t make it true. I’ve heard too many of our pilots say they annihilated the target, and next week they got sent back to annihilate it again.”
“Repairs,” Champion said. “Salvage work.”
“You can’t repair annihilation. People are too casual with words. Coventry wasn’t destroyed. Its center was severely damaged. Its gas and electricity and water supplies were cut. Some factories were hit. But by far the greater part of Coventry was still standing next day, and all the factories were back in action within weeks, some within days.”
“They were indeed,” Butt said. “However, we don’t want the Germans to know that. How did you find out?”
“Intelligence. A Waaf in my section comes from Coventry.”
“Ah. And what conclusion do you draw from all this?”
Skull puffed out his cheeks. “Not a conclusion, but a suggestion. If the Luftwaffe couldn’t destroy Coventry, perhaps we shouldn’t be too cocksure about destroying Hamburg.”
“Too late,” Champion said cheerfully. “We’ve already made a start. And we’ve also knocked down large chunks of Kiel, Bremen and Wilhelmshaven. How can I be so cocksure of this? Because neutral businessmen see it and tell us. Foreign journalists make reports. Travelers travel, Skull. In and out of Europe.”
“Travelers. I see.” Skull felt that he had been sucked into playing verbal ping-pong for the amusement of an audience of one, and he was growing tired of it. “I trained to be a historian, and historians are suspicious of travelers’ tales. Men like to excite their listeners. The traveler visits, say, Dusseldorf and sees one bombed street. When he returns to Sweden he tells what he saw and soon there is a report headed ‘Devastation hits Dusseldorf,’ from which it is but a short skip and a jump to believe that Dusseldorf is devastated.”
“Jolly good!” Champion applauded, briefly. “The strategic bombing campaign as seen through the eyes of a Swedish news editor. That’s more than I had hoped for.” To Butt he said, “He really is awfully clever, isn’t he?” To Skull he said, “Thank you, flight lieutenant. Most enjoyable. I don’t think we need keep you up any longer.” Skull shook hands with Butt. At the door, Champion said, “You must lunch with me at my club, old chap.”
“If I must,” Skull said.
Champion came back and poured himself a whisky. “I like old Skull,” he said. “He’s got a mind like a rugger ball: you never know which way it will bounce. Of course, his weakness is he sees everything at squadron level. He can’t take the broad view. I brought him along to act as a sort of devil’s advocate. Not bad, was he?”
“Not bad at all,” Butt said.
“Now to serious business. Bomber Command’s the only weapon we have which can seriously damage Germany. That’s hard fact. And you don’t need the brains of an archbishop to see that the more bombers we build, the sooner we win. Or have I overlooked something?”
“Tell me more,” Butt said.
Next morning, Silk bought some food at the village shop: bread, salad stuff, two Chelsea buns, four pears, lemonade. Everything else was on ration. He drove to the broken bungalow and Zoë wasn’t there. He sat by the edge of the lake and watched dragonflies perform maneuvers that were strictly banned by the manufacturers. After a while she appeared, very wet. “I found a bubbling brook,” she said. “Had an all-over wash. How the rabbits stared. Golly, such red tomatoes.” She ate one. She sat beside him.
“What’s that funny smell?” he asked. “It smells like carbolic soap.”
“That’s because it is. All the best outlaws use carbolic, darling.”
“It smells awfully coarse. Us bomber pilots are terribly sensitive, you know. Pug Duff cries at dog shows.”
“Don’t believe you.” She stretched out so that her head was resting on his lap. “Tony wasn’t sensitive. Tony was an animal. Sometimes I had to bite him on the neck to make him stop.”
“Are we talking about the same chap?” No answer. Her eyes were closed. “How often did you bite his neck?”
“Once.”
“What a shocking liar you are. I was going to ask you to marry me but…”
“Jinx popsy, remember?”
“Balls. I’m on my second tour. I’m jinx-proof.”
“I won’t marry you, Silko.”
“Too late. I withdrew the offer ages ago.”
“You don’t really love me. You just covet my body.”
“You coveted mine first.”
“I did, didn’t I?” She smiled at the memory. “Men are so slow.”
Silk thought about that. Was he really slow? Often, during the past year, he had thought about Zoë, about finding her again. Why hadn’t he done anything? Because he was slow? Or because he hadn’t expected to survive his first tour? Thirty ops had been too many for most crews. After that, instructing ham-fisted student pilots in clapped-out Wimpys had been a chapter of accidents. He had no right to survive that, either. Nobody on the squadron had ever finished a second tour. It was one reason why he kept putting off having a haircut. Or getting a new uniform. Or buying a book. Fancy going to all that trouble and then getting the chop. Wasted effort. And now, as it turned out, Zoë had come looking for him, which probably proved something, but Silk didn’t care what it was. He preferred to sit and enjoy the feeling of her head in his lap while he watched the dragonflies do their stunts. How long was a dragonfly’s tour of ops? Bloody short, judging by their frantic antics. That was nice. “Frantic antics,” he murmured. She didn’t move. Sound asleep.
Zoë wanted lunch: a real knife-and-fork lunch, not tomato sandwiches and lemonade. Silk told her she looked like a gypsy princess and no respectable hotel would serve her. “They’d better,” she said. But she brushed her hair.
They drove across Suffolk. At every crossroads or junction, she pointed and that was where he went. He felt a sense of happy irresponsibility, but he also felt hungry. “Are we going somewhere special?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Zoë, you’re completely lost.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “And Tony said you were thick. You’re not at all thick, Silko.”
After many more turnings, she suddenly pointed at a white-stucco hotel. “There,” she said. Silk parked, and they went in. A middle-aged woman sat at reception. She wore a straw hat with a rose tucked into the band and she was knitting a scarf, using the biggest needles Silk had ever seen. They were like chopsticks. “Hello,” Zoë said. “We’d like lunch, please.”
“Can’t be done. We don’t do lunches, not since my chef got called up by the army.”
“Oh.” Zoë fished a checkbook out of a skirt pocket. “In that case I’d like to cash a check for fifty pounds.”
“So would I.” She hadn’t stopped knitting.
Zoë took the revolver from her other skirt pocket. “If you don’t give me fifty pounds, I’ll shoot this man.”
Silk put his hands up. “She’s quite mad,” he said. “I’d pay her, if I were you.”
“If I had fifty pounds,” the woman said, “I’d be at the races.”
“It’s a real gun,” Zoë said. “Look: give us the money and we’ll take you to the races.”
She put down her knitting. “He’s a nice boy,” she said. “What good would it do to shoot him?”
“Ten pounds.” Zoë opened the checkbook. “It won’t bounce, I promise.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you have a room and bath, and a plate of ham sandwiches, for the afternoon, for a pound.”
“Done,” Silk said, and lowered his hands.
“It’s not like this in the movies,” Zoë said.
“I was your age once,” the woman said. “I know what it’s like to be young. I eloped with an Italian count when I was nineteen. We ran away to Gretna Green and the blacksmith married us, but it turned out he wasn’t an Italian count, he was a vacuum-cleaner salesman with a wife in Cardiff. Still, he was lovely in bed.”
Silk gave her a pound.
“Use any room,” she said. “A hotel with no meals doesn’t get many guests.”
“I’m on the run from the police,” Zoë said. Silk groaned.
“I get the occasional deserter staying here,” the woman said. “They’re no trouble. D’you like mustard?”
Zoë picked the room. They lay on the bed, comfortably naked in the afternoon sunshine, and ate ham sandwiches. “She didn’t play the game,” Zoë said. “What if the gun had gone off accidentally?”
“It’s empty, you juggins.”
“She didn’t know that. She might have killed you.”
“I think you confused her. Why did you say you would shoot me? We came in together, we were friends.”
“Who else could I shoot? Not her. Women don’t shoot other women, do they? Anyway I bet if I’d been a man, James Cagney for instance, she’d have found fifty pounds. It’s not as if I’m robbing anyone. My check’s good. The money’s in the bank.”
“Zoë, my sweet, if you want fifty quid, write me a check and I’ll cash it for you. You don’t need a gun.”
“Perhaps. It’s all become a bit of a bore, hasn’t it?” She got mustard on her fingers, and wiped them on his thigh.
“What a slut you are, Zoë.”
“Yes. Go on. More like that.”
“Slut. Floozy. Tramp, trollop, tart. Strumpet. Bitch. Double slut. Super bitch.” She was on top of him, laughing as she kissed him, smearing mustard from her lips to his. Without looking, he reached sideways and put the remaining sandwiches on a side-table. That was the hard work done. Now it was all uphill to the mountaintop.