Our Yanks (20 page)

She yawned and lay down, tugging at the eiderdown. ‘Come to bed, Sam, and get some rest before you have to be up again.'

He undressed and clambered in beside her. She was asleep almost at once but he lay awake for a while, thinking of that hayfield and that summer long ago.

‘I've brought your plate back, ma'am.'

Corporal Bilsky was standing on the doorstep, holding a brown paper package out to her. Miss Cutteridge, who had never expected to see him or the plate again, was taken completely by surprise. ‘Good gracious me. Bless my soul!'

There was a bitter wind blowing down the street and she felt obliged to invite him inside and then into the sitting room, as the hallway was so narrow. He waited, cap in hand, while she undid the brown paper. The Crown Derby plate had been beautifully mended. So well that she couldn't see the joins.

‘However did you manage this, Corporal?'

‘Well, I can fix most things pretty good. Are you satisfied, ma'am?'

‘Of course I am. It's wonderful – the breaks are quite invisible. Thank you, Corporal.'

‘I'm real sorry it got broke.' He felt in his left pocket and then his right. ‘These are for you, ma'am.'

‘For me?'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘Oh, my goodness . . .' He was holding out a bar of chocolate and a tin of spam. She stared at them in dismay. ‘Oh, dear.'

He looked deflated. ‘I guess you don't like them. Tried to get some ham but there weren't none this time.'

‘No, no . . . it isn't that. But I really can't accept them, Corporal. I hardly know you. It wouldn't be correct, you understand.'

It was obvious that he didn't understand at all. Perhaps they had different rules in America? Different customs?

‘Gee, we're givin' this stuff away all the time, ma'am. Just tryin' to help you folks, seein' as you're so short of things. I'd be obliged if you'd take it.'

How could she refuse when he put it like that? It would be most ungracious. And the spam would be very nice. It was on points and not always available and it made delicious fritters. As for the chocolate, well, she'd always had rather a sweet tooth.

‘It's very kind of you, Corporal. Thank you so much.' She accepted the tin and the chocolate bar and put them on the table.

‘My pleasure, ma'am. Anythin' else I can do for you, while I'm here? Like I said, I'm pretty handy at fixin' things.'

Miss Cutteridge hesitated. She could think of several things that needed repairing and it was almost impossible to get anybody in. ‘Well, if it's not too much trouble, one of the handles on a kitchen cupboard has broken.' She showed him the faulty handle that she had tried hard to mend without success, and fetched the tin box where she kept a few tools. He put it right in a matter of minutes.

‘Anythin' else, ma'am?'

‘Well, this drawer has stuck. I don't know why.' Her string and brown paper drawer had jammed halfway. He crouched down to take a look and whistled. ‘My, you've sure got a whole lot in there, ma'am.'

‘I save it, you see. Every bit. String is very scarce and so is paper. Almost everything is. We have to save every single thing we can.'

He rocked the drawer carefully. ‘Uh-huh. Looks like there might be somethin' gone and got itself caught up some way.' He pulled some of the string and paper out of the drawer, reached inside with his arm and felt around. ‘Yep, that's your trouble, ma'am.'

The drawer was soon freed and, after that, he mended a dripping tap, the part-blocked sink waste pipe, and a collapsing shelf. Ginger appeared and wound himself lovingly round the corporal's ankles. So unlike him, Miss Cutteridge thought.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Corporal?'

He grinned at her wryly. ‘Better not. Wouldn't trust myself with the cup. Anythin' else need fixin'?'

‘No, really. Thank you.'

‘Well, I'll come by another time, case you think of somethin'. Or somethin' else gets broke.'

‘Thank you so much for the chocolate and the spam.'

‘Weren't nothin'. I'll see what else I can bring.'

When he'd gone she put the spam away in the back of her store cupboard, together with her other special treasures: the Tate & Lyle's golden syrup, the gas-proof Mazawattee tea, the Prince's salmon, the Nestlé's condensed milk, and the Oxford marmalade. She picked up the chocolate bar, examining it more closely. Hershey's Milk Chocolate, it said, in silver letters on a brown background. 5c. The c would stand for cents. They had dollars and cents – not pounds, shillings and pence – which must be so much simpler. She unpeeled the wrapping, just to see what American chocolate looked like. It seemed very like Fry's or Cadbury's, but of course she wouldn't know that until she had tasted it. Miss Cutteridge nibbled cautiously at one corner of the bar. It tasted delicious.

Lieutenant Mochetti shone his torch on the jeep. ‘I'll give you a hand getting in.' There was no running board and no step of any kind. He put his arm under Agnes's elbow as she climbed up awkwardly into the passenger seat. There were no doors either; instead he clipped a webbing strap across. ‘Sorry, it's going to be kind of draughty.' He shone the torch again. ‘There's a grab handle just here on the outside if you need it, but don't worry, I'll take it real easy in the dark.'

He swung himself in on the driver's side, as though there was nothing to it. They drove out of the village, under the railway bridge and up the hill in the direction of the aerodrome. She soon discovered how right he'd been about the draughts.

‘We're going to a place called the Haycock. Know it?'

‘Yes, I know it.' She knew the Haycock because Clive had taken her there often and it had been there that he'd proposed to her on one of his leaves. Well, not exactly proposed. He'd produced the ring at the end of the dinner, picked up her left hand and slid it straight onto her fourth finger. ‘I'm not taking no for an answer, Agnes.' It hadn't come as any surprise. She had always supposed that she and Clive would get married one day and it meant that she would never have to worry about Father.

The American pilot changed gear. ‘Been there to the bar a couple of times. One of the guys said the food's OK. He'd better be right.' He changed gear again at the top of the hill. ‘Let's get one thing straight,' he said. ‘I'm not Lieutenant, whichever way you pronounce it. My name's Ed. And in case you're wondering, that's short for Edoardo. The Italian version of Edward. But nobody calls me that, except my family. You speak any Italian?'

She shook her head. ‘Just French.'

‘I know some French, but not too much. Italian's real easy to learn. Seems so to me, anyway. A darn sight easier than English, I reckon. I can switch, no problem. Makes no difference to me which one I'm talking. And that can come in handy. There's a whole lot of Italians in New York and everywhere in the States. And a whole lot of other immigrants from all over, speaking all kinds of languages. Of course, when you get a generation or two down the line, some kids don't learn their own lingo and that's a pity. My family, they made sure I did.' He slowed to avoid a rabbit caught, frozen in fright, in the jeep's masked headlights. It skittered on across the road and vanished. They roared on. ‘I forgot to mention back there that you're not Miss Dawe. You're Agnes. OK?'

‘OK.'

‘Now we're getting somewhere.' In the dark, she could tell that he was smiling. ‘You lived round here long, Agnes?'

‘About fifteen years. We lived in Norfolk before that.'

‘I know where Norfolk is all right. Always a country girl, huh? I guess you'd have a real problem picturing a place like New York. I'm sure looking forward to seeing it again myself, when I get to the end of my tour. If I make it.'

‘How long is a tour?'

‘Three hundred hours combat mission time.'

According to the King's Thorpe grapevine, the Americans had been losing a lot of fighter pilots. The village always got to know about it . . . who hadn't come back; what had happened to them; all the gory details. She said, ‘That sounds an awful lot.'

‘Yeah . . . it can go real slowly on some missions. Boy, is it cold, sitting up there for four or five hours with no heat. Flying icewagons, we call the P-38s. You get so you're so damn cold you don't care about anything else. We've had some bad problems over here. Too cold and too wet for them. Engines quitting on us all the time. But we're getting different kites. Brand new ones that can go a whole lot further. That's good news for our bomber guys and real bad news for Hitler and Goering. The good news for us fighter pilots is they've got heating.'

‘But you'll be flying longer missions?'

‘Yeah, but what the hell. We'll be warmer.' He flipped the wheel for a sharp turn. ‘Ben and me have been thinking what to call our new planes,' he went on. ‘We figured something from Walt Disney. Thought we'd pick out a couple of the Seven Dwarfs and have them painted on. Ben's going to be Grumpy because he's forever complaining about things. Mine's going to be Bashful.'

She smiled, too, in the dark. ‘For a joke?'

‘Hell, no. I'm dead serious. I'm a very shy sort of guy.'

At the Haycock he helped her off with her coat and held her chair for her to sit down at the table in the dining room – by coincidence at exactly the same table where she had sat with Clive. The other diners were mostly Service men – a good number of them Americans. Nobody from King's Thorpe that she could see, thank heavens.

She looked at the menu. They'd done their best to make it all sound
haute cuisine
, dressing the dishes up with fancy French words, but it was still corned beef, sausagemeat, smoked haddock, tripe and onions . . . He was frowning. ‘What in the world are
les tripes
?' She explained. ‘Good grief, you British eat that sort of stuff?'

‘It's food. We eat anything: sheeps' hearts, pigs' trotters, intestines, turnip tops, nettles . . . The fillets of pork will be sausagemeat, by the way. And the
rissoles de boeuf salé
will be corned beef.'

‘Thanks for telling me. Well, I guess I'll settle for the corned beef. Least I know what
that
is. Now, what're you having?'

She chose the corned-beef dish as well and watched him ordering from the elderly waitress and then some wine from an even older wine waiter. When the wine waiter had shuffled away he said, ‘I can see you're trying to figure me out, Agnes. You're saying to yourself, I've never met anybody like this guy. I don't know what to make of him. That's the trouble with us Yanks. We don't behave the way you British are used to. We talk different, too.'

‘We can understand you – mostly.'

‘Easier than the other way round, I reckon. When we first got here most of us could only get three words out of ten.'

‘Well, we've heard Americans speaking before. In films.'

‘Hadn't thought of that. There aren't too many British films or British actors in the US. Guys like Leslie Howard, Charles Laughton, Ronald Colman . . . but most people over here don't talk too much like them.'

‘People speak differently all over the British Isles.'

‘Same thing in the States. You'd have a problem with some of our accents.'

‘I expect we would.'

‘Matter of fact, I've never met anybody like you either, Agnes, so I reckon that makes us quits. This guy you're engaged to – he's in the army, that's right?'

‘Since the very beginning of the war. He was in France with the BEF and then evacuated at Dunkirk.'

‘You been engaged to him for long?'

‘Two years.'

‘That's a pretty long engagement.'

‘There's been a war on,' she pointed out. ‘Clive's been away most of the time. A lot of people have had to wait.'

‘Your father told me his family's from King's Thorpe.'

She nodded. ‘His family have farmed here for over a hundred years. It's the biggest farm in the parish.'

‘Is that why you're marrying him?'

‘Of course it isn't.'

‘Then I guess you must be in love with him?'

‘We've known each other for a long time. Since we were children.'

‘That's no answer.'

‘Well, it's all I'm giving.'

‘OK. Sorry. I was just curious. Where is he now?'

‘Somewhere in England.'

‘Somewhere in England . . . that's where all of us guys are. Somewhere in England. That's all they let you tell them back home. And pretty soon we're going to be somewhere in France, beating the hell out of the Germans.'

‘You sound confident.'

‘Sure am. This war's not going to last that much longer. Maybe another year. You reckon you'll get married, soon as it's over?'

‘I expect so.' There was no point in telling him about the big wedding that the Hobbses had planned when Clive finally came home from the war. People from all over the county were going to be invited. It was going to be the biggest wedding King's Thorpe had ever seen, according to them. ‘There's no rush about it. I've got my teaching job and my father needs me to help in the parish.' She hesitated. ‘My mother left us six years ago. She hated being a rector's wife. She couldn't stand how everyone in the parish behaved as though they owned her – at least that was how she saw it. The way she was expected to do so much and be at everyone's beck and call all the time.'

‘I guess I can sympathize with that,' he said, ‘but it must have been real tough on you and your father when she went.'

‘She was twenty years younger than him. I think that was part of the trouble.'

‘Yeah, that's a big gap. She remarried?'

She shook her head. ‘They're not divorced. Father would never divorce her – not unless she asked him to and so far she hasn't.'