Authors: Alan Judd
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.