Their destination was Odstock – a bleak spot, over a low ridge just south-west of the city where a collection of low buildings and Nissen huts constituted a small British hospital with an American one beside it.
As they bowled along, she only caught snippets of the conversation. But what she heard electrified her.
“Of course, if your men could take out . . .” It was Forest-Wilson speaking. “Certainly a great help . . . effective . . . trouble is, too fortified.”
“Could be done.” The American.
There was more murmuring she did not catch. Then Forest-Wilson.
“Seems too much of a sacrifice. I just don’t think anyone’d come out alive.”
“If we did, though . . . day after tomorrow?”
“Perfect. Who would you use?”
“Oh. Either some of the Ibsley or Thruxton people I guess. Leave it to me.”
The day after tomorrow. She was on the telephone within an hour.
She kept very cool.
“Darling, could you get one day’s leave – I mean a night?”
“Maybe. I’m owed a couple.”
“Downton. The day after tomorrow. Could you manage it. Just to please me?”
“I’ll ask.”
“Ask right away.”
“O.K.” He sounded puzzled. “Why then?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“I thought it was October.”
“No.” Or not, she thought, as she put the receiver down, this year it isn’t.
He confirmed the next day.
“Listen, I can do it, but are you sure you can get leave yourself?”
In fact she was not.
“Yes,” she lied.
“Only there’s a mission I’d like to volunteer for. It sounds interesting.”
“I’ll be there. I promise. By four o’clock.”
“O.K. But if you get held up . . .” Damn him. He was more interested in his blasted mission than her. “If, say, you aren’t there at five, I can get a ride back to base.”
“I’ll be there,” she promised.
She had worked it all out with such care.
Her last run was to Wilton at three in a staff car. Then another girl would take it on. She had twenty-four hours leave.
Early that morning, she had parked her own little Morris safely at Wilton. That gave her, say, forty minutes to get over to Downton. She had plenty of petrol. She guarded her coupons jealously. Nothing, surely, could go wrong.
She arrived at Wilton at half past four. The meeting at Larkhill had gone on late. Hurriedly she raced to the little Morris in Kingsbury Square and started the engine.
It spluttered slightly. She took no notice. Moments later she was bowling out of Kingsbury Square.
She skirted Salisbury on the Harnham side and soon was on the road that led south down the Avon. She passed Britford; Lord Radnor’s estate by the ancient forest of Clarendon lay on her left.
It was just after this, as she came up a slight incline, that the car engine died.
She pulled into the side of the road. It was a quarter to five.
She tried to start the car. It was no good. Soon it was ten to five.
Desperately she looked for a car or a bus, but the road was empty: nothing seemed to be moving. She noticed some cherry blossoms on the ground that stirred slightly in the faint breeze. The minutes passed.
The car which finally appeared came along the road in the opposite direction at a careful pace. It was driven by John Mason. She hailed him frantically.
“You’ve got to get me to Downton.”
“I’ve just come from there.”
“I know. Please, John. Can we hurry?”
He looked at her gravely. “Is it so urgent?”
She answered by getting into his car.
He rested his hands on the wheel. Then he sighed.
“I think I can guess what this is all about. I wouldn’t have thought it was so urgent.”
“You can’t guess. Really. Please hurry.’
Reluctantly he turned the car. It seemed to him ironic that he should now be expected to ferry her to her lover. Whatever she said, that must be the reason for the journey.
They got to Downton in five minutes and with a hurried kiss, she fled into the long, thatched inn.
She was always glad, in after years, that she had been in time. They made love with a passionate urgency that night and afterwards she cried.
He wondered why; only she knew it was from relief.
As the night of June 5, 1944 ended and the dawn of June 6 broke, the people of Sarum did not sleep.
Overhead, hour after hour, passed one of the greatest airlifts the world had yet seen. The planes were lit; their throbbing engines made the whole city reverberate and tremble. The black cloud seemed to be endless as the planes, many of them trailing gliders behind them, passed along the Avon valley and over the cathedral spire.
Adam Shockley and the squadrons from Ibsley were giving convoy and beach cover.
He felt a strange sense of elation that dawn as he joined the huge, humming concourse. He smiled to himself as they sped high over the quiet river and he thought of the sleepy city and its tall grey spire a few miles behind him. He thought of Patricia. For a moment, too, he remembered their conversation, her fervent denunciation of what she saw as the world’s unfairness. Then he grinned. That was her trouble – perhaps the trouble with the English in general. They all wanted to be nice guys. Maybe, after this was over, he could cure her of that.
As they passed over the still waters of Christchurch harbour with its narrow headland, and out over the Channel, Adam Shockley drew his final conclusion on Patricia and Sarum: locked in the past, but worth defending. Then he put both out of his mind, as they swept towards France.
Later that morning, Patricia Shockley picked up Brigadier Forest-Wilson at the entrance of Wilton House.
“It’s Bulford camp, please.”
There were still planes crossing overhead and it was impossible not to think of him: where was he now? Over France, over the Channel?
She felt numb as she drove.
When they arrived at Bulford she was able to put a call through to Ibsley. He was back. They would meet again in a day or two. She returned to her staff car, trying to look as calm as she could and she believed she had succeeded when, a few minutes later, the brigadier reappeared and asked her to take him to Wilton again.
In the rear seat, Forest-Wilson watched the back of her neck thoughtfully. One shrewd glance at her as he came out had been enough though. The offensive was only a few hours old and already she was radiant. “He’s an airman then,” he deduced, “and he’s back.” Then he smiled to himself. The American air bases would be moved to France soon.
It was hard, he considered, for people in a wartime romance to know how serious it was; for how could anyone know anything under such conditions? Perhaps this one would last – but there was only one way to find out.
He would ask her out to dinner again in a month or so.
He was a good fisherman.
The staff car bumped along the road over the rolling ridges of Salisbury Plain, suddenly emptied, once more, of its unaccustomed traffic.
THE SPIRE
1985:
APRIL
10
Already the crowds were gathering in the close.
It was not often that the city of Salisbury had a royal visit: and this one, besides, was probably the most important for the cathedral in seven hundred years.
On the station platform, Lady Forest-Wilson smoothed her skirt. She had sent the three other members of her little house party into the close ahead of her, and now she was waiting.
She wondered if her tweed suit was a wise choice. She was an elegant woman, but as she grew older she had developed a dread of looking frumpish. She pulled the little pocket mirror out of her bag, glanced in it quickly, and dropped it back again. She was still good-looking. Grey of course, but she liked the way her hairdresser had teased her hair forward, giving it more wave and body. Did it make her look a little square and severe? No. She reassured herself: it was just a good bone structure.
It was hard not to be nervous after forty years.
Her nervousness had showed that morning. Her daughter Jennifer noticed it at once. Her son-in-law hadn’t. But then, she thought privately, Alan Porteus never noticed anything that wasn’t a number on a balance sheet.
“I know several accountants who aren’t dreary at all,” she had confided to Sir Kersey Godfrey the day before. “I’ve never been able to understand why she had to marry that one.”
Kersey had noticed of course. Dear Kersey noticed everything. He had said nothing at first, just quietly read the paper at breakfast. But when Jennifer had gone out, that handsome, grey-haired man asked, with a mischievous smile:
“Is he married?”
“Who?” But she had blushed.
“The American you have to meet today.”
“His letter mentions a wife.”
“Good.”
He had turned back to his paper. She had watched him for a moment.
“Kersey.”
“Yes?”
“Damn you.”
He had been staying at the house at Avonsford for three weeks. It was an experiment. Since Archibald had died ten years ago, she had been entirely alone there, except for Jennifer’s occasional visits and she was not sure how she would take to having a man about the place again. To her relief, it had been a very agreeable experience. Jennifer, of course, had asked the inevitable question.
“Do you?”
“None of your business.”
“People think you do.”
“My dear, I simply couldn’t care less. The village always thinks something about everyone, in any case.”
As for the next question, was she going to marry him, she was quite straightforward.
“Would you mind if I did?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, if he asks me, and I think he will, then I shall say yes, so long as we spend four months a year here at Avonsford.”
Not that Kersey’s own home at Melbourne wasn’t infinitely grander. There was the property an hour’s flight away and the huge house in Melbourne with its wonderful art collection. She had visited Sir Kersey Godfrey’s establishment and admired it for what it was: three generations of highly successful businessmen, building patiently and with taste and culminating in Kersey, who had done so well he had earned a knighthood. He had taken her to see the small sheep farm the family had owned in the last century, too.
“I respect his roots, and he respects mine,” she explained. She had spent all her married life with Archibald Forest-Wilson at Avonsford: and her family had been Sarum people before that. She could not bear to lose all contact with the place, and she had every hope that Kersey Godfrey would agree to her request. He was retired now. He could spend his time where he liked.
She smiled to herself. Thinking about Kersey relaxed her – a good sign.
As for the American.
She felt her heart miss a beat. The train was coming.
He came straight towards her. How sunburnt he was. To an older woman’s eyes, his creased, tanned skin was even better looking than that of the unlined young pilot she had known before. His blue eyes were positively startling. But as he held his hand out, the grin was the same.
“Recognised you at once.” He turned. “This is my youngest daughter Maggie.”
A fair-haired, blue-eyed girl of eighteen, the same height as she was and with a powerful handshake. She was carrying a grip.
“So,” Adam Shockley remarked, “you said today would be a good day to visit.”
“A very special day. Come to the car though. We must hurry to park.”
They went to the small carpark near Crane Street bridge, on the west side of the river, only a short walk from the close.
Then she led him over the bridge.
She told herself she was not excited, but as they turned into the High Street she realised that she had been sufficiently distracted to leave her bag in the car. With an effort, she forced herself to be calm. She owed that to Kersey Godfrey. Definitely.
It had been a surprise after all these years to hear that he was coming to England. They had kept in touch after the war, writing regularly for a year until she got married. They had exchanged cards at Christmas since then. She knew, of course, that he had become chairman of a construction business in Pennsylvania, and that he had five children. Maggie, the youngest, his letter explained, now had to visit England.
“I do pentathlon,” she told Patricia.