They stared up at the new Knights Templars: would-be warriors of the skies, untested yet in battle.
‘My God,’ muttered Mr Arnold to himself as a dozen Spitfires cruised swiftly above them, engines throbbing and sunlight flashing off Perspex cockpits and aluminium wings. ‘My
God – how long before John will be flying into war?’ He shivered as a ripple of disquiet passed through him.
‘What’s that, Daddy?’ asked Diana.
‘Nothing, dear,’ he replied, trying to shrug off his premonition. ‘I was just wondering which aircraft John is flying.’
The squadron moved off to the south-east, the deep rumble of engines dwindling as they swept towards Rye and the Channel. The wonderful moment was over, and the Arnolds walked slowly back to
their car.
Six months after what Mr Arnold invariably described as ‘the son and heir’s flypast’, lingering hopes of peace quietly evaporated and war was born on a
sluggish, late-summer morning as German troops swept into Poland. Gwen and Oliver sat by their mahogany wireless set and listened intently to the Prime Minister admitting comprehensive diplomatic
defeat. He sounded desperately tired.
‘Well, that’s it,’ said Mr Arnold, switching off the radio. ‘We’re all for the high-jump now.’
‘I can’t bear it,’ Gwen said quietly. ‘I always thanked God for the miracle that brought you back to me the last time. I always promised Him, when I was praying for you,
that I would never, ever, ask for another one. And I haven’t. I kept my promise. But what am I supposed to say to Him about John? What? It isn’t fair. It simply isn’t fair.’
Tears rolled silently down her cheeks.
Mr Arnold stared at his wife.
‘Look, Gwen,’ he said finally, pulling her to him. ‘God’s mercy is – oh, you know how difficult I find it to believe in all this stuff, after what I saw in France
the last time – but surely God is supposed to have infinite compassion? If you believe He saved
my
worthless skin twenty-odd years ago, surely you can believe that He has the power
to keep our son safe too?’
‘But that’s just it,’ Gwen said miserably. ‘I don’t know if God even heard my prayers about you. Maybe you were just one of the lucky ones. Maybe John won’t
be. Oh God . . .’
The telephone rang.
John.
‘I can’t bloody believe it, Dad,’ he shouted down a bad, crackling line. ‘They’re disbanding the entire squadron in some kind of stupid reorganisation. Bloody
bureaucrats. We’ve just declared war and I’ve been given
bloody
leave. It’ll all be over before I get a chance to do anything.
Hell!
I’m sorry, Dad, but
I’m spitting rivets here.’
‘Yes, I’d rather gathered that,’ said Mr Arnold, putting his hand over the receiver. ‘It’s John,’ he whispered to his wife. ‘Looks like your unsaid
prayers have been answered. He’s coming home for a bit. The RAF have put him on standby.’
Gwen grabbed the telephone. ‘
John!
Are you coming back here now?’ She listened for a few moments, then said, ‘Of course, darling. We’ll see you both
tomorrow.’ She hung up.
‘Both?’ her husband repeated.
‘Yes,’ said Gwen quickly. ‘John is bringing his flight commander. Apparently the poor boy’s parents are in Canada at the moment and the family house is shut up. He
can’t stay in camp all alone and John says he’s terribly nice and very funny. Now, what did he say his name was? I forget . . . oh yes, it’s James. James Blackwell.’
Mr Arnold shrugged. ‘A full house for the weekend, then, with Diana coming home too,’ he said. ‘She’ll be most invigorated at the prospect, I’m sure. You’d
better go and tell Lucy to make up one of the spare rooms. Actually, let’s put Mr Blackwell up in the top attic. You know what these fighter boys are supposed to be like with the girls.
Predatory so-and-so’s.’
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Gwen as she pulled the bell for the maid. ‘I’m sure that Flight Commander Blackwell is an officer and a gentleman.’
‘Yes, but he’s a fighter boy too,’ her husband muttered under his breath as he left the room.
Diana, as her father had predicted, was electrified by the news that Flight Commander James Blackwell would shortly be arriving with her brother.
‘He’s bound to be a dish,’ she said confidently as she ran upstairs to reapply her make-up. ‘All Spitfire pilots are impossibly glamorous. It’s practically one of
the qualifications for the job. What time do him and John get here?’
‘
He
, dear,
he
,’ her father called after her. ‘So much for the Girton girl. I thought language and politics were your passions, not Brylcreem Boys. In fact, I
thought . . .’
Diana’s muffled answer drifted down from above, but he could only make out two words – ‘
absurd,
Daddy’ – before her bedroom door slammed shut.
‘It’s absurd, all right,’ said James Blackwell, as coffee was served in the Arnolds’ dining room that evening. ‘Everyone else racing back to
barracks at maximum speed, and our lot gets sent home. Hardly the most martial start to a war for us, is it? The whole squadron’s furious. It’s a total waste of resources. I don’t
know what Mr Chamberlain would make of it.’
I wonder what Mr Chamberlain would make of
you
, thought Mr Arnold as he passed their guest sugar cubes and silver tongs. James Blackwell was pin-up material; a gift for the RAF’s
propaganda unit. As Diana had predicted, based more on hope than intuition, he was impossibly glamorous. Indeed, all three of the young people sitting at his table were, in Mr Arnold’s view,
excessively attractive.
His daughter’s dark brown hair and green eyes were a source of initial surprise (and continuing private discussion) between her parents. These features – and her olive skin –
owed nothing to their own fairer colouring. Gwen’s blonde hair and blue eyes, and Oliver’s light brown hair and pale grey irises, had been bypassed in Diana by some genetic resurgence
from the past. She looked, her parents agreed, more Irish than English and sometimes even Spanish, especially when the long Kentish summers turned her already burnished skin a glowing brown, a
setting from which her eyes glittered with emerald intensity.
‘She’s a Changeling,’ Mr Arnold told his wife at Diana’s tenth birthday party, as their daughter raced, screaming with laughter, along the ha-ha with her friends in
blazing August sunshine. ‘Nothing to do with us. Our real daughter is in Faerie. This? This is a cuckoo-creature from the Underworld. She’ll disappear on her twenty-first birthday when
they come to reclaim her, you’ll see.’
John, though, was a Janus. Tall and slim, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he could be, depending on his mood, the reflection of either of his parents. At his most thoughtful, his expression was
identical to Gwen’s when she hesitated before one of her unfinished paintings. But when relaxed and amused, he became a young Oliver, suppressed humour dancing behind his eyes. He had
inherited his father’s smile, but was more conventionally good-looking, with a straight nose and high cheekbones. From his middle teens, John had fascinated the opposite sex. He was entirely
unaware of it.
James Blackwell, thought Mr Arnold as he sipped his coffee, was, at a casual glance, not dissimilar in looks to his own son. Like John he was blond, although his eyes were a brighter, almost
glittering blue. He radiated a sense of self-possession, speaking in clear, confident tones. But there was something a little odd about his accent. It was public-school, certainly, but tinged with
something else.
Mr Arnold tried to place the inflection as James told a wide-eyed Diana about a recent crash-landing at the squadron airfield. Was that a colonial twang he could hear? The boy’s parents
were in Canada, apparently; maybe the family was originally from there. But he didn’t think that was it. James Blackwell’s vowels were slightly clipped, rather than drawled. South
Africa, perhaps?
Oliver gave it up for now and looked from his son to their guest. Both men were a little over six feet tall, and from a distance they would be practically indistinguishable in their blue RAF
uniforms. Closer examination would reveal that one was a flight commander and the other a more junior pilot officer. But, Mr Arnold reflected, that wouldn’t count for anything, anything at
all, when either boy was in the enemy’s gunsights.
At the moment, though, one of them was very much in his daughter’s sights. Clearly, it wasn’t her brother.
Diana was, at nineteen, far from sure of who she really was, or would turn out to be.
‘I feel like a walking question-mark,’ she told a friend at Girton. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea how I’ll end up. Part of me wants to stay here in Cambridge
forever and slowly become a fossilised academic, part of me wants to marry as soon as possible and have millions of babies, part of me wants to have endless
liaisons dangereuses
and be a
woman with a certain reputation – you know, like the Dean’s wife here at Girton. Actually, maybe that’s my answer. I should marry a Dean, have his babies and lots of affairs. What
do you think?’
This little arc of reflection was, as it happens, a neat summary of Diana; a character sketch in shorthand.
She knew she possessed a fine mind. She had cruised through exams and her School Certificate, and was universally regarded by her tutors as the brightest in Girton’s intake of 1937.
Academia called to her. She adored Cambridge and its ancient college buildings. She loved the river that slowly rolled through the town and lazily curled through the fields and water meadows
surrounding it. The thought that she might stay here her whole life was, at times, intoxicating, and brought with it a deep sense of inevitability and peace.
Sometimes, during lectures, she would stare at a tutor in full flow and say to herself: ‘I
know
I could do what you’re doing. I’d do it better, too.’ And she
would glimpse a future of stately intellectual growth. She would hone her intelligence in the great college libraries, and in lectures to, and exchanges with, the finest young minds in the land.
She would compose insightful essays and ground-breaking papers which would be published to academic acclaim. And when she died, peacefully in her study, behind her desk and at a great age, there
would be calls for a college to be named after her. The calls would be heeded . . .
There was no room in these fantasies for a husband, or a male partner of any kind, come to that; still less children. So Diana could not understand why, at the most unexpected moments, she was
suddenly possessed by a raging desire to have babies, as many as her body could produce. This fierce passion could descend on her without warning, and consume her wordlessly, an instinct so primal
and powerful that it overwhelmed her senses and left her unable to think coherently for minutes at a time.
But again, these experiences (which Diana wryly described to herself as ‘my atavistic attacks’) had no male component to them at all. They never included even the vaguest, shadowy
image of a man who would be necessary to the business. Diana felt almost embarrassed after the blazing flames of maternal passion had flickered and died. ‘When it takes hold of me and burns
me,’ she confided to a friend, ‘I feel like some kind of towering, fiery goddess with powers to create life all by herself. Afterwards, the whole thing just seems silly –
completely ridiculous, in fact.’
But there was a third Diana; the one which unsettled her the most, and about whom she confided in no one. This Diana was erotic, carnal and quivering with sexual curiosity. This Diana, she
sometimes thought, her cheeks growing warm as her heart beat hard and fast, was capable of the kind of recklessness and animal lust that, later, when she remembered her dark fantasies, astonished
her. The images that caused her to catch her breath never materialised when opportunity was at hand – at a college ball, or on a date with an undergraduate – but only later, in the
darkness and solitude of her room. Then, this Diana hungered for a sexual experience that had so far been denied her. Or, to be more accurate, she had denied herself.
James Blackwell was the quintessential scholarship boy. Unapologetic elitism had been the making of him since, at eleven years old, he won the Mayor of Hackney’s Junior
Essay Prize, was plucked from grimy Dalston Lane Primary and installed, on a full governors’ discretionary bursary, at the Stones Company Grammar School in Garnford Square, Whitechapel.
Stones Company was a trade school established in the late sixteenth century, just a few years after the Spanish Armada. By the twentieth century it had become a ladder which East End boys might
scale to escape London’s most economically stunted and deprived community.
Stones, for those able to rise to its academic challenge, was a way you could drag yourself out of the pit.
And James Blackwell wanted out. His father was a faint memory – a coalman who had left forever with a, ‘So long, Jimmy!’ when James was five – and his devoted mother was
an usherette at the Whitechapel Odeon, who smuggled her son in to see the silent films of his boyhood and the ‘talkies’ of his teens. It was about the only frivolous pleasure of his
childhood. An usherette’s wages were barely enough to clothe and feed the two of them.
But James’s mother compensated for her son’s pinched existence with the extravagant praise she heaped upon him as he grew up.
‘You can be anything you want to be, Jimmy,’ she told him firmly as she dressed him for school. ‘You’re clever and handsome and the best boy that ever was. You could be
Prime Minister or an explorer or a film star . . . you’re special, James; really special. You’ll see. One of these days you’ll surprise the world, just you see if you don’t.
You’ll amaze everyone. And you’ll have beautiful, beautiful ladies – princesses, I shouldn’t wonder – who’ll give anything to be your wife. Mark my
words.’
James believed she was telling him the truth. Why wouldn’t he? But he also knew that much of what he watched, open-mouthed, on the Odeon’s dazzling screen was pure, bewitching
fantasy. He gradually realised that the newsreels were much closer to reality – closer in every sense. Many of the glamorous premières, parties and soirées they highlighted
offered tantalising glimpses of lives being extravagantly enjoyed just a couple of miles from where James sat in his flea-pit stall. They called it ‘the West End’.