The Aerodrome: A Love Story (11 page)

the landlord's wife known all the time of my parentage when she had brought me as a baby to the Rectory? Had the Rector known, too, and was this the "whole truth" which he had mentioned in his confession and, if so, why had he kept it back from me? With all this in my mind, so incapable was I of connecting ideas together that I still refused to believe what I had heard. But I looked at the landlord's wife tenderly as though she were indeed my mother, and asked, "Who am I, then? Who are my parents?" I noticed that I was trembling as I waited for her reply, but my question seemed to have surprised her. She looked at me as though I were speaking wildly. "You know who your parents are," she said, "but you don't know about me. Your father was Bess's father, too." I saw at once that by my "father" she meant the Rector, and my surprise at this revelation of the Rector's infidelity and of Bess's true parentage flashed through and out of my mind in an instant. Relief and joy took its place; for had not the Rector himself told me that my parents were unknown? And though he had hinted at some other secret which had not been disclosed, this secret certainly could not have been that he was himself what he had just denied himself to be. I felt at once that my own difficulties were settled, and looked with a new interest and affection at the landlord's wife. There must have been one thing more, I saw, beside the murder, to disturb the Rector's conscience; but I thought kindly of him as I remembered how like Bess this old woman must have been in her youth. It seemed to be my part now to press her hand. "It's all right," I said. "The Rector and his wife aren't my parents." She smiled at me, and I could see from her smile that she was quite incredulous of what I said, and surprised that I was saying it. I quickly told her of what had happened at the dinner party and of how the Rector had expressly mentioned her as the woman who had brought me as an infant to the house. While I was speaking I watched her face closely and eagerly for any sign that my story was convincing her; but, although I could see that she was surprised by some of my words, the expression on her face hardly altered. She still looked at me with commiseration, and still evidently adhered to her former opinion about my parentage. I began to feel a growing sense of doubt as to the truth of what I was myself saying, a horrible suspicion that all the time I might have misunderstood something which the Rector had said, or that I had suffered a lapse of memory so that some explanation which he had given me later had passed completely from my mind. I began to fear that it might be found that what the landlord's wife believed was strictly true, and at the same time everything in me rebelled against accepting either that truth or its consequences. I knew that nothing would make me give Bess up, for apart from her, I thought, I had nowhere to stand, and for her I would break every law of man or nature. I listened sullenly and with a feeling of arrested fear as Bess's mother spoke. "My dear," she said, "your father was very wrong to tell you that story, even though he may have done it for the sake of his wife. He ought to have thought of what might happen." I broke in and said: "But he wouldn't have said he was not my father if he really was." The landlord's wife continued as though she had not heard me. "He was a strange man. He would do anything to shield his wife from any blame." She smiled as though recalling to her mind some incident from the past, and then, turning to me, began to speak more quickly. "He was right," she said, "when he told you that it was I who brought you to the Rectory. I came with your mother and I had been looking after you for nearly a year. I was the only one in the secret, because I was useful and your parents trusted me. And I'd never have told even you if it hadn't been for Bess. Don't you see? You were born only five months after the marriage?" There was in her voice a gentle confidence which enraged me. "What do you mean?" I said. "What marriage? I don't understand." She laid one hand on mine as though to reassure me, and went on speaking. As she spoke I began to pull at the loose threads on the patchwork quilt. The squares were red and yellow and blue. "Your father was a terrible man," she said, "when once he was fixed on a woman's love. I know that. It must have been like that with your mother. They couldn't get married for some time, not till your father got his post here; and he wasn't the man to stand a long courtship. So you came into the world too soon. Of course, your mother and father went away for their honeymoon and after that he came back to the village alone and sent me to look after his wife. I didn't think then that I should bear his child." She paused and laughed. I saw that the past had taken such a hold upon her mind that she was forgetting the present. She jerked back her neck as a girl might do to throw back into place a lock of hair; but her hair was thin and neatly compacted to the top and sides of her head. She looked at me sharply and almost as though in apology for having strayed from the purpose of her story. "I looked after your mother," she said, "while she was carrying you, and I was present when you were born. Poor dear, she was upset and ill most of the time, and saw no one except your father who could only visit us from time to time. She was very fond of him and she was a handsome woman, too. I used to wonder sometimes what he saw in me. But even in those days he used to like me. He paid me well and used to say how he'd never forget the way I'd helped him and his wife. And, of course, if the true story had got out I suppose it would have been the end of him in this village. He used to say that it would be awkward if at any time you wanted a birth certificate because, you see, you were registered under your mother's maiden name. 'Later on,' I can remember him saying, 'I may have to disown him.' He was very serious about it." She paused again, and I began to be overwhelmed with a dreadful conviction that she was telling the truth. What reason indeed could she have for doing otherwise? I could see clearly that if, as she said, I had been conceived before the marriage of my parents this fact, considering the Rector's position, would have had to be concealed, and indeed it could only have been concealed in the manner of which Bess's mother had just told me. But still I was at a loss to account for the Rector's speech at the dinner party. He had throughout my life carried off successfully a deception that was only in one small respect a deception. Why should he finally replace this by a pure fabrication? I remembered that some time previously I had indeed asked him for my birth certificate, since I knew that this would be required at the time when I was to apply for an entrance into the Civil Service; but still it seemed to me absurd that so small a thing as this could be responsible for so large a falsehood. And yet it remained true, I saw, that it was impossible for me to secure a birth certificate that would have carried the name by which I had always been called. I began to feel lost in the intricacies of deception which seemed now always to have surrounded me, and I found my mind wandering to inessential questions, such as whether the Squire and his sister had known the truth or whether they had been as misguided as myself. Meanwhile the landlord's wife continued her story, but I gave only half my attention to her account of how within two months of my birth, the Rector had begun to court her; of how she had felt herself to be acting disloyally towards her mistress; how the Rector, "a great talker", as she called him, had set her doubts at rest, so that they had become lovers. Bess had been the result of this, and to conceal the true facts of her conception there had been a hurried marriage to the man who was now landlord of the pub. "And I've been very happy," she concluded, "though I didn't like giving up your father, and I'm sure he didn't like giving me up. He was a real man, my dear, and there's never been anyone like him. He'd say terrible things, too. Often in the night he'd turn and cross himself and pray. I believe that he had something on his conscience, and never told me what it was." "Yes," I said. "He'd murdered a man." The words came from me without my having willed to speak, and at once I realized that I should not have spoken them. Yet I hardly regretted them; for I felt no tenderness for the reputation of the man who was, if this story were to be believed, the father both of Bess and of myself. Respect I did feel for him and a kind of admiration and pity for his passionate, self-reproachful, and tortured nature. I was glad, too, that he had both won and kept this woman's love; nor did I feel any bitterness against him for his part in the situation where I was now placed. But I knew already that, just as he had disowned me, so I would disown him. In my mind were horror and fear and hesitation, but behind them and stronger than them all was my resolve by some means or other to surmount this obstacle to my independence and my delight. I looked at Bess's mother and saw that the words which I had just spoken had had very little effect on her. She was holding her head between her hands and smiling to herself secretively, as I had so often seen Bess smile. I rose from the bed and took a step towards the door, but she quickly put out a hand to stop me and, rising to her feet, too, stood facing me, looking at me in an appealing way and with the affection which I had known from her always in my childhood. But this affection, simple and profound as it was, seemed to me to have lost its solidity, and I was quite unwilling to resign myself to it. I looked at her now with more understanding but with much less faith. Here, I thought, was another of those who had guided my childhood and whose life I had imagined incorrectly to be simply as it had appeared to be, firmly based on the easy generalizations that a code of rules will supply. She felt certainly none of the agony of self-reproach with which both the Rector and the Squire had been afflicted, but she was no less than they bound up in secrecies and in dissembling. Now, when she held my hands and looked deeply into my eyes, I was both fond of her and sorry for her distress, but I felt her gesture to be a trifle foolish. "My dear," she was saying, "I know that this will have been a shock to you, but you do see, don't you, why I had to tell you. And I am so sorry for you. I'm sure you'll get over it in time, though." She paused, expecting me to reply. I looked at her in some surprise, for it seemed to me that she was expecting from me altogether too much. I realized fully that it would be impossible for me to tell her what was in my mind and I smiled, as though this fact were amusing. "One thing more," she said. "Would you like me to tell Bess, or not? I've promised never to tell her, but it may be the only way." I said: "No, don't tell her. You'd better leave it to me." Then I kissed her on the forehead and left the room.

CHAPTER XI

Change of Plan

AS I WALKED away my mind raced from argument to argument and from plan to plan as to how I could escape from the dilemma in which I was placed. Yet, feverish and rapid as my thinking was, there was something behind the mind that was disconnected from it all, something that had already made its decision and was fixed and certain there, that was even calm, although so great was the overlying agitation of thought and feeling that the sky, I remember, and the bright light seemed to me, as I walked away from the pub, as unreal as a kind of scenery that might at any moment be removed or replaced by something else. I can say confidently that I felt no horror and no disgust at what I had done by accident. Whether, if it had to be done again and I had possessed full knowledge, I should still have done it is another question. No doubt I should have found myself restrained. As it was I knew that my feelings for Bess had not altered in any way, and I busied my mind with arguments to show that they should not alter, that they need not alter, or that the story which I had heard was false. One obvious course of action was to go at once to the Rector's wife, tell her what I had heard, and seek from her an explanation or a confirmation. Yet I shrank from doing this; because if, as I feared would be the case, the story of the Rector's wife should tally with the story of Bess's mother, then I should be in no further doubt, and should have to face the full implications of my position. As it was I could still, in some part of my mind, fall back upon the Rector's express declaration that he was not my father and though, to be candid, I no longer believed in this, there was still a certain number of difficulties in accounting for the speech which he had made at the dinner party, and these difficulties my mind began to make the most of, but was unable by any means to make much of them. I found that my steps had carried me back on the way which I had come, and I paused at the bottom of the fields below the aerodrome, looking uphill to the tin hut, some quarter of a mile distant, in which I had said goodbye to Bess. The late afternoon sun glistened from its roof, so that in the landscape it appeared an object of special importance as to me it was certainly more important than any other building; and as I noted its distance it seemed to me a jewel, minute and inestimable, of which my possession was already threatened, and to retain which I would use up all the energies that I had. I knew that by this time Bess would have left it and the thought of the empty tin walls between which she had lately been filled me with a certain unreasonable tenderness for the vacant space and the rough furniture that I know so well. My mind still was turning over the advantages and disadvantages of seeking an interview with the Rector's wife and still I was so busy with my thoughts that I hardly noticed the shadows that were beginning to close upon the valley or the ground upon which I trod. I walked towards the tin hut with no definite object in view, but rather as though I were attracted thither by some force outside myself. On reaching it I turned round and looked back over the village and the river beyond it winding through the fields, letting my thoughts relax. There were some duck flying high in the air above the river, and I watched them till their stiff formation was lost in the shadow of the farther hill. I noted the Air Force flag flying from the church, the school, and the Manor, and a detachment of aircraftsmen marching past the pub which I had just left. These visible signs of the subjection of our village to a different organization would, not long ago, have angered me. Now I smiled to think that they left me wholly indifferent, and that the sight of the airmen was, if anything, slightly stimulating to me. I began to consider my approaching entry into the Air Force and to reflect that if I were moved to some distant station I could go there with Bess and no one need know, as some did here, the truth of our relationship. The very necessity to defy or to deceive the whole opinion of the world had both strengthened my love and made it more tender. Now, I thought, I should have not only to enjoy but to defend. While I was thinking in this way I became conscious of a noise behind me and had turned round to look at the hut with no definite intention or even any curiosity as to whether the noise were that of the wind against the tin walls or whether it proceeded from some other source; but as I turned I heard another sound, a low and delighted laughter, and I knew that it was Bess laughing. Immediately my body stiffened and a kind of pain seemed to freeze me and stagger me where I stood. I put out one hand against the wall of the hut, and was at a loss to know how or why this flood of feeling had come over me, for my mind had formed no precise conjecture and it was something quite different from my conscious thought which had so sharply and suddenly threatened me with distress. Indeed, my thoughts came immediately to my rescue and forced a smile upon my face. Again I heard the low laughter, and I shook my head as though to deny the sound or else innocently to explain it. I walked towards the door of the hut and, as I walked, I remember noticing and being surprised at the heaviness of my feet. At the door I paused again, shrinking from putting my hand to the latch, and it was no conscious thought that determined my hesitation. Now I heard words murmured indistinctly in another voice, which I did not recognize, and there flashed into my mind the memory of how words spoken are indistinct when the mouth that speaks them is pressed into the flesh of breast or shoulder or neck. I thrust this thought from me, and indeed it was still unconnected with any idea which I had as yet formed of the present situation. I began to feel weak at the knees and raised my hand to the latch. Now I heard Bess's voice again, a few words spoken rapidly and a low murmur, which I knew well and knew well when it was uttered. I was suddenly convinced of what I would find and, with no more deliberation, flung back the door with a crash against the iron wall. I stopped on the threshold with the sun behind my back pouring its light into the hut and radiating back golden from the two heads close together. My attention was concentrated first on Bess who had been lying with her back to me, naked on the bed. When the door had opened she had twisted round her flushed face, frowning in the sunlight, and there was a look of uncertainty and of surprise about her which I had seen often myself when some sudden noise of the wind or of an owl hooting had startled her in my embrace. I knew how her body would stiffen at such moments, and I noticed the hair damp about her forehead. In a moment she had recognized me and the surprise in her face was quickly chased away by a look of fear. She put her hands over her eyes and turned as though to seek protection from the man beside her. But he (it was the Flight-Lieutenant) had already left the bed and was hurriedly putting on his clothes. So she turned back to me, sat up, and pulled some of her own clothes around her. She looked as though she might either smile or cry and were trying to decide which it was that she would do. The Flight-Lieutenant was buttoning up his jacket. His head was bent forward a little and his lips compressed as he closely watched my face. Perhaps he feared that I would attack him and, as I was taller and stronger than he was, he had some reason, perhaps, to be afraid. Indeed, had the mass of ill-defined feeling which now overwhelmed me been, by some accident, concentrated into anger, I might well have killed him; as it was I thought of no such thing, but was puzzled as I looked at him, for previously, I had admired his beauty, his experience, and his skill; I had looked up to him as at a superior being; but now I saw nothing superior in him, and was somewhat shocked to find it so. He took some papers from his pocket and held them out towards me. "Here are your calling-up papers, Roy," he said. "I brought them along. They want you to report for duty tomorrow." He advanced towards me and made as though to put the papers in my pocket; but as he extended his hand I turned upon him quickly, for I could not bear to feel his touch. I felt a kind of weight upon my shoulders, and my arms lengthening towards him. He dropped the papers on the floor and sprang past me into the open air and, as I turned my head, I noticed a look of relief upon his face, though I did not know why he was relieved and was quite unconscious of how I was myself behaving. I turned back towards Bess and saw her staring past me with wide eyes towards the door. Behind me now the Flight-Lieutenant was speaking. "Sorry about this," he said. "But all's fair, you know." Then I noticed the beginnings of a smile on Bess's face, and I put one hand in front of my eyes and the other hand against the wall to steady me. Soon I turned and looked out through the door and saw the Flight-Lieutenant walking quitkly away across the fields. For a few moments I watched him and then, coming back into the shed, sat down on an empty packing case that faced the bed where Bess was lying. The clothes were huddled up round her, and in her eyes was again a look of fear, as though I were likely to be dangerous to her. There seemed to me something pathetic both in her look and in her posture. With no clear idea of what I was doing, I stretched out one hand towards her, and her eyes followed my hand as though fearing it and wishing it away, so that soon I removed it from the space between us and, looking across the space, began to see that now it was most difficult to cross, though all the more I wished to cross it and to hold her in my arms to find comfort there and a kind of explanation for this event that, in reality, held no comfort for me and could never be explained in any way that could cause me any satisfaction. "When did this start?" I said, as though that mattered, and was surprised to find my voice trembling as I spoke. Bess's eyes were wide open as she looked at me. Her voice was low, but expressed no hesitation. Rather there was a note of certainty and of defiance in it as she asked: "Why do you want to know?" I looked in her face before I answered, but I looked in vain for any expression there that wbuld allow me to declare my love, to tell her that my whole life was bound up in her and to plead with her not to exercise against me that cruelty which those who are soft-hearted and weak and indifferent are alone capable of exercising. "I just want to know," I said. "That's all." She smiled before replying, but smiled wryly, as though the information which she was giving was neither very important nor much to her taste. "It started the day before we were married," she said, and then, misinterpreting my look of surprise, she added quickly: "It's all right. I know I've done wrong, but I couldn't help it. And I don't mind." I got up and walked to the door of the shed. The sun had set behind the farther hills, but I hardly noticed the cool and dampness of the evening air. A dog was barking in the garden behind the pub, and I could hear, too, the raised voices of men shouting at the animal, though the men themselves were out of sight. The dull pain which had settled on my mind was like the feeling which I had had months ago, at the time when I lay drunk in the meadow after the dinner party, so strangely disturbed by what I had imagined to be the loss of my parents whom now, it seemed, I had found again and in the meantime lost much more. I watched the smoke curling up from the cottage chimneys, heard a whistle blow from the village schoolroom, now occupied by the aerodrome authorities, and was conscious that behind me Bess was putting on her clothes. I turned round and saw her sitting on the bed, pulling a stocking on to one leg and frowning as she wriggled her foot to make it fit the artificial silk. "So you never loved me at all," I said, and she looked up at me, smiling gratefully as though I had introduced a subject on which she wished to speak. Her tone was no longer defiant as she said brightly: "Oh yes, I did love you. I loved you a lot. I still do. But with him it's so different. I wish I could explain. He says that it's because we're physically better adapted to each other." She paused and looked up at me shyly, as though to estimate the effect of the long words. I nodded my head and, having nothing to say, waited for her to continue. "I'm sorry," she said, "if this has upset you", and then, since I still made no reply, she added: "I never meant to do anybody any harm." She looked hard into my face, as though claiming my sympathy, but I had none to spare, and so, after a moment or two, she turned away from me and began to comb her hair in front of the small mirror that hung from a nail in one of the walls. I watched her as she stood with her back to me, and found it painful to see the delicate carriage of her hips and the dress creased below the armpits as she raised her hands to her head. Still I had nothing to say, and yet felt strongly that it was time for me to speak, so that my own silence became embarrassing to me. At last I said: "Why was it that you married me when all the time you were in love with someone else?" She turned round from the mirror and, though there was a puzzled look in her eyes, I could see that what was puzzling her was not the difficulty of answering my question, but merely the choice of the words which she would use. She looked at me as though I had spoken stupidly, as a child might speak on some subject of which he has not yet grasped the rudiments. "It's not like that at all," she said. "I did love you. I've told you I loved you. But I loved him, too, and I didn't know which I loved best then, or I don't think I did. You see I hadn't had enough experience. I thought I was being nice to both of you. After all, we've only got one life to live." I smiled, for she was not speaking like herself, as I knew her, but was using the phrases which the Flight-Lieutenant would use, though without the logical coherence of his conversation. Then I began to wonder whether the part of her which I thought I knew had ever existed or whether it existed still. "You bitch!" I said, and was startled by the violence in my voice. Bess began to cry, standing up straight and putting her hand before her face. I sat and watched her shoulders heaving and was glad to see her so, though I knew that if by any word or gesture she had expressed any need or affection for me that I could have understood I should have been at her side in an instant to soothe her trouble and to assure her of the strength snd depth of my love for her. She made no such sign, but stood there tall and solitary, remote and, it seemed, out of place in these surroundings. At length she took her hands away from her