A Place Of Strangers (15 page)

Chapter Twenty Five

Evie wondered if she should rescue McCall from the female
mourners who fussed him into a corner with their wan smiles and sympathy. Yet
it did not need a wake for his vulnerability to bring out their mothering
instincts. It was always in his face. Evie made no move. She was too sensitive
to her own position. Shun any prominence, attend only to Bea’s wishes. Critical
eyes were watching, alert for gold diggers.

The windows remained covered by the builder’s blue plastic
sheeting which cast a theatrical ghostliness across the drawing room. Bea
looked ill even without these stage effects. The more people nodded over her as
though she were a stupid child, the angrier she became at being unable to
answer back.

McCall reminisced about Francis with some old Foreign Office
types. They were the last knockings of Empire and the darker arts beyond
politics. The flag would soon be lowered on them, too.

After an hour, Bea could take no more. Evie and McCall
helped her into the nurse’s car. Bea tried hard to form words to express what
she was feeling but nothing came so she just held tight to McCall.

When everyone had gone, he sat with Evie at the kitchen table
and talked about the VIP in the diplomatic Jaguar.

‘If he was a friend of Bea’s, why didn’t he come
back to the house?’

‘Mac, how would I know?’

‘Are you sure it was actually
him?
’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But that footage was shot years ago.’

‘I know but those high cheek bones, the penetrating eyes –
he’s still got them.’

‘But you were only side on to him in the church.’

‘Listen – I’m trained to remember faces. It’s part of what I
do, OK?’

A door to McCall’s past had opened as another closed. He had
to locate this man, ask about Elizabeth and why Bea and Francis had airbrushed
a year from his life. The film of his mother, like that of his father, summoned
her back from the grave. McCall had seen himself in her arms and all he had
meant to her. It did not matter that they lived in a condemned house or were
church-mice poor.

His mother cried out to be acknowledged for who and what she
had been. Evie knew what was in McCall’s mind – and why.

‘I can find out which embassy the Jaguar came from, if you’d
like.’

‘That’d help.’

‘There’s someone in the diplomatic protection squad who owes
me a favour... and listen, McCall – you’ve no need to upset Bea with any this.’

‘Why should it upset her?’

‘Come on, you can see how she is. Another stroke and that
could be the end of her.’

*

Once a week, Edgar Fewtrell put on his best court pinstripe
and ate supper at the Bale of Cloth restaurant in Lower Broad Street, close to
where weavers of the middle ages once toiled in their damp riverside cottages.
He always reserved the same table and high-backed settle by the cast iron
grate, ordered the same meal of spinach, new potatoes and three cutlets, well
grilled, with two glasses of house red. He was usually be gone by nine.

Soon after the funeral – and when Evie was back in London –
McCall rang him to make an appointment but was invited to the Bale instead.
They talked about the progress of roof repairs at Garth, Bea’s sad
deterioration, McCall’s depression.

‘I can’t seem to sleep or concentrate and the thought of
work... I just dread it.’

‘It’s called grieving, Mac. Let it happen.’

The restaurant gradually emptied. Coffee was brought. Mr
Fewtrell poured and asked what else was on McCall’s mind.

‘There was a man you were talking to after the funeral... a
bit stooped, had a walking stick and a chauffeur.’

‘I think he was just one of Francis’s old pals. Why do you
ask?’

‘So he wasn’t someone you knew, then?’

‘No, just another mourner.’

‘He looked a bit foreign to me.’

‘Yes, I’d say possibly eastern European from his slight
accent.’

‘Who invited him?’

‘I suppose he must have seen the death notice in The Times.’

‘But he didn’t come to the house afterwards as I would’ve
expected.’

‘No, he probably had to get back to London again.’

Fewtrell clasped his hands across his belly. He had a rather
aldermanic face, soft cheeks flushed pink in the firelight. Yet McCall sensed a
steeliness behind his pernickety bachelor ways and said he had seen the
Nuremberg photograph in his study.

‘Oh, that. All our yesterdays, Mac.’

‘I never realised you’d been such an important witness to
history.’

‘Well, in truth I was only one of the clerks but it was a
fascinating experience.’

‘How did you get onto the prosecution team?’

‘My father knew Hartley Shawcross. He thought it’d be
interesting for me.’

‘And was it?’

Edgar Fewtrell moved position slightly and stretched out his
withered leg.

‘You know, Mac, there are some artists who sit in a
landscape for days and don’t paint a stroke because first, they have to absorb
the essence of all they see, to get to the very fundamentals of what touches
them as human beings. In a way, Nuremberg was like that for me... however
dreadful the details of what I saw and heard were, they became secondary to the
overwhelming truth of the whole experience.’

‘Which was?’

‘That we must never let our guard down against man’s
capacity to bureaucratise evil and wickedness for his own purposes.’

‘Yes, but surely Nuremberg proved that man lives by law and
is civilised by law.’

‘To some extent, it did. But the truth was we hanged a few
of the ringleaders... that’s all.’

‘But that is justice, man’s ultimate decency, the formalised
triumph of right over wrong.’

‘Mac, Nuremberg was a symbolic, political act as much as
anything because the dock has yet to be built that could have accommodated all
those who should’ve stood in it.’

‘I don’t see the alternative. There was a trial with
evidence, a prosecutor, defence – ’

‘– true enough but remember this... the law doesn’t always
deliver justice.’

Fewtrell paid the bill in cash and they walked into the
fresh night air. A slight mist rose from the river. Above them, the sky was a
clear sweep of stars. The old lawyer and his callipered leg could never get
into McCall’s low-slung Morgan so they stood talking for a while longer.

‘We need to meet again soon, Mac. There are papers to sign,
things like that.’

‘About Francis?’

‘Yes, but you, too.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you’re going to be very well off and we shall have to
make plans.’

*

Was she awake or dreaming or dead? Who kissed her in the
half shadows?

Bea was laid out under the tightly drawn sheets of her
hospital bed, arms by her side, head sunk into the snowy white col of her
pillow. It was neither day nor night. Figures seemed to hover above her then
dissolve. Cleaners, nurses, doctors and the families of those like her, clinging
on to whatever remained, came and went like the spirits who kept her company.

*

‘Elizabeth McCall’s rung me again, Bea. Edward’s still
giving her a terrible time.’

‘You can’t carry on being his skipper, Francis. The war’s
over. He’s not your responsibility any more.’

‘But he’s only like this because of what happened.’

‘Come on. He’s a damned excuse of a man.’

‘He wasn’t always.’

‘Well, his wife can’t keep running to you every five
minutes.’

‘But there’s no one else... and there’s their boy to worry
about. I’ve told her I’ll drive down tomorrow.’

‘But Arie’s coming – ’

‘Then we’ll all go, get a hotel and make a weekend of it.’

*

They find Edward McCall at The Crown in Churchill. Bea has
not seen him since he left Francis’s crew. He sits on his own in a brown
overall made messy by oil paint from the pictures he tries to sell.

The pub has just opened but he has almost finished his first
pint of bitter. His eyes are red from crying or insomnia. The smell of
self-pity and failure is all about him. Edward looks up and meets Francis’s
eye.

‘Edward, good to see you again. We were just passing.’

‘Pull the other bloody one, skip.’

He is introduced to Arie who buys a round of drinks. Bea
asks about McCall’s son, young Francis.

‘He’s well enough, I suppose.’

‘We’d love to see him – and Elizabeth, of course.’

‘Well I’m busy. There’s a man coming who might buy some of
my pictures.’

Bea hopes he is telling the truth. They leave for McCall’s
cottage without him. Elizabeth looks worn down from trying to cope. Little
Francis scrambles behind her legs and hides his face from the strangers’
smiles.

Elizabeth’s kitchen is small, dark and squalid, the table
covered by newspaper, not cloth. The red floor tiles are furred white with
salts coming up from the bare earth on which they are laid. She boils a kettle
for tea. Arie feigns a liking for the framed paintings stacked against the
stairs. They are chocolate box views of thatched cottages and country scenes.
No originality, no flair – not like his pre-war efforts. Arie tempts young
Francis outside with a promise of candy. They all follow and Francis senior
records the gathering on his cine camera. Then he takes Elizabeth across to the
orchard to talk out of earshot. Arie asks Bea what had happened to make Edward
the way he is.

‘Something on a mission, I think. Francis has never told me
the full story.’

Edward McCall returns from the pub a few minutes later. His
mood is even darker. The would-be buyer failed to show. Arie offers for
‘Farmhouse at Dawn’ and refuses change from the five pound note he puts in
McCall’s hand. Then Francis starts recounting war stories about how he and
Edward survived their hairy raids over Germany. McCall turns away, almost
angry.

‘Leave it, skip. I’m sure you have to be somewhere else.’

He gathers up his boy and carries him inside. Bea sees the
child’s eyes looking at her, not understanding. Elizabeth looks at her, too, on
the point of tears. She goes inside and they hear the door being bolted.

*

They drive away from Mendip Cottage, knowing they have brought
distress to those within, not comfort. Arie asks why Francis takes Edward’s
problems so personally.

‘Because he was a brave man, once.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Cracked up spectacularly on a raid... fell victim to the
eighth passenger.’

‘The what?’

‘Fear. That’s what we called it.’

They check in at the Cliff Hotel in Cheddar then set off
walking a path along the limestone ridges of the Mendip Hills. Bea can think
only of how much she pities Elizabeth and despises her husband. He seems
incapable of understanding what a blessing a child is.

They rest a while on a seat above a steep-sided ravine. The
quilt of England’s soft green hills lies beyond. No one speaks. Arie and Bea
are waiting for Francis to finish the story of Edward’s downfall. When it
comes, his account is somewhere between a debriefing and a confession... and
long overdue at that.

*

It is October the 14th 1944. Two hundred and fifty
Lancasters from 5 Group take off from bases in Lincolnshire. Their target is
Brunswick in Lower Saxony, thirty miles from Hanover, a medieval city of
timber-framed buildings but which has factories making aircraft as well.

Each Lancaster carries two one thousand pound bombs of high
explosives and sixteen canisters of multiple incendiaries. They fan over the
North Sea in three great wedges of destructive power. The target will be
reached by midnight. Each crewman is about his business. The navigator is
curtained off with charts and instruments and signals are coming into the radio
operator. Crouched in their turrets are the gunners – forward, mid-upper and
rear – watching for enemy fighters in the fearful vastness of the night sky.

Tedium and routine are but preludes. Ahead will be
confusion, panic and the ferocity of combat... and the prospect of instant
death. Within each man, there is all this – that and the conflict between the
instinct for self-preservation and the demands of duty. Those who accept they
are likely to die will suffer less stress. More imaginative men see only the
horrifying end that might await them.

They are seventeen thousand five hundred feet above
Brunswick. The city’s streets are running with white fire from the first storm
of Lancaster bombs. Francis and his aerial warriors begin their run. They are
about to be tested to destruction once more. Then they hear screaming on the
intercom.

‘I’ve had it, I’ve had it. I’ve fucking had it!’

It is their rear gunner, Edward McCall.

‘Do you fucking hear me, you bastards – I’ve had it!’

There is terror in every word. At that moment, the bomb
aimer should be signalling weapons away so Francis can peel left and descend
below German radar. But he doesn’t. Something is terribly wrong. Francis hears
scuffling from behind then McCall lunges at him.

‘Out of the bloody way, skip. Get out of my way.’

He tries to wrestle Francis from the pilot’s seat to get at
the escape hatch. McCall wants to bale out... wants to leap into the inferno
below. Francis is fighting to keep control of the aircraft. McCall punches him
in the face again and again and they go into a dive, hurtling towards the
flaming city at two hundred miles an hour.

The forward gunner manages to scramble up from his turret
and grabs McCall. The flight engineer pitches in, too. They sit on him and bind
his hands with webbing. But still McCall kicks and thrashes about till they hit
him so hard, he goes unconscious. Francis struggles back into position and
levels them out just above the inferno and orders bombs away immediately.

*

Bea shakes her head in disbelief. Arie asks what happened
when they got Edward back to base.