I'll Be Seeing You (23 page)

The doctor disinfected and rebandaged the wound. ‘Another American has been discovered by the French, but he is dead. The parachute did not work. He has been buried so that the Germans will not know anyone escaped. But it is believed that everybody else was in the plane. Nobody knows about you.'

‘Did they find the wreck?'

‘Oh, yes. All burned. Nobody was living. You are the only one.'

Soon after the doctor had gone down the ladder, the little girl appeared, bringing some hot soup in a tin can. He didn't know her name, or the name of the family, or where he was. It was better not, they had said. There were four of them – the girl, the girl's parents, and another older woman – the grandmother. They had all come running to the barn when the kid had first spotted him and stood staring up with white and frightened faces while he struggled again with his French.
‘Je suis un pilote américain
 . . .
je suis blessé
 . . .
pouvez-vous m'aider?
'

They hadn't looked as though they were going to help him at all – more as though they were going to go running straight to the nearest Germans. There'd been a big argument between the husband and wife, a long gabble of agitated, incomprehensible French with a lot of hand-waving. Finally, the man had shrugged and the wife had come climbing up the ladder and taken stock of the situation. Her husband had been sent to fetch hot water, scissors and some old sheeting. His pants had been cut open, the gash laid bare and washed and bound with strips of sheet, while he did his darnedest not to groan and yell out loud.

Later, the old grandmother had brought bread and cheese and blankets and a bucket for him to use, hauling herself stiffly up the ladder and sliding them towards him across the hayloft floor with a toothless grin and a lot of nodding. None of them spoke English but he could make himself understood in his rusty French – enough to thank them, and let them know how grateful he was. He had nothing for them except the Horlicks tablets, which he gave to the girl. The doctor had come after a day or two.

He went on lying up in the hayloft, drifting in and out of consciousness, and they went on bringing him food and once in a while some lung-busting French cigarettes. Every so often, the doctor would clamber back up the ladder to clean and dress the leg. His watch had been smashed up when he'd bailed out and he found it hard to measure the passage of time; the days seemed very long, the nights endless. Hours of dark and pain and cold. If it hadn't been for his thick sheepskin jacket, he reckoned the cold alone would have killed him, never mind the wound.

A lot of the time he thought of Daisy. Bronsky and his crew would have seen the two chutes – he was sure of that – and they'd have reported it at debriefing. Daisy would have heard all about it. She wasn't the sort of girl to give up easily: she had more guts than that. She'd keep on hoping, keep on believing, keep on waiting. He wished to God he could somehow get a message to her but it was impossible. Sometimes he thought about the Cat and Mustard and the feather bed and the firelight and of how they'd talked about the future. He knew she'd been afraid of him breaking the golden rule and tempting fate and maybe he had, but fate hadn't done with him yet. He was still alive and he could still get through this and find a way back to England.

Other times he thought about his parents, who must have been told by now that he was missing; he knew how cut up they'd be, his sister, too. The MIA letter wouldn't have said anything about chutes, so they'd have no reason whatever to hope. Once he thought about Lola back home, who still kept on writing to him. He figured she wouldn't be shedding tears for long. And he thought a lot about his dead crew: Ray, Don, Lee, Carl, Ken, Alvin, Cliff, Merle, Bernie. He mourned them as brothers. The bond between them had been a kind that he knew he'd never experience again. He was sorry about
Miss Laid
too. For all her faults, she'd gutted it out with them as long as she could.

Whenever the little girl came to feed the hens she would nip up the ladder and sit beside him. He taught her simple English words and phrases and she corrected his French, giggling when he made bad mistakes. Once she brought him a deck of cards and he showed her how to play gin and how to cut and shuffle the deck like a riverboat gambler. Alone, he played endless games of solitaire. During the day he sometimes heard American bombers go over, and, at night, the RAF.

The leg improved slowly until he was able to stand on it, and then to hobble. They brought him a stick so that he could begin to walk. He practised walking up and down the hayloft – up and down, up and down, up and down – until he could do without the stick and knew he was ready to leave. When the doctor came again, he said so.

‘And where will you go, my friend?'

‘Away from here. Head south for Spain, I guess.'

‘And in which direction is south? Do you know that?'

‘I'm a pilot, doctor. I can steer by the sun and the stars. Also I have a compass. They give us one in our escape kits. And a map.'

‘Ah . . . such efficiency. But you have only American uniform and no identity papers. You would not go very far, believe me, before the Germans arrest you. If you have a little patience, I can perhaps organize clothes and papers for you. There are people I know who will help you. Spain is not perhaps the best idea; there are other ways.'

He said, ‘Thanks but I wouldn't want to put anyone in danger.'

‘By yourself, my dear friend, you will not succeed. The clothes we can find quickly, the
carte d'identité
is more difficult. For that we need a photograph of you and film is very difficult to get.'

Hamilton produced the grainy photo of himself in a civilian jacket – the escape-kit one that all American air crews had taken for that very purpose.

‘Will this do?'

The doctor took it, looked at it and smiled. ‘Now I know that you will certainly win the war for us.'

A tin bath out in the yard was home to two ducks. The farmer's wife and daughter carried it into the barn, took out the straw and filled it with water from the pump. The grandmother brought a pitcher of hot water and a bowl, a sliver of soap, a cut-throat razor and a hand mirror. They left him while he took a bath in the cold water and shaved in the hot and when he'd finished and put on the civilian clothes provided by the doctor, they came back and the three of them stood admiring the way he'd cleaned up. The grandmother took away his American clothes. They would burn them, she told him, except for the sheepskin jacket. It was too good to waste so they would bury it and mark the place secretly, so that after the war he could come back for it if he wished. He wondered if he would ever be able to find the farm again.

A few days later, he left in a baker's horse-drawn cart carrying a French identity card that gave his occupation as a cook. He had been given French francs, a train ticket and an address in Rennes to memorize, where he would be given shelter and more help. He did not know how to thank either the doctor or the family adequately for risking their necks for him; his French wasn't up to it, but he sure hoped they understood what he felt. When he gave the little girl a goodbye hug, she started crying. The farmer shook his hand, the wife kissed his cheek, the old crone of a grandmother clasped his hands tightly in both hers and tears trickled down her withered cheeks.

Daisy went home to convalesce. The weather was still cold but the crocuses were out in the garden, the daffodils coming up fast and buds starting to open on the trees. The English spring was beginning: a spring that Ham would never see. And summer would follow, and autumn and then another winter. And next year and the year after and all the years after that which he would never see either, and which she would have to live through without him.

She had been home for a week when Vernon came to visit his mother. He called round to see her and sat with her in the old nursery upstairs beside the gas fire – the room she and her sisters had played in, and where their children's books and toys and games had been left undisturbed. This was also the room where he had helped her with her homework, patiently trying to explain the mysteries of logarithms and geometry and algebra.

He looked tired and as though he had lost weight. His clothes hung on him, as ill-fitting as always – bony wrists protruding from too-short sleeves, trousers finishing above his ankles to show odd socks. He reminded her of Worzel Gummidge, the scarecrow in the children's book that she had sometimes read to Madeleine and Peter at bedtimes, and she half-expected to see tarred-string braces and bottle-straw boots on his feet. When she asked him how his job was going, he mumbled something vague and said it was pretty boring.

‘Your mother says they work you too hard.'

He gave a helpless shrug. ‘You know what she's like.'

‘You
do
look a bit tired, Vernon.'

‘Do I? Well, there's a lot to do . . . you know, with the war on.'

‘Communicating?'

He nodded, staring at his shoes. ‘All that sort of stuff.'

She wondered what he really did. Whatever it was he'd never tell her and she wouldn't ask any more questions. ‘Well, don't forget to eat sometimes. You look as though you could do with a few square meals. No wonder your mother's worried.'

He lifted his head. ‘It's
you
that's the worry, Daisy. You've got over the pneumonia, but that's not all, is it? You're very unhappy. I can see that. Will you tell me what the matter is? I can keep a secret.'

She smiled. ‘I know you can.'

‘Then tell me. Perhaps I can help you.'

‘Nobody can help,' she said. ‘I have to work it out for myself.'

‘Tell me, just the same.'

And so she told him. All about meeting Ham and falling in love. About the week away at the Cat and Mustard, the plans and the hopes and the unbelievable happiness. And then what had happened.

‘His plane was shot down. He and his crew were all killed.'

‘Are you sure they were? All of them?'

‘Oh yes. The other crews always look for parachutes, for men bailing out. Nobody saw any and the wreck was found in France with the crew inside. Or what was left of them.'

He shook his head. ‘How dreadful! I'm so sorry, Daisy. No wonder you're so unhappy.'

‘When I heard what had happened, I wanted to die as well. I didn't want to live without him.'

‘You must have loved him very much.'

‘He was the love of my life – that's the phrase people use, isn't it? The one that will never
ever
happen like that again.'

‘Yes, I think that's what people call it.'

‘There's something else, Vernon. I'm pregnant. Three months to be exact. What with being ill, I didn't realize for a while . . . When I did, though, I stopped wanting to die because I knew I had something to live for. His child. A part of him.'

He was silent and she thought she had shocked him deeply.

At last he said, ‘Have you told your parents', Daisy?'

‘No – not yet. I've been trying to think what to do for the best. Whether to go away and have the baby somewhere else . . . what on earth to do. I'll be thrown out of the WAAF of course, but I've got some money a godmother left me, so I could manage on my own.'

He said quietly, ‘You could marry me, Daisy. Right away. I'd love your child as if it were my own. And, like I said, I'm quite good at keeping secrets.'

She touched his arm. ‘Thank you, Vernon. But that wouldn't be right. Or fair on you.'

‘It would be all right by me. Very all right.' He knelt down clumsily on the old nursery rug in front of the gas fire and took both her hands in his. ‘I've loved you all these years, but I've always known that there was no real hope . . . that you'd never feel the same way.'

‘I'm awfully fond of you, Vernon.'

‘It's not the same thing though, is it? There's a big difference between being fond of someone and loving them. But I'd be content with that, and I'd never expect anything more from you. I'd take care of you and the child, give you both my name and a home . . . and my unconditional love, for always.'

She shook her head. ‘No, Vernon . . . but thank you, all the same.'

He said, ‘Have you thought about what it would mean to have an illegitimate child?'

‘Yes, of course I have. I don't care what people think of me.'

‘I didn't mean that. I know you wouldn't care about yourself, Daisy. But think about your child. About the stigma he, or she, would always have to bear. Imagine the child growing up and being shunned by other families, going to school and being mocked and taunted by other children, ostracized all its life. It doesn't have to be like that. We could say we were married in secret three months ago at a register office. Nobody would ever need to know the truth – except you and I.'

It was her turn to fall silent.

‘I need time to think . . . do you mind?'

‘Of course not. Take all the time you want.'

She said slowly, ‘I'd want the baby to know.'

‘That would be up to you, Daisy. Maybe one day, you could tell the truth – if you thought it would be the right thing to do.'

The address in Rennes was a small restaurant –
Le Faisan d'Or
– and the patron and his wife were expecting him. Hamilton was given a cubbyhole under the eaves and it was explained to him that, when the time was right, he would be passed on to the next safe house. Eventually, with luck, it would be arranged for him to be picked up off a beach at night by a British motor boat, or possibly by an aeroplane landing in a field. But it would all take time, he must understand that. He must be patient and do exactly as he was told and stay inside, out of sight, at all times. Meanwhile, he was to work in the kitchens – it would give him something to do to pass the time, and if his
carte d'identité
should be demanded, then,
voilà
! he was a cook, just like it said.