Requiem for a Wren (27 page)

I went on to tell her why I hadn't kept in touch with Janet Prentice, about the snow at Evere aerodrome, about my time in hospital, about my self-centred preoccupation with my own affairs before I went back to Australia. 'Not so good,' I said quietly at the end. 'But that's what happened.'

'I lost touch with her, too,' said Viola. Tm just as bad, I suppose, because she needed her friends after the war. But - one can't keep up with everyone.' She glanced at me. 'You know that she was trying to get back into the Wrens?'

'No,' I said. T never heard that about her.'

She thought for a minute. 'I went and saw her just after the invasion, at Oxford' she said. 'I was on leave. She wasn't up to much then - sort of weepy and very, very nervous. It was just before she got her discharge from the Wrens and she knew that it was coming. She took it as if it was a sort of disgrace, I think. The Junkers she'd shot down was worrying her, too.'

'I don't know anything about that Junkers,' I said. 'What was it that she did?'

She told me as ranch as she knew. I called the waiter and ordered a fresh pot of coffee, and lit another cigarette for her. At last I was learning something real about Janet Prentice.

'It was all a bit depressing,' Viola said at last. 'She'd been such a fine person a few months before, and now she was all to pieces.'

I said nothing.

'I saw her again in the summer or autumn of 1946,' Viola said. 'I can't remember what month. I saw her mother's death in the Telegraph, and I was driving to Wales or somewhere so I wrote to her and fixed up to have lunch with her in Oxford on my way through.' She paused. 'It was just after the funeral and she was packing up the house and selling everything. Her one idea was to get back into the Wrens.'

'Why was she so keen on that?' I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. 'Why do any of us look back on our war service with such pleasure, in spite of everything?' she demanded. 'Answer me that. You'd be glad to be back in the RAF in another war, and you know it. If it happened again, I'd be back in the Wrens like a shot.'

'Did she get back into the Wrens?' I asked.

She shook her head. 'They wouldn't have her.'

'Why not? She must have had a very good war record.'

'I know.' There was a pause, and then she said, 'They're very, very careful who they take in. Even in peacetime there are many more girls trying to get into the Wrens than they want. They can afford to be choosey.'

'I see,' I said.

'I know a girl who stayed on in the Wrens' she told me. 'She's a second officer, in the Admiralty. She tells me that

they won't have anyone back, however good, if there's the slightest hint of any nervous trouble on the record. She says they get a lot of cases like that, and they turn them all down, just on principle. They want girls with untroubled minds, who sleep soundly at night.'

We sat in silence for a minute. 'When you saw her in 1946,' I asked presently, 'was she really bad? I mean, I'd like to know.'

'She wasn't raving, if that's what you mean,' Viola said, a little sharply.

'I want to try and understand,' I told her.

'I know,' she replied, more gently. 'She was very lonely, for one thing, I think. She was missing her mother, of course, and she didn't seem to have any relations left in England to speak of. She didn't seem to have made many friends, either.'

'She didn't make friends easily?'

Viola shook her head. 'She did in the Service, but that's different. When you're sleeping thirty in a hut you just can't help making friends. But in civil life, living at home and looking after her mother - I don't think she would have done. She was rather shy, you know.'

'I'd never have thought that of her,' I remarked.

'You only saw her in the Navy,' Viola said. 'It's so totally different, living with men and working alongside them. You can't do a job in the Navy and be shy. But it can come back afterwards.'

'Was she still nervous?'

She shook her head. 'Not in the way she was when I saw her before, the time I saw her just after the invasion. She'd got herself under control. I don't think anything was very real to her that had happened since she left the Wrens, though.'

'Was she still worrying about the Junkers?'

Viola nodded. 'It was still very much upon her mind - that, and your brother's death. But what really did worry me was the way she talked about the dog.'

'What dog was that?' I asked.

'Your brother's dog,' she said. 'He had a dog that he called Dev. I thought you'd have known.'

'I know he had a dog,' I said. 'A sort of Irish terrier. They had him with them in the boat that day. What about him?'

'Bert Finch brought him over to her after your brother's death' she said. I sat in silence while she told me about Dev.

Ten minutes later I said, 'It was that that really finished her? When the dog got killed?'

She nodded. 'You see, it wasn't just a dog that she'd got fond of. It was your brother's dog She told me in the Wrennery that evening that she'd let your brother down by not taking more care of his dog. Of course, I didn't pay much attention to that at the time, because she was in a sort of a breakdown and going off on leave next day. But after her mother's death, more than two years later, she told me the same thing. I tried to tell her it was my fault as much as hers, that I shouldn't have let him out of the boat on to the hard. But it didn't register with her. She seemed to have got a sort of horror and disgust with herself that she hadn't looked after Bill's dog better.'

'She never had another dog, after the war?'

Viola shook her head. 'Oh no - I shouldn't think so.' There was a pause, and then she said, 'Something broke in her when that dog got killed that took a lot of breaking, and would have taken a lot of building up. And it never got built up ...'

She looked at her watch presently, and it was half past ten. 'I must go,' she said. 'I've got to work tomorrow.'

I paid the bill and we left the restaurant. We walked slowly together the short distance to her flat, and paused for a minute on the pavement outside before I left her. 'There are one or two other people who might possibly know where she is,' she said. 'There's a girl called May Spilcins, the other OA Wren who worked with her. I think I might be able to get you her address. You ought to see Bert Finch, too.'

'I've been in touch with him,' I said. 'He's in China, or on his way home now. I'll be seeing him before Christmas - about Bill.'

She nodded. 'Of course. I think you might find he knows

something about Janet Prentice. Anyway, I'll find out about May Spikins for you,'

I saw a good deal of Viola Dawson after that. She rang me up a few days later to give me information about May Spikins, who was May Cunningham by that time, and when I suggested that we might have lunch together she seemed pleased. She was almost as anxious as I was to find Janet Prentice, for having been close friends in the war Viola was genuinely worried to find that they had drifted so far apart that she had lost all touch with her. On my part, I soon found that Viola knew a great deal about Janet Prentice that had not come out at our first meeting - not important things, for she had told me all of those, but little touches, little incidents that happened in their Service life together that helped me to build up a picture of the Leading Wren that Bill had loved.

I went to see May Spikins in her new house in the new town at Harlow, and she put me on to Petty Officer Waters in his tobacconist's shop in the Fratton Road at Portsmouth. Then, about Christmas time, Warrant Officer Finch came home and I went down in January after he came back from leave and saw him in his mess in Eastney Barracks. From him I got the account of Bill's death, and in the long vacation of 1951 I went to France and spent some time endeavouring to find out where Bill had been buried. As I have said, I failed, but it wasn't very important to know that in any case.

At each step in this matter Viola and I used to meet to talk things over, often at a restaurant in Jermyn Street. Presently she began coming with me to motor-race meetings, and I visited her film studio and spent an afternoon upon the set with her, and had lunch with her in the commissary. She Was a very easy person for a man like me to go about with, for we had the Service background as a link. I found presently that I was telling her about my life in the RAF, almost unconsciously, a thing that I had never been able to talk about to anybody, and I woke up one day to realise uneasily that we were getting very close, that she knew more about me, probably, than anybody else in the world. It was a year after we had met for the first time that I woke up to that,

and the realisation troubled me. I liked Viola, and I didn't want to hurt her.

It all came to a head next winter, either just before or just after Christmas. She had been to Switzerland ski-ing for a fortnight and had come back with a lot of action photographs, and from these she had been working up a painting of a chap on a snow slope doing a fast turn. It was part of her artistic development that she was getting away from naval subjects now; at long last, perhaps, the preoccupation with her Service life was beginning to fade. She had asked me to come round to her flat to have a look at this picture, and I went with slight reluctance. At some stage I would have to hurt her, and I didn't want to do it.

I went one afternoon at a weekend, intending to take her out to a movie and dinner. The painting she was working on was a good, vigorous action picture; if anything, I think she was a better draughtsman than painter and her action drawings were unusually good for a woman. We talked about the picture for a few minutes, and then she went through to her kitchenette to make tea, and I dropped down upon the sofa.

She had been rummaging in the cupboard where she kept her old sketchbooks, and the big, floppy things were all out upon the floor. I turned them over till I found the one that I thought contained the sketch of Janet Prentice firing the Oerlikon, and turned the pages. It was full of pencil sketches of Naval craft and Naval scenes, with a number of rough portrait sketches, a sort of commonplace book that she had kept with her throughout her service in the Wrens. Presently, turning the pages, I came upon a pencil sketch of Janet Prentice.

It was a head-and-shoulders portrait, exactly as I had seen her in the boat at Lymington, as I remembered her. She wore a round Wren cap and a duffel coat, the hood thrown back upon her shoulders. I sat there looking at the square, homely face that I remembered so very well, thinking of that day. Viola came in as I sat motionless with the book upon my knee. She asked, 'What have you got there?' and looked over my shoulder.

'Portrait of Janet Prentice,' I said. 'Can I have it?'

'What do you want it for?' she asked. There was a sharpness in her tone, so that I knew there was trouble coming. It had to come some time, of course.

'It's very like her,' I said quietly. I wanted a picture of her very badly. Td like to have it, if you can spare it.'

She did not answer that at once. She crossed to the table and put down the teapot and the plate of cakes that she was carrying, and stood silent for a minute, looking into the far corner of the room. Then she said, 'You think you're in love with her, don't you?'

'I don't think anything of the sort,' I replied. 'She was Bill's girl. If he'd come through she'd have been my sister-in-law. We ought to have a picture of her.'

'It's absolutely crazy,' she said dully. 'You only met her once for a few hours nearly eight years ago.'

'It would be absolutely crazy if I was,' I retorted. 'You're imagining things.' I paused, and then I added weakly, 'I'm just trying to find her.'

She turned to me, suddenly furious. 'And when you've found her, what then? Do you think she'll still be the same person as she was eight years ago? Are you the same person as you were in 1944? For God's sake be your age, Alan, and stop behaving like a teenager.'

She was quite right, of course, but I wasn't going to stay and have her talk to me like that. I got to my feet. 'About time I beat it, after that,' I said. I put on my raincoat and picked up my sticks. Tm sorry, Viola, if I've done anything to hurt you. I didn't mean to.' And I made for the door.

She stood watching me go, and I half expected the embarrassment that she would call me back and ask me to stay, and so prolong the inevitable. But she didn't do it, and I closed the door behind me and made my way slowly down her stairs for the last time. It's no good looking backwards; one has to go on. It's no good trying to be happy with the second best. She had said that I was absolutely crazy, but I had known that myself for some considerable time.

Two days after that I got a note from Viola; it enclosed the little pencil sketch of Janet Prentice, cut from her sketchbook. It said simply,

My dear Alan,

Here's your sketch, as a peace offering. I've fixed it, but you'd better frame it under glass.

I think you're mad as a March hare, and I don't want to see you any more, so please don't ring up or write and thank for this.

Good luck, Viola

London wasn't much fun after that. I had grown to depend on Viola more than I quite realised for company, and when it all came to an end I didn't know what to do with myself. I had my work in chambers, of course, and I had the Club and motor racing still, but as 1952 progressed I began to take less interest in these things, and to feel that a time was approaching when I should have had England. Reports from home weren't too good, either; both my father and my mother were beginning to fail in health and to find the work of the station a burden, and a wistfulness was starting to creep in to their letters when they mentioned my plans. I saw Helen from time to time and she was obviously fixed in London with her Laurence, and I began to feel that I should be at home. My search for Janet Prentice seemed to have petered out, and it was only a chance now if I ever heard of her again. In the uncertain climate of the English spring and summer I began to think with longing of the warm settled weather of the Western District in summer, and the drenching sunshine of our property at Tennant Creek.