Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (90 page)

She waited after that for some kind of peace, of relief, but it didn’t come. She felt as wretched as ever: her dilemma over, but imagining every moment John’s horror, his rage, his grief, waited for a letter back, the vituperative letter she deserved, castigating her. That didn’t come either.

And she told Laurence she had written to him.

She did that by letter; there was no question of seeing him for several weeks and she had thought, in any case, it was the easier way.

She was wrong. He wrote demanding that she marry him at once, that there were no further obstacles, and when she said she couldn’t, he unleashed an assault on her, a savage assault, of demands, assertions, accusations, a bombardment of letters, day after day, some so passionately loving that she felt the power of them physically, some so angry and abusive she felt distraught and afraid. Followed by others, often the same day, remorseful, self-abasing, begging her to forgive him.

That was what had frightened her: those letters. She would sit reading them, the first absolute proof that he had not—of course—changed, had not become easy, more reasonable, less manipulative.

And every day, she wondered why and how she could love him so much: and what on earth could become of the pair of them.

‘And what of you?’ she said to him now, ‘in this endeavour?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’m hoping to go with them.’

‘What? On the invasion?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Laurence, this is going to be the most dreadful of battles, surely they won’t take you—’

‘On the contrary. Information will be crucial to us. Any high-ranking prisoners could hold extremely vital information. No, I expect to go.’

She said nothing, assuming, hoping, that he was as usual exaggerating.

‘What’s Eisenhower like?’ she said.

‘Extraordinary. A superb soldier and a most remarkable man. He has the ability to strike up such rapport with people. He doesn’t think of himself as an American, or indeed as British, or Canadian or French or Polish. He’s just a soldier, doing that job, and determined to do it so well that we win. I admire him enormously.’

There were very few people Laurence admired.

She managed somehow, by pulling rank, exaggerating her ill-health, to wangle a last two-days’ leave. London was strangely empty.

‘They’ve all gone,’ said Laurence, ‘all the military anyway. And a good few others as well. People are scared. It’s all you hear—what hell it’s going to be, when the invasion starts, that London will be bombed night and day, we shall have to live in the shelters . . .’

‘But you’re still here.’

‘I’m still here. And so are you. So what else matters?’

‘Nothing,’ she said feebly. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Good. I have plenty of plans. And, you know, suddenly you can get taxis, the restaurants are empty, so are the nightclubs, we are going to have a marvellous time.’

He was adamant still that he would be going ‘over with Eisenhower’.

‘Are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be.’

‘Oh,’ she said staring at him, and it was a moment of absolute revelation, of how very much she loved him, ‘oh, Laurence, no.’

‘Won’t you be proud of me? Because that’s what I want.’

He was like a child, she thought wearily, a demanding, spoilt child.

‘Ye-es. But—’

‘Oh Barty,’ he said, his voice impatient, ‘you’re very hard to please.’

‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘Of course I’ll be proud of you. You know that. But—’

‘But what?’

‘I shall be frightened,’ she said very quietly, ‘so frightened for you. So frightened I shall lose you.’

There was a long silence; then he said, his voice gentler than she had ever heard it, ‘That is very good to know.’

‘It’s true.’

‘But—’ he added, suddenly brisk, ‘I shall be perfectly safe. I’m not going to have to fight my way in, you know. VIP treatment and all that sort of thing.’

She was silent: knowing he was, to an extent, a large extent, lying.

‘I love you, Barty. Very, very much.’

‘I—love you, Laurence. Also very much.’

He smiled at her. ‘This has been the most extraordinary time,’ he said, ‘I shall never forget it, as long as I live.’

‘Nor shall I.’

She stood there, looking at him, thinking of it, of the strange, difficult, joyful, wretched time, of what he had done to her and to her life. Then, ‘Tell me what plans you have for the next two days,’ she said.

‘They were quite extensive. Now I think I would like simply to stay here.’

But she made him tell her; and agreed they should do at least some of it.

There was still no word from John.

She was billeted near Rye in the last week of May; they were under canvas and sleeping in tents of four, pitched in a cherry orchard. The promised Morrison shelters, protecting them from the shells, formed a sort of tunnel inside the tents. There were two camp beds in each, into which they had to crawl each night.

Their steel helmets had to be worn at all times, even down to the village on their evenings off; every morning they would count the chalk marks on them to see how many hits they had notched up in the night. They were working now with magnetic ammunition, so the strike rate was much higher.

She could truthfully say they were all too busy to think about what might happen to them, too busy even to notice the noise and the sight of the shells. As long as you could shout and could hear someone and as long as they could hear you, that was all that was required.

The security was ferocious, so great was the terror of discovery. Barty had had to sign a certificate declaring on her honour that any mail she sent (limited to the most urgent) related only to ‘private and family concerns’.

Ten years later, Barty edited a history of that week, the week of Operation Overlord, when the south coast seemed to contain nothing but troops, troops drilled, exercised and trained into absolute readiness; when the great mass of trucks, tanks, and lorries that had filled the roads in an endless line for weeks had finally come to a halt; when every hotel, every building, every house had been requisitioned; when every beach was covered with great rolls of barbed wire; when every field was khaki coloured with army tents; when every port was filled with naval vessels, and with assault and landing craft; when a temporary pipeline was already in place under the Channel, to carry a million gallons of petrol daily to France; when the extraordinary half-constructed Mulberry Harbours were loaded on to landing craft, ready to be towed on to the French beaches and provide shelter for the great armada of invading ships; when an elaborate set of fake preparations were in force, for an attack on the Pas de Calais; when the whole country was becalmed, holding its breath: and when General Eisenhower and his staff sat helplessly waiting for a go-ahead from that most capricious of enemy tyrants: the English weather.

They still had no knowledge of the actual day: it was impossible. Decent conditions in the Channel were an absolute necessity; hourly forecasts were brought to Eisenhower by the Met office. They needed a day to give the go ahead, to set the thing in motion: when there was a certainty of a day of calm to follow. And there was no such certainty. A classic early June bought a severe depression, rain and high winds. A second depression was following on its heels.

It seemed hopeless. The men waited; waited on their ships, in their tents, in a long silence which fed their fear. They read, they smoked, they played cards, they wrote letters to their wives and sweethearts. And began to think they would never go: even High Command began to fear the whole thing would have to be called off.

And then the miracle happened; there was a break in the weather. Or rather one was coming. It would arrive late on Monday, continue through Tuesday. Early on 5 June it was decided.

Eisenhower said to his driver as he came out and got into his car, ‘D-Day is on. Nothing can stop us now.’

And so it began.

Jay Lytton, with D Company under the command of Major John Howard, was one of the first to leave from Dorset, in his glider fleet, on the evening of 5 June, their objective being an air assault on a vital bridge over the Caen Canal, immortalised afterwards as Pegasus Bridge. Its capture and that of its neighbour was essential to the entire D-Day exercise; they carried a lateral road vital to the supply of ammunition, fuel and rations to the beach head. The cloud was thick, and the conditions frightful; their towing tugs, the Halifax bombers, were flying almost three hundred feet ahead of them, at 6,000 feet, to delude the German radars into thinking this was just another bombing raid on Caen. Every possible skill was called into play. Precise landing position was crucial: too high and they would smash into the roadway embankment, landing short would alert bridge defences, and to top it all they had to navigate a belt of fifty-foot trees. They had studied the landing ground from a precise scale model for the past three days; Jay was in the lead glider, absolutely focused on his task, pushing through the clouds, waiting for the release 8,000 feet over the Normandy coast, felt nothing at all, no fear, no excitement even, only a white-hot concentration. They were released three miles short of the French coast; the angle of descent was horribly steep. They managed it with extraordinary accuracy, their parachute brakes marvellously silent, their only obstacle a herd of cows, disturbed in their cud-chewing slumber and stampeding, mercifully quietly, away from the planes.

Jay’s crew was the only one of the three to land in the right place; but the courage and savagery of their attack made up for their missing numbers. They landed at 12.16 and only ten minutes later, the bridge was in their hands, the first vital objective of D-Day achieved. And although later there was extremely heavy fighting, the bridge was held.

But then, as Jay told Victoria later, Howard had had an unsuspected weapon: quite apart from his own remarkable skills, his superb equipment, the courage of his men, he had Lucky Lytton in his company.

It was as well they had not been aware of the odds: losses of glider pilots were estimated at six or seven out of ten. Gordon Robinson did not, of course, know that, but he knew of the appalling danger, and as he sat all that day listening to the radio reports, with no idea where Jay was, or whether he was alive or dead, he was thankful for the very first time that LM was not with him.

Boy never told Venetia very much about that dreadful day; rather as he had with his desert experiences, he buried the worst of it deep within himself.

He had survived the horrors of the crossing, the vile sea, the small boats lifted six or seven feet on the waves, the seasickness, the ghastly terror of the landing, had witnessed the craft just in front of them running into an underwater mine, and somehow made it inland. He managed three miles that first day, losing many of his men on the way. Later, he listened to tales told by the Americans who had undoubtedly got the worst of it; it was said that on Omaha you could walk on the dead from one end of that beach to the other. Of the one hundred and thirty thousand troops ashore that day, nine thousand were dead.

But Boy survived, had witnessed the incredible gratitude and relief of the French as they made their way inland, while feeling deeply sickened by the slaughter of the small towns they passed, their grey stone houses and brightly flowered squares turned to blackened skeletons.

It was something quite different that haunted him though, and more than the rest, and something he did tell Venetia; it was the sight of pretty young French girls weeping, some of them literally collapsed in grief as their German lovers were taken prisoner and marched away. That, he told her soberly, had brought home to him, more than anything, the absolute stupidity and futility of war.

Three days after D-Day, when the grim news was easing into optimism, Barty was walking exhaustedly back from the canteen after breakfast, when she was told the CO wanted her.

‘Someone to see you, Sergeant Miller.’

She knew who it was immediately; and yet she knew it couldn’t be, knew it was absolutely impossible, no one could do that, not even Laurence.

It was Laurence.

Somehow, he had pulled strings, pulled rank, talked, argued, charmed, eased his way in; and more incredibly, eased her out.

‘Only for the day, Sergeant. Back at 1800 hours.’

‘How did you do that?’ she said, laughing and crying at the same time, as they walked down the lane. ‘How could you possibly have done it?’

‘Oh—you know. Colonels, even in the American army, have a certain amount of influence.’

‘But you’re not even a real colonel.’

‘Do be quiet. Nobody knows that here. Anyway, I told them that you were my wife.’

‘Oh Laurence,’ she said. ‘Laurence, how could you—’

‘And that I had some bad news for you. Which I wanted to deliver personally.’

‘Now that is really naughty. You shouldn’t lie about such things, when there is so much—’

‘It’s not a lie,’ he said and his voice was very gentle, as she had hardly ever heard it, ‘it is bad news I’m afraid. This came for you. I – well, I knew what it must be. So I opened it.’

Too shocked, too afraid to be angry with him, she took the envelope. An army envelope. From it fell her letter, her letter to John. And a letter from his CO deeply regretting his death. And the fact that her last letter had never reached him.

‘I don’t know why I feel so sad,’ he said, holding her tenderly while she wept, ‘but I do. So very sad. For you and with you.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I don’t either.’

‘I would have expected to be feeling something quite different. But I’m not.’

‘Well—thank you. Yes. Oh God. Oh Laurence. Well, at least he never—’

‘No, he never did.’

They were in a hotel in Playden. She was still confused as to how he had got there at all.