The Aerodrome: A Love Story (9 page)

so I looked indifferently at the Squire's sister and at her brother's body. In a few moments the lady ceased to sob. She was wringing her hands and staring at me with large inquiring eyes. "How could I have done it?" she asked. "How could I?" She spoke as though I were likely to know the answer to her question. "One gets overwrought," I said, conscious of the feebleness of my reply and irritated with her for requiring from me assurance in such a situation. "He was trying to tell me," I added, "something about my father." She looked at me as though my words had startled her, and then, turning away from me, rose from her chair and stumbled towards the bed. Here she fell on her knees and, burying her head in the pillow by the dead man's head, began to weep unconstrainedly. Her body was relaxed, and her neck and head, with some locks of hair loose, looked beautiful, I thought, as I watched her sorrow and the relief which evidently it was bringing her. Over her shoulder I could see the Squire's nose and sunken chin. I thought of him as I had seen him often--in his regular pew in church, standing at the door of the pavilion to pat on the shoulder a village batsman who had distinguished himself, saying grace at a tenants' party, digging in his garden or, as he had sometimes done, playing charades in our house. Now he and all these scenes, although I felt some tenderness at the memory of them, appeared to me as wholly dead. I went on tiptoe to the door and, opening it, saw the butler, his wife, the cook, and several maids standing huddled in the passage-way. Closing the door, I began to walk past them, and as I went Mrs Wainwright, the cook, touched my elbow and whispered in my ear, "Has he passed beyond, sir?" I nodded my head, and proceeded down the stairs, having no comment to make. Behind me I heard the butler reassuring in a low voice some of the servants who had begun to weep. In the hall I paused for a moment to look at the empty oak chair by the fireside and the gleaming ornaments and oddments on the walls. I remembered that only a day ago I had seen the official from the aerodrome glance just so around the room, and I reflected that the house itself now was, with its owner, a thing of the past. This reflection actually elated me, for I could see here no longer the certain innocence and stability that I had always imagined. The outrageous outbreak of the Squire's sister which had preceded and perhaps caused her brother's death was clearer in my mind than was the sight of common sorrow and of the collapse of a house which had been, together with the church, for generations the centre of a village's life. Yet against the Squire's sister I felt no animosity, as for the Squire himself I felt little pity. Even the curiosity with which his last words had filled me began now to grow faint and to disappear. I walked quickly towards the Rectory and at the gate saw the erect figure of the Air Vice-Marshal standing by the running board of his large grey car. He was looking down to the ground while pulling the tight gloves on to his hands, but before I reached him he raised his head and noticed me. Somewhat to my surprise he lifted up one hand in a gesture of greeting and smiled at me as I approached. "Is he dead?" he asked and, as he spoke, I seemed to see again most vividly the distorted face and to hear the frantic inhuman breathing of the dying Squire. The very ordinariness of the Air Vice-Marshal's voice, contrasted in my mind with what I had just seen and heard, frightened me, and I paused for a moment or two, unable to frame a reply. I felt the man's keen eyes on my face. "It's not a pleasant sight," he said. "One gets used to it." I looked at him with, for the first time, a kind of admiration, for his words had seemed certain and had certainly charmed away my fear. The chauffeur had now left the driving seat and was standing at attention, ready, when needed, to open the door of the car. The Air Vice-Marshal himself was buttoning up one of his gloves and, as he looked down at his hand, continued to speak to me. "In the case of this gentleman," he said, "death was probably a great relief. So it is for anybody who has not a purpose in life." "Yes," I said, "I suppose so", and without much reflection I added: "I am thinking of joining the Air Force." He raised his eyes quickly and looked at me, I thought, with satisfaction. "Then we shall most probably meet again," he said, and nodded quickly to his chauffeur who stepped forward smartly, a rug over one arm. The car's door was opened and shut. I caught a glimpse of the Air Vice-Marshal's face as he leant back against the cushions and took from his pocket some papers which he proceeded to study. I followed the car with my eyes all the way up the village street and, when it was out of sight, stood for some moments looking after it before going into the Rectory to acquaint the Rector's wife of her friend's loss.

CHAPTER IX

The Honeymoon

ONE MIGHT DESCRIBE, I suppose, as a honeymoon that state of existence between two worlds in which I lived for the three months after my marriage and before my entry into the Air Force. If unreflecting happiness, indifference to the outside world, a sudden and prolonged delight in the pleasures of the senses are characteristic of honeymoons, then certainly this period of time in my life deserves the title. When I held Bess in my arms, naked or clothed, I felt assured that I was laying hold of a brilliant, a better, an unexpected world, never thinking that I was doing only what every other man had done and what had finally satisfied nobody. With the Rector and the Squire all my upbringing seemed to have been dead and buried. Though I still lived, and often slept, at the Rectory, I made no effort to speak or behave with any intimacy towards the Rector's wife or the Squire's sister. They noticed, as they were bound to do, the elation in which I lived, but, if they questioned me about this or about my frequent absences from the house, I would put them off with some light-hearted reply, and would be amused to find that, although they may have suspected something which was not far from the truth, they seemed to shrink in timidity from pressing their inquiries too far. And this reluctance of theirs to attempt to force my secret from me, whether it came from a refinement of feeling or from fear, gave me pleasure and caused me to believe myself independent, strong, and progressive, although in reality I had no title to these qualities except my pride in the sudden and unrestrained exercise of my sexual powers. Of the future I hardly thought at all, although before my marriage I had signed on for training in the Air Force and Bess would speak often of what she imagined to be the delights of living at the aerodrome. For me the delights of each day were enough and plenty. Every afternoon and many nights of the week I would meet Bess in a corrugated iron shed at the bottom of one of the fields below the aerodrome. It was on Government property but was, so the Flight-Lieutenant had informed us, quite safe for our purpose. Thither he and two friends of his who had acted as witnesses at the wedding had escorted us when the ceremony was over. They had brought some old sacks with them, and these had been our first wedding bed, though later we had added to our comfort and convenience in various ways. Even now, when I think of that shed and of the times we spent together there, I feel an excitement rising in my blood--that and different feelings, too. I remember the night after the wedding when we stood in the light of a candle which one of the Flight-Lieutenant's friends had brought with him, saying good night gladly and nervously to the airmen. Huge shadows swung and flickered on the walls of the shed, and through the creaking door, above the round heads of the Flight-Lieutenant and his friends, I could see two or three stars. We had shaken hands and "Sleep well" one of the men had said, to which the Flight-Lieutenant added, "I shouldn't bother", and I had laughed and observed Bess looking at him as though his words had pleased her, for she was smiling slowly. Then they had gone away and I had secured the door and turned round to see Bess watching me. And so we stood for some moments listening to the retreating footsteps until their sound had died away and nothing was to be heard but the light swishing of the breeze against the iron roof. Then I stepped forward and Bess did too, so that we fell into each other's arms, and I covered with kisses her mouth and eyes and neck, and finding her body soft and yielding, I pressed my fingers into it, my muscles hard and angry with desire, but with my soul, as I know now, more soft and yielding than her body, crying out for the warmth and succour which I believed that she could give to me and I to her. I remember how, when my lust was spent (and this time more successfully than had been the case on the day of the Rector's death), I lay relaxed with my arms about her, and felt the tips of her fingers on my forehead and shoulders, entranced and as it were listening to something very far away, though I was conscious of the fusion of our flesh and the warmth about me; and then her voice with something of triumph in it, "You do love me, don't you?" and this seemed to drag me back into the nerves of my body and, unaccountably, to make me sad, while it accentuated my desire; and I held her tighter, muttering incoherent words, as people at such moments do, words that seemed to hurt my body as they were dragged through it, words that mean much, but not always what one thinks they mean. But in these weeks I was in no mood to reflect upon the meaning of what we said or did. I went eagerly from one delight to another and she followed me, always gentle, usually calm. Often I would gaze at her for minutes on end while she sat staring out of the door of our shed, until she would turn her head and smile as she saw me as though she were seeing me for the first time. Then the blood would race to my heart and at the same time I would feel my limbs weakened by an overwhelming tenderness for her, a wish to please, a sad sense of the weakness of all my passion before her sweetness and her calm. At such moments she would often begin to speak of our future life together at the aerodrome, when I should become fully qualified as an officer, and somehow this topic of conversation always seemed to me most inapt, so pressing and inexhaustible was the present time, so much I wished her to see not the possibilities of a future career but the depth and severity of what I now felt; and as I stared into her calm or slightly puzzled eyes I would be hopelessly at a loss for words with which to tell her how gladly I would give her my life, how wholly I trusted in her goodness or adored her beauty. She would look at me then with a small smile on her mouth and her eyebrows raised a little incredulously, as one might look perhaps from the shore at a child who believes that he is venturing in the sea beyond his depth. And I would feel a growing despair with words, as though it were they that were to blame, and would go again to the body, concentrating it in a moment's flame or stretching it out in the broad splendour of desire, and fancying that what I found there, because it was new, was indeed what I was forced to seek. And when I left her, returning in the late evening or early morning to the pub or Rectory, I would be sure that I was leaving what was the most precious thing of all to me, what made my life at the moment and would form it for the future. Away from her I could still feel her flesh against my flesh, hear the sound of her voice, imagine the shapes of shadows that our candle would throw over her face; and when I thought of these things, I would know my love and be proud of it and cherish within me the melting tenderness I felt for her softness, her delicacy, her mild and gentle ways. So day after day passed, and in the midst of this novelty and delight I hardly noticed the events that were taking place around me, although I heard them frequently discussed and although they were of great importance both to myself and others. The promise or threat made by the Air Vice-Marshal at the Rector's funeral was strictly fulfilled, and it so happened that it was the day on which the Squire was buried that was chosen for the formal occupation by the authorities of the aerodrome of his land and the village which it surrounded. This particular choice of dates might well have been regarded as one more deliberate insult offered by the Air Force to the feelings of the villagers, although it was maintained that the order had come direct from the government who could not, of course, have been informed of how exactly things stood with us. At all events the Squire's sister was determined that her brother should not be buried in the village, since this would mean a service conducted entirely by an officer from the aerodrome; and when it became known that it was the Flight-Lieutenant who had been appointed to take the church services amongst us, the lady's indignation knew no bounds. Indeed, this appointment created an unpleasant effect everywhere. Even those who in the pub had liked and respected the young man (and they were not very many) were horrified at the thought that one so young and one who, moreover, had been, however indirectly, responsible for the late Rector's death should now take the dead man's place among them. "Why, he's not a clergyman at all," they would say and, though the Flight-Lieutenant himself would occasionally remark that he did not pretend to be much interested in religion, and regarded his new post merely as a "job of work", these remarks were considered by most people to be improper or scandalous. People even resented the fact that the Flight-Lieutenant refused the title of Rector or "your reverence" and demanded to be known simply as "padre" or "skypilot"; although, if he had chosen the former title, his choice would have been, no doubt, equally unpopular and, in point of fact, he had no right to claim them since his appointment had nothing to do with the bishop of the diocese but was entirely the business of the administration at the aerodrome. His duty was not to live in the village, but merely to read the appropriate services on Sundays and, in his sermon, to pass on to the villagers any instructions which his superiors considered could be best given in this way. On these occasions he wore neither surplice nor cassock, I was told (for I did not attend church myself), but appeared always in his Air Force uniform. He read the prayers distinctly but in a voice that was generally agreed to be lacking in reverence; and though on the Sunday of his appointment a considerable congregation had been brought together out of curiosity, for some time after this fewer and fewer people attended the services which he conducted. I met him often in the days after my marriage and was, as a rule, glad to see him, for above everything else I remembered that it was he who had, in a way, brought Bess and me together. With this in my mind I hardly remembered his conduct at the dinner party or even his negligence at the Agricultural Show. When I thought, which was not often, of the fact that I had signed the papers applying for work at the aerodrome and that in the course of time I should no doubt be called up, I was glad to think that I had a friend there who would help me with his advice at the beginning of my new venture. In particular I enjoyed talking to him of Bess, and this even although his attitude to the subject was seldom serious and often somewhat embarrassing; for he spoke of her, and indeed of all women, in a way which, at this time, I imagined to be peculiar to himself. It was not merely that he regarded marriage in itself as being a kind of lunacy; this opinion would have been shared by Fred and Mac and others of the young men in the village who would spend the long summer nights, after the pubs were shut, in roaming the fields on the look-out for easy and almost indiscriminate love. They would afterwards roar with laughter as they told of their adventures, and yet in their laughter there was always something of affection. "She was a prettily marked child," one might say when he reached the end of a story. "I wouldn't mind seeing her again some day." The Flight-Lieutenant, on the other hand, never laughed about this subject, though he took at least as great an interest in it as did any of the men from the village. He would speak coolly, dispassionately, and at some length about the physical details of making love; but if I mentioned any of the feelings which I had in my heart, he would cut the conversation short, sometimes smiling condescendingly at me as if I were a child, sometimes appearing almost indignant, as though I were speaking of something boring or disgusting. "You'll get over that sort of thing," he would say, and I would smile to myself, though I felt sorry for him, fancying that perhaps at some earlier period of his life he had suffered a disappointment which had warped his nature. But, so great still was his ascendancy over me, that I did not question him about himself; once indeed, long before, I had asked him about his parents, and he had replied: "What on earth do they matter?" Since then I had made no effort to discover anything about the life he had led before he had joined the Air Force. Of the Air Force itself he was now much more willing to talk than he had been previously, and it was on this subject alone that he seemed to me to speak seriously. Indeed, he often showed annoyance at my own attitude, which was simply that I had signed on for training so as the more easily to be able to marry Bess and for no other reason. I could see that to. him it was really shocking that I should think in this way, and this was the more remarkable because he never told me anything about the aerodrome which could account for his devotion to the life there. He would describe cocktail parties, love affairs with some of the officers' wives, new buildings, improvements made in the construction of the planes or of their instruments; but he never seemed to me to have any clear idea of the purpose or of the future of the organization to which he belonged. He carried out his duties in the village with perfect regularity, although they would have seemed to be wholly unsuited to a person of his character, and this contrast between his complete irresponsibility in ordinary life and his perfect efficiency when it came to carrying out an order was a thing which surprised not only me but everyone else in the village; for we had become accustomed to considering the officers of the aerodrome as characters from a different world whose conduct was incalculable; now, however, we found them in our midst and discovered that, though their way of life was indeed different from our own, their official actions were precise and certain. After an initial period of bewilderment when no one knew what to make of the changes which were coming so rapidly, two fairly distinct parties formed themselves among us. On one side were the older men and women, who grumbled at every step taken by the aerodrome authorities and would speak with tears in their eyes of the time when Rector and Squire had been alive; and on the other hand were many of the young men who, apart from their interest in mechanical devices such as aeroplanes, were attracted to the new order of things by the higher rates of pay which were now offered for their work and by the opportunities which might come in time of wearing uniforms; for they were encouraged by the Flight-Lieutenant and others to believe that there might be room for the more intelligent and ambitious among them on the ground staff of the aerodrome itself. They had merely to give up their old way of life (the