The Green Gauntlet (18 page)

‘Where did we go wrong, then?’

‘In telling ourselves that all that rushing around and money-making was fun. Happiness is stillness, that’s what I’ve come to believe. Stillness, and putting down roots and taking stock.’ They stopped on the last spur of the wood and looked across at the low hills enclosing the estuary on the Carmarthen side. The rim of the sun was like the heart of a forge sending out regular pulse beats of crimson light that reached them as the wink of a distant heliograph. She said, without looking at him, ‘What you said back there—about loving me, Stevie. I’ll tell you something. Andy never said that, not once in all the time we were together, if you don’t count the marriage service, that is. It wasn’t said on impulse, was it? You have thought about it?’

‘I’ve not thought of much else since that first time in London,’ he admitted, and the answer must have given her the reassurance she needed for she caught up his hand and kissed it, saying, ‘Then that’s that. I don’t care anymore. Let everything work itself out and there’s something else I should tell you. I’m off the bottle. I haven’t taken a real drink since I made up my mind about buying ‘
Ty-Bach
’
and there’s a reason as well as the obvious one. It’ll keep, however. Let’s go back now.’

They went along the lip of seamed stone that divided woods and shore and when they reached the cottage she lit the lamp and made up the fire. Then, from the top shelf of the big cupboard, she took down a heavy mahogany box and threw open the lid. ‘There’s no wireless here,’ she said, ‘so you’ll have to make do with this,’ and he saw that it was a musical box of Swiss manufacture, with a repertoire of Welsh tunes. ‘My Gran owned it,’ she told him, ‘and it’s one of the things I remember about this place when I was a child. Listen.’ She touched a spring and the box began to play a tinkling version of ‘The Ash Grove’ and after that ‘Men of Harlech’. He listened, amused but also impressed by the astounding change this place wrought in her. As long as they were here and together, he decided, time would stand still. It was a simple matter to shrug off the war and the fact that, out there behind the woods crowding down on ‘
Ty-Mawr
’
,
there were so many bills to be paid. With the music still playing he tilted her face and studied it with the same objectivity as he had when she was asleep in her London flat. She looked, he thought, so much younger and more vulnerable, and yet there was peace in her eyes that had never been there before. He kissed her mouth very gently and the kiss set the pace of their lovemaking all the time they spent in that place. There was no urgency about it, and no more guilt.

II

B
ecause he had not been able to give a leave-address when he left camp he had written the address of Wiley, his wireless op. on the counterfoil of his pass and he did not remember this until the fourth morning of their stay in the cottage. Wiley, whom he had promised to ring, lived in Hampshire where he had once had a radio shop, and because there was always a possibility that he might be recalled it was not until the seventh day that he said, casually, ‘Where’s the nearest ’phone box, darling? I’d better give Wiley a tinkle, just in case.’

‘You’ve finished your tour, so why should they expect you to phone in?’

‘We’re supposed to keep in touch and I haven’t, all the time we’ve been here. I’m not due back for another forty-eight hours and even then it’ll be a matter of stooging for upwards of six months.’ He had a comforting thought, ‘I’ll wangle a posting reasonably close at hand,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be an O.T.U. or an F.T.S fairly handy and then, with the kind of ground job I’m likely to land, I can pop over almost every weekend.’

She directed him to a phone booth in the nearest village, a place with an unpronounceable name, and he asked trunks to connect him with Wiley. The moment the wireless-operator answered Stevie recognised urgency in his voice. ‘Skipper? Thank God you’ve rung! I’ve been hanging around this end for three days …’ and when Stevie asked if they had been recalled by signal Wiley said, less eagerly, ‘No, Skipper, it’s not that … it’s about your brother. He’s pranged. Missing they said, no confirmation either way. I got it from camp after your folks rang the adj. They’re trying to locate his missus. Do you know where she’s likely to be?’

Stevie stood quite still looking down at the pale gleam of his knuckles where his left hand was clenched round the receiver. He could think of nothing to say and after a moment Wiley called, with renewed urgency, ‘You still there, Skip?’ and Stevie answered that he was, adding, ‘Is that all the gen. they gave you? Missing on ops.?’ and Wiley said it was, adding, ‘He’ll probably turn up. Bods often do out there, more often than in our bloody outfit.’

Stevie said, slowly and carefully, ‘Look, Wiley, will you do something for me? Ring home and tell my Old Man you’ve located me, that I can get in touch with Andy’s wife and that I’ll be ringing them the moment I do. Tell them what you just told me, that more often than not in the Desert Air Force ‘missing’ means gone astray and that there is no reason to assume Andy has bought it. Will you do that?’

‘Sure, Skip. Sorry to have to pass it on to you. Had a good leave?’

‘Yes, until now.’

He ran off and went out to the car, conjuring with crowding factors and spilling them one after another like blobs of quicksilver. Irrelevancies invaded his brain, reinforcements hurried up to buttress him against the impact of Wiley’s message, odd, fleeting memories of a schoolboy Andy in muddied football togs and yards of trailing scarf. Andy missing out there in the Blue! Fried almost certainly, in the tangled skein of a wrecked Hurricane, with nothing but sand and camel thorn for miles and miles and miles. And then his mind switched to Margaret and he wondered if anyone had ever had such a grotesque obligation thrust upon him, that of telling a twin-brother’s wife who was also a mistress that she was now a widow. Driving over the winding, bumpy track needed attention that he could not spare. Every now and again the car lurched and pitched him forward, so that his head brushed the windscreen and the car slewed as his breastbone bit the wheel.

She was in the little kitchen making an omelette. Hearing him come in she called, ‘Lunch up! Won’t be a minute,’ and he slumped down in the window recess looking out over the flooded estuary at the line of Carmarthen hills on the horizon. His body felt drained of moisture, as though it was an old stick that would crumble if prodded with a boot. Then she was standing there with two plates in her hands. ‘What is it? You’ve got to go back?’

He said, listening to his voice as though it belonged to someone a mile away, ‘It’s Andy, they’ve been trying to contact you.’

‘He’s dead?’

The word helped him to focus. ‘No, not dead. Missing. It probably happened more than a week ago. He must have given the Old Folks as his next-of-kin because he couldn’t be sure where you were. They got the message and tried to phone me at the camp.’

He was surprised that there was no outcry and that she carefully placed the plates on the table instead of dropping them. She looked serious enough but not overwhelmed and certainly not stricken. She lifted the hem of the little apron she was wearing and began twisting it, not agitatedly but idly. ‘Missing? What does that mean out there? The same as it would mean here?’

‘No. Types can go missing for weeks out there. They run out of gas in the Blue, or make a forced landing for one reason or another. He might be in the bag, or he might even be back with his unit by now. They have air searches unless somebody saw him go down and nobody could have or the message would have been ‘missing, believed prisoner’. They often say that to soften the blow.’

‘That’s the truth?’

He hesitated, wondering if it was and finally deciding that it was not.

‘No, Margy,’ he said at length, ‘it’s ten to one he’s bought it.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

There was silence in the sunlit room. Over by the fireplace the grandfather clock ticked, a sound you didn’t hear unless you listened for it. She said, slowly, ‘Well, it’s like I told you and I’m not all that surprised. I never believed he would make it, not from the minute I said good-bye to him. It was just a question of time. The thing I didn’t bargain for was uncertainty and I imagine that will continue indefinitely, won’t it?’

‘It’s impossible to say. I could write to his CO. for details, and maybe form some kind of judgment from that. He’d probably tell me things he wouldn’t tell you or the old folks.’

‘Perhaps you’d better do that, Stevie. Do it soon. We have to know as quickly as we can. I’m having your child in less than seven months.’

It was an even heavier shock than Wiley’s news and he must have reacted to it in a way that dismayed her for she ran across the room and threw her arms about him, pressing his face hard against her breasts. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you until I had to. I had some vague idea of going away somewhere and then trying to get it adopted, but now everything’s changed. I don’t have to do that, do I? I could come back here with the child. I could do that, couldn’t I?’

What puzzled him was the way Andy seemed to have slipped through the net of her consciousness, as though he had been someone they had known and liked but with whom they had no close relationship, and when he thought about it this did not make her callous, or even selfish but realistic, putting the unborn before the dead as a matter of prudence and commonsense. He said, putting his hands over hers, ‘I always thought you couldn’t have children. I knew you wanted them, and that Andy didn’t care either way, but you told us all after you went to that doctor that time that it was very unlikely and that was that. I remember Monica saying you were lucky because she sometimes had to say the same kind of thing to her mother and would have preferred not to be a liar. Were you lying as well?’

‘No, I wasn’t lying. Andy and me, we never tried not to have children, not after the first few months anyway, but nothing ever happened, so I got used to the idea of never having any. Andy didn’t mind and ours didn’t seem the kind of set-up where a child would have been welcome—but now everything’s different. I want that baby badly and I was glad when I found out, even though I couldn’t see a way of keeping it. Now it’s silly to pretend anymore. I’m sorry about Andy, but only in the way I was sorry about Simon’s Rachel, or any of those twenty-year-olds who were shot down the summer before last. Does that shock you?’

It did shock him but it didn’t make the smallest difference to how he felt about her and it didn’t diminish her either, for he saw that anything less than complete honesty between them was unthinkable. ‘Whether Andy has bought it or not has very little to do with it anymore, Margy, and if you’re glad about the baby, so am I. I hope to God Andy turns up and if he does there’ll have to be a showdown. Neither one of us—or Monica for that matter—could go on like this, pretending nothing had happened, and I was coming to that conclusion anyway. I’ll do what I can to get the griff from his C.O. but in the meantime I’ve got to phone home and put them in touch with you. They’ll almost certainly invite you down there. Could you bluff it out until we know, one way or the other?’

She considered and he waited, giving her time but not saying what he intended to do if and when confirmation of Andy’s death reached him. He would, he supposed, have to contact Monica and ask for a divorce, perhaps citing some nameless person. There was no point in plaguing her with this now, but the thought did occur to him that if she went home she couldn’t remain there long.

Her answer, when it came, astonished him. She said, ‘I’ll go home but if I do I’ll tell Claire. Not Paul, he’d never understand, but Claire would. She’s made my way and she could make allowances, some kind of allowances. There’s one thing I can fix my mind on. You won’t be flying for a bit and that’s some kind of comfort.’ She went back to the table and picked up the plates she had laid there. ‘We can eat later,’ she said, ‘if we’ve got any appetite. Go and phone home now. Say I’ve been visiting in Wales and that you’ve got in touch with me.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if you rang?’

She looked at him calmly. ‘No, it wouldn’t. I could tell Claire everything but not over a telephone. Say I’ll be down there the day after tomorrow. You’re due back at 23.59 hours, aren’t you? You could drop me off at Shrewsbury en route.’

He went back to the car wondering if delicacy had prevented her from saying ‘Chester’ instead of ‘Shrewsbury’, or whether she had chosen it as being the more convenient town.

III

M
arch 25th, 1943, proved a field day for Flight Lieutenant Andrew Craddock. It was the day the Eighth Army made its spectacular heave over the Mareth Line closing the jaws of the trap held open for so many weeks by the ingenuity of Rommel and the fighting qualities of the retreating Afrika Korps. There had never been so many tempting targets, from tanks and self-propelled guns, to beetling little scout cars speeding between embattled units. There was little opposition and to a fighter pilot who had flown against odds in the Battle of Britain it seemed a very one-sided contest up there in trailers of cloud. All that morning, and again during an afternoon sortie, he cruised over the desert making carefully timed swoops against ground targets and it was when he was heading back towards Tripoli, in the apparently lifeless area south of Gafsa, that he spotted the small concentration of vehicles around a tiny oasis and came down to have a closer look. It was probably a headquarters of some kind, an untidy spread of troop carriers and scout cars grouped around a single tank and a battery of light flak guns mounted on half-tracks, vehicles almost certainly captured from the British during Rommel’s advance the previous summer. He saw men scatter for their slit trenches when he came diving out of the west and concentrated his burst on the tank but then, a second or two later he saw the flak guns wink and a film of fine dust rose from the cockpit of his aircraft as a giant seized the tail of his machine in a casual, almost genial grasp, weaving it lightly left and right so that he had time to wonder whether his tailplane had been shot away. It could not have been however, for he was able to gain some height although overall control of the Hurricane was not possible and he continued to fly east in a series of dips and swoops that was an entirely new sensation, more like riding the big dipper at a fair than flying.