A Rather English Marriage (10 page)

‘Hello? Hello, that you, Southgate?'

‘This is Tunbridge Wells 45829. Who's speaking, please?'

‘Jolly good. Thought we ought to have a word. Vicar's idea, you know. Something to do with Mandy Hope. Gather she's talked to you as well.'

‘Oh, yes, Mr Conynghame-Jervis -'

‘Squadron Leader, don't you think?'

‘Look, I'm ever so sorry, I've only just got back. Been visiting my son. He's not, you see, been very well.'

‘Bad show. Never mind. No time like the present. Don't know what to make of it, really. What's your view, Southgate? Think it's worth having a chin-wag? Care to come round for a snifter? Give you the address, might as well nip round now.'

With his other hand Roy Southgate pushed open the dining-room door. The scent from Grace's freshly cut flowers drifted towards him. He had grouped three vases together in the middle of the table and they formed a fountain of leafy stems erupting into colour, rearing up straight and triumphant, vibrant with life. You never got that sort of vigour from florists' blooms. One rose nestled its head against the top of the photograph frame and her face laughed out at him below its soft petals.

In his ear the bluff voice chuntered on.

‘… carry on past the hospital, past the cricket ground, and it's on your left, first turning off Bishops Down and then first right. If you get to High Rocks, you've gone too far. The Cedars. Can't miss it. Easy. Park in the drive. See you in, what, half an hour? ETA twenty hundred hours, eh? Eight o'clock?'

‘Not tonight,' Roy said. ‘Not feeling quite up to it.'

‘But good heavens, man, it's
Sunday
.'

Roy understood that nothing he might say would be listened to. He had to get the man off the phone. ‘Kettle's boiling,' he said. ‘Have to go. There's a tea shop in the Pantiles. First one on the right. I could be there tomorrow morning, round about eleven.'

Surprised and cross, the Squadron Leader assented.

Roy Southgate put the telephone down very carefully. With equal precision, he walked into the kitchen, unhooked Grace's apron, wrapped it round his head, put his hands up to his face and wept. Behind him the kettle whistled, emitting clouds of steam through the little black bowler hat that crowned its spout. Under cover of the noise and the apron, Roy howled his pain. Gentle images of laughing Grace were overwhelmed by the memory of Alan, his throat encircled with soft white bandages, a striated purple bruise showing over the edge and running up past his ear to disappear into the springy thickets of his hair. Roy's head rocked from side to side. ‘Gracie,' he moaned, ‘I can't bear it alone, I can't, I can't, I can't.'

Fellow's damned impertinent, said Reggie to himself. Good mind to tell him to forget the whole idea. Who does he think I am? Frigging tea in the frigging Pantiles? Make myself a laughing stock. Suppose someone saw me? Think I'd become a poofter. He strode over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a tumbler of whisky. It splashed on to the polished mahogany top, and he wiped it away with his sleeve before taking a deep swig.

‘Haaaa …' he sighed aloud, thinking, That's better. Too good to waste on that miserable little pongo. Don't know what gave the vicar the idea that he'd make himself useful about the place. Sounds damned uppity to me. Ought to have shot the idea down in flames straightaway.

He opened and slammed shut a couple of silver cigarette boxes lined with cedar wood and imbued with the sweet lingering smell of decades of tobacco. Empty. He rootled around in his trouser pockets, rummaged in his jacket: no good.

‘Have to go down to the pub,' he said out loud. ‘Just pick up a packet of fags. Nothing else. Nanny's good boy.'

*

Reggie leaned on the bar, a large double whisky tucked cosily inside the curve of his sleeve, a cigarette smouldering in the glass ashtray on the other side. He was rehearsing an old and much-loved controversy.

‘Say what you like, and I've heard all the arguments, I still think stunting's essential. You've got to know everything your kite can do, and how else are you going to find out? Risky, I grant you. Put myself in hospital during OT, messing about in a Spit, but it teaches you what you're both capable of.'

‘Couldn't agree more, squire,' said the barman absent-mindedly. He was in his thirties, a weary figure revolving the puddles of beer on the bar with a sodden rag, and he had no idea what Reggie was talking about, but he knew better than to disagree with a drunk.

‘Then, when it comes to a scrap, when it counts, you've got the experience,' Reggie went on happily. He was back in the Nissen-hut crew room, sitting round a coke stove waiting for the weather to clear up so that they could fly, going over the old arguments. Long Gone Manners would disagree with him on principle, and the two of them would bicker knowledgeably, without the least hope of either being converted. After a while the others would say, ‘Knock it off you two, for Pete's sake!' and Reggie would appeal for somebody to back his point of view … The barman would have to do for now.

‘Let's face it,' he went on, ‘the tighter your turn the better your chance of escape in a dog fight. Round you go, couple of boxers in the ring, you're feinting' - his head ducked from side to side, his jowls wobbling - ‘you're on guard. Suddenly you put the Spit into a stall-turn. Bingo! You're ready to attack! Difference between life and death, that sort of practice. Take my instructor: now
he
was a pretty handy stunter. Get him on your tail and you'd never shake him off. Practice - all good practice. Never enough time, of course. We're talking about the days of Dunkirk, now: not your University Air Squadron messing about.'

‘It's all in the lap of the gods, I say. Taking your life in your hands, aren't you, every time you fly?' said the bored barman.

‘Trouble was,' Reggie continued, his mind perfectly sharp as long as he stabilized it around the age of twenty-one, ‘trouble was, their tactics changed all the time. Fight from height - that's one thing that never changed; come at them straight out of the sun: that's another. Get your Messerschmitt from behind - that's where he's vulnerable. All very well with the 109s, but when the 262s came along, rules changed again.
If you
could catch them.'

‘That's what it's all about, isn't it?' said the barman.

Reginald looked up as he moved to serve a strikingly dressed woman who had come in by herself. She wore a lime-green car coat and a narrow skirt slit some way up the side to show off good legs. She placed her handbag on the bar and levered herself on to a stool with a flash of thigh. The barman winked at Reggie.

‘Spot of sympathy required, Jim,' she said. ‘I've had a hell of a day! I could really do with a Scotch.'

‘Glenmorangie for the lady,' said Reginald. ‘Make it a double?'

She looked across. ‘I don't know who you are, but the way I'm feeling at this moment, all I can say is that sounds like a lifesaver! Yes, a double would be lovely.'

‘Two double Glenmorangies, Jim,' said Reginald. ‘Mind if I join you?' She swept the edge of her coat aside to show that he was welcome.

‘Smoke?' said Reggie.

‘Oh dear, I know I shouldn't. Yes, all right, go on, lead me astray.' As he snapped open his silver lighter, she said, ‘I'm Elizabeth Franks but everyone calls me Liz.'

‘And I'm Reginald Conynghame-Jervis but everyone calls me Reggie. How do you do, Liz?'

‘Cheers, Reggie!'

‘Give you lift?' he asked a couple of doubles later, and the big boy shifted hopefully.

‘You are a sweetie,' she said. ‘Bless you, but no, thanks - I've got my own car outside. Only meant to pop in for a pick-me-up. Never meant to stay so long, you wicked man!'

The big boy twitched. ‘Be popping in tomorrow?'

‘I might - after I've closed the shop, but it's not a promise … Look, really, I must be off.'

‘Shop?' said Reggie, grasping at the last fragment of conversation, but with a final smile she swept out.

He turned back to the barman.

‘Who's she when she's at home?'

‘Our Liz? Quite a looker, isn't she? Well stacked - in both senses. Keeps one of those posh dress shops - down near the Pantiles, I think. Never checked out the goods myself. Too pricey for me.' He laughed uproariously.

It was long after eleven when Reggie got home, but he telephoned Roy Southgate immediately. When after several rings a dazed voice answered, he said abruptly, ‘Squadron Leader here. About that confab tomorrow, Southgate. No can do. Some other time. Give me a tinkle. Or not. Suit yourself. Cheer-oh.'

He hung up without waiting for a reply.

Roy lay in bed, the softness of Grace's brushed cotton nightie against his skin. He knew he would not get to sleep for hours. Mentally he called off the whole idea - the Squadron Leader would obviously drive him round the bend in a week - and, to make the night pass, settled down to play an old game of Grace's.

‘Ro-oy?' she would ask, ‘how many times do you think we've made love
now
?' They would do the familiar arithmetic together, an excuse to remember their happy youth. During the last glorious summer of peace they'd bicycled off into the country and picnicked in fields, curling up to fall asleep afterwards in each other's arms, or gazing up into the green branches flickering brilliantly against a sky of palest blue. They had married in May that year, just after he'd finished training to be a sapper with the Territorials (Royal Engineer Field Company). They'd decided on one of those hurried last-minute weddings, never knowing how long these halcyon
pre-war days might last, and never mind that she had to buy rather than make her wedding dress. He'd wangled a week's leave after that…

‘Twice a night and then some: call it fifteen,
minimum …'

And then odd weekends' home leave, if you could call her parents' cramped terraced house in Purley
home
. They had felt self-conscious about slipping away too obviously; all the same …

‘Probably three or four times per weekend …'

‘Call it four …'

They hadn't made love often once they knew she was expecting. Roy had been afraid of hurting her. Not that he minded the swelling pregnancy: her slight figure, back curved to take the weight of the great mound that strained forward from below her rib cage, filled him with pride and joy. The pale skin of her belly seemed almost transparent, so that he felt he should have been able to see the child curled inside. He could certainly see her flesh twitch when it kicked, and would lay his hand against her bare skin as they lay in bed and murmur, ‘Feel him, Gracie! That's our boy. Isn't he strong?' But the district midwife had told Grace that it wasn't advisable to permit relations in the last three months and, precious as their weekends together were, they had, not without difficulty, abstained.

So it had taken about sixty tries before they had got it right, they had decided. ‘Yes, and wasn't the practising fun?' Roy would whisper. They both took it for granted that they would make love until the end of their lives.

He was born in 1940, during the Blitz; desperate times. What sort of a world are we bringing him into? Grace used to ask. What if Hitler
wins?
And Roy would say, Now now, girl, you know that can't happen.

After his birth - and he
was
a big baby: nine pounds, three ounces - Grace had to have a few stitches, and stayed in hospital for three weeks. They named their son Frederick, after her father, knowing it would please him, and Albert, after his.

‘Frederick Albert Southgate,' Grace said, gazing at the child
rolled up tightly in a shawl and lying on her bed. ‘He'd better be prime minister when he grows up, with a name like that!'

Outside feeding and visiting times their child took his place in a room with all the other babies, two rows of them in identical cots. No matter how much they yelled, feeding was strictly regulated. No point in tiring yourself out, feeding him all hours of the day, the starched sister told Grace. You feed him every four hours and he'll soon learn what's what. He did too. By the time she came out he was feeding at six, ten, two, six, ten: regular as a mathematical progression.

Roy was back with his Company by then. They wrote to each other as often as possible, and she would describe the baby, how he smiled and waggled his arms about, how greedily he fed. Roy would imagine him sucking at her breast and wondered whether it was wrong to find this idea exciting. Then, when little Freddie was just over three months old, came the news. Grace had slept late one morning, exhausted by broken nights, and woken up to find him dead in his cot beside her. They gave Roy forty-eight hours' compassionate leave, and he and Grace and her parents had buried the baby and wept together.

‘I should have taken him to the country!' she said, over and over again. ‘It was the raids that killed him, I'm sure of it! Night after night, having to get him out of his warm cot and go underground to a stuffy air – raid shelter - that can't have been good for a tiny baby.'

‘And where else could you have gone?' Roy had said, wearily, guiltily. ‘To my Mum in Folkestone? That'd been just as bad.'

After that they had decided: no more babies till the war was over. Hitler had taken one child from them: he wasn't going to have any more. Grace spent the war in Purley, grieving over her one small death in the midst of so many others, and never forgot Frederick Albert.

Where was I? thought Roy drowsily. Oh yes, sixty … But instead of counting further, he fell asleep thinking of his little lost son, rather than of the grown-up man who was also his
son, and whom he had also nearly lost. The thought of Frederick and Grace together brought some hint of comfort; the thought of Alan was no comfort at all.