Damned Good Show (32 page)

“That's right,” Skull said.

“Yet one is wrecked. In Essex.”

“But not lost. An aircraft is lost when nobody knows where it is. We know precisely where S-Sugar is.”

“I must remember that.” They shook hands. “Good luck.”

“I recommend the kippers,” Skull said.

By ten o'clock, ops were on: a rubber factory in Hanover. The weather in Suffolk was good, but by midday ops were scrubbed. The high winds that 409 had met on the way to Bremen were circling around a deep low-pressure system that had settled on central Europe. The Met men predicted foul weather in Germany, becoming abominable later. 409 was stood down for two days. Urgent servicing could be done. Cameras could be installed. Aircrew could get pissed.

None of this made any difference to Rollo. He had been driven, in Rafferty's car, to the aircrew assessment center, and now his head was being X-rayed from five different angles. An ear, nose and throat specialist had decided that his sinuses and associated cavities deserved closer scrutiny.

“I'm just a passenger,” Rollo told the X-ray technician. “I'm not going to fly the bloody plane. What's all the fuss about?”

“It's about your cranial orifices. You know how your ears pop when you go up a big hill? Some people can't fly because their head won't tolerate changes in pressure. The pain sends them berserk. Now, keep absolutely still, please.”

Rollo was placed in a waiting room while they developed the plates. A medical orderly came in and asked for a sample of his urine. “If that's got anything to do with sinuses, my plumbing is in big trouble,” Rollo said. The orderly nodded soberly and went away.

Time passed. Rollo practiced holding his breath, and got up to twenty seconds. A male nurse opened the door and called his name. Rollo followed him down a series of unfamiliar corridors and finally arrived at a dental surgery.

The dentist was as big as Rafferty but far friendlier. “Just as well we took these snaps, Mr. Blazer,” he said. He held up the X-rays. “I've never seen such sinuses. Perfect in every respect! Nothing to worry about there. But
here
…” He pointed to the end of the jawbone. “Just look at that wisdom tooth! I mean to say, it's in a bad way, isn't it?”

“Oh, hell and damnation,” Rollo said.

“Better have it out, don't you think? We certainly can't pass you as fit to fly with that tooth. Have it out, old chap. What you haven't got, can't harm you. That's the RAF's dental policy”

Rollo took the X-ray from him. The wisdom tooth had roots like an oak tree. He desperately wanted to discuss alternative solutions, but his mouth had stopped working. He was trapped.

The obvious thing for Silk to do was get a haircut. His hair was so thick that it bulged out around the sides of his cap. Hazard kept telling him it needed cutting. But the barber on the base was a butcher, so that meant driving to Bury St. Edmunds, where there was a man who understood hair. Too bad he didn't understand people. His hobby was collecting postage stamps. No: his real hobby was talking about them, endlessly, tediously. Silk forgot about a haircut.

He had a golf club, good condition, one previous owner, collided with a Hampden in eight-tenths cloud over Krefeld. If he could find a golf ball he could whack it around the aerodrome. He was scrabbling in the back of a drawer when he pulled out a photograph, several photographs, some taken outside a cathedral, others at a wedding reception, and one taken during a briefing by Pixie Hunt at RAF Kindrick. Pixie of the piercing eyes. Well, Pixie was gone. They were all gone. Silk burned the snaps in an ashtray. “I don't wish to discuss it,” he said aloud, to nobody.

He drove out of camp in the Frazer-Nash. “Nobody left it to me,” he said. “I won it in a raffle. Kindly leave the room.”

He stopped at the first village he came to. It had a pub, the King William, and he wanted a pint of beer, but if he went inside they
would all look at him, at his wings, at his face, and nobody would say anything until some stumpy-toothed, bald-headed farm laborer came up to the bar for a refill and said, “Day off today, then?” And Silk would agree, he wasn't actually flying at that particular moment, and the man would say, “I was at the Somme, you know. Not like this, it wasn't.” You couldn't go into a pub without meeting a boring old fart who told you how lucky you were, not dying of trenchfoot at the Somme.

So Silk went to the village shop instead. Bought a small loaf, two apples and a bottle of milk. Sat on a bench at the edge of the village green. It was a big green, and some boys were playing cricket.
How frightfully English
, he thought.
Pub, church, cricket, and here comes a haywain with a couple of immensely patriotic cart-horses.
The batsman took an almighty swing and hit the ball higher than the elms. It fell about ten feet short of Silk and bounced over his head. A boy came running.

“This place is worse than Bremen,” Silk said.

The boy fetched the ball and trotted back. “What's Bremen like?” he asked.

“Not cricket.”

The boy looked at him, decided not to risk another question, and returned to the game. The sun shone, the church clock sounded the hour, and another bloody haywain came around the corner. Silk felt totally out of place. He tossed the food into the car and drove away.

After a mile or so he reached a wood. Nothing majestic; just a tangled mass of silver birch, ash, sycamore, a few beech, the occasional oak. He liked trees. He enjoyed watching the top branches wave in the wind and hearing the whispered conversation of the leaves. That was a thoroughly sentimental idea and one which he would never have mentioned to his crew. They were in Newmarket, flashing their half-wings at floozies in pubs. He'd seen enough uniforms for a while. Enough floozies, too. A gap in the wood looked as if it might be a track, so he turned into it. The Frazer-Nash mowed down grass and thistles, and after fifty yards he stopped. This was as good a place as any to eat his lunch.

Food made him drowsy. He curled up in the back seat of the car with his hat over his eyes and fell asleep.

The usual dream came along. He half-rolled the Wimpy, a pointless maneuver and strictly forbidden by the manufacturers. Now
the kite was upside-down and everything was falling off the instrument panel: first the boost gauges, then the flap control lever and the altimeter and the air speed indicator and more; they all dropped to the roof. Without them, he couldn't land. But he didn't care. He'd had this dream many times before, he knew that landing was impossible when inverted, so there was no point in worrying. One small problem. How to drop the bombs? Damn things were a nuisance, get rid of them. He pulled the jettison control lever and it came away in his hand. Fat lot of use that was. He dropped it and it fell past his face. Damn. They'd make him pay for it. He'd signed for this kite, and what you lost, you paid for. Sure enough, here was the Engineer Officer, poking him, what a mannerless bastard. Silk took a long time to wake up, and it wasn't the Engineer Officer. It was Zoë. Well, that couldn't be right. He let his eyelids close. Back to sleep. “Come on, Silko,” she said. “Hit the deck.”

Gradually he became completely awake. She was kneeling on the front seat, looking like an angel who had missed too many hair-dressing appointments. A rather weather-beaten angel. In a grubby green sweater with a hole in the elbow. “That's the navy,” he said. “We never hit the deck. Our batman wakes us with a nice cup of tea.” He sat up and scratched his ribs. “It is you, isn't it?”

“What an asinine question, even by your standards … Oh, look. Milk.” She drank from the bottle.

“You never used to touch the stuff.”

“Things have changed. You've changed. You've got more lines than Clapham Junction.” She traced the map of his face with her fingertip. His face enjoyed it.

“This is a thumping great coincidence, isn't it?” he said.

“No. Quite the opposite. Let's go for a walk.”

They took a path into the wood, and Zoë explained. She said that she had been looking for Silk. First she found out that 409 was at Coney Garth; then she hung about the area, hoping to catch sight of him. She had a push-bike, and today she'd seen the Frazer-Nash and hoped it was him driving.

“Of course it was me,” he said. “Nobody else drives it.”

“Somebody else might. Remember how you got it.”

“Goodness. You
have
changed.”

She had followed the car on her bike, lost it, seen it leaving the village, lost it again, and searched the lanes without much hope—he
was probably miles and miles away—until she noticed the wheel marks in the grassy track.

“Bluebell, the Girl Detective,” he said.

“Don't laugh. It's taken me ten days.”

“Zoë, my sweet. What's wrong with the telephone? Call the Officers' Mess. Send me a postcard. Ask at the Main Gate, and I'll come and meet you.”

“There's something else. I'm on the run from the police.”

That had to be a joke. “Dear Zoë,” he said. “I'm finding it very difficult to concentrate right now because, in the words of the popular song, as time goes by, woman needs man and man must have his mate, that no-one can deny. Certainly not me. But it's never as simple as that, is it, and in a nutshell, I haven't got a French letter on me.”

“Poor Silko,” she said. “Why are men so
slow
? I was ready the minute I saw you in the car. And the only protection I need is your tunic to lie on. Forest floors can be dreadfully lumpy.”

Already they were undressing. “Later, you must tell me about the police,” he said. “Much later. Next month will do.”

Later, of course, was too soon; as it always is. The keener the desire, the quicker the anticlimax. One quick glimpse of paradise from the mountaintop, Silk thought as they walked back to the car, and then God tips you over the edge. Still, better than no glimpse at all.

He put her bike in the back of the car, reversed to the road, and drove until they saw a tea garden. A small girl brought a large teapot and a plate of scones with a jar of plum jam.

“It's been nearly a year,” Zoë said. “Feels like ten.”

“He might be a prisoner-of-war. Cock-ups do occur. It's not impossible.”

“He's dead, Silko. I knew as soon as I opened the door and saw the adjutant. Stone dead.”

“Where did you go?”

“London. Albany. You didn't write.”

“Couldn't think what to say. You weren't interested in the squadron, and anyway life was just ops, and more ops. You didn't write, either.”

“I had too much to say. Life became very messy, Silko, and it was all my fault. First, I was pregnant. No surprise. God knows Tony tried hard enough.”

“I did my little best, too.”

“Forget that.”

“What! Never.”

“The baby was born in March. Anthony Charles Hubert. Greedy little savage. Chewed on my breasts until they were raw. I'd got engaged to Hubert at Christmas, he was a fighter pilot…”

“Big mistake. They're cowboys.”

“Well, he's a dead cowboy. Shot down over France. Then something strange happened to me, I began to hate the baby, so I gave it to Mummy.”

“Makes sense. She's the one who wanted it.”

“And Mummy's living in Dublin, so there aren't any problems about food rationing. Or bombing.”

“No? Jerry bombed Ireland twice. By mistake, of course. I'm told it doesn't hurt so much when you get accidentally killed.”

“Hey.” She rapped his knuckles with a knife-handle and he spilled his tea. “If you know my story so well,
you
tell it.”

“Zoë, you've ruined these trousers.”

“I've cleaned them. What a shambles you are, Silko … Anyway, after the baby went away I met a wonderful Norwegian pilot called Rolf and we both wanted to marry and a week later—gone. Failed to return, nobody knew what happened. That was when I decided I must be a jinx popsy, and I gave up men. Then I met someone at a party who asked me to work for a refugee charity, raising money. He was a Czech count and they had nice offices in Belgrave Square. The chairman was a Polish baron and I worked for the director. He was a Hungarian prince. They made me treasurer because I'm English and according to law … I can't remember the details and it didn't seem to matter because it was a charity and nobody was working for pay, we were raising lots of money for a really good cause, I just signed documents when I was asked to, a pure formality they said, and about a fortnight ago I turned up and the office was empty and all the money had gone. It seems that I'd authorized it. The police were banging on the front door, so I did a bunk through the back window. There's a warrant for my arrest.”

Silk made a guess, and said, “How much is missing?”

“A quarter of a million pounds.”

He winced. His guess had been twenty thousand. “When you say you're on the run…”

“I've got Rolf's revolver. He was supposed to take it whenever he
flew, but he gave it to me, in case I got attacked in the blackout. I drove to Suffolk and ran out of petrol and when a policeman asked to see my identity card I told him to stick 'em up.”

“You actually said, to a British bobby, ‘Stick 'em up.'”

“Yes.”

“Bizarre. Was it loaded?”

“Probably not. How does one find out?”

“I take it he stuck them up.”

“Yes. So I stole his bike. That's it in your car. He wasn't a real policeman, just a Special Constable. They don't count, do they? He was quite small, too. I managed to lower the saddle. That was lucky, wasn't it?”

“And where are you living?”

“I'll show you.”

They drove back, past the aerodrome, up narrow lanes, into a dirt track that led eventually to a small, broken-down bungalow overlooking a lake. Marshy scrubland was all around. No house was in sight. “I think people used to come here to shoot duck,” Zoë said, “but the bombers scared the ducks away.”