Piece of Cake (25 page)

“I was aged five. After that I got sent to school, thoroughly knickered all year round. They were amazing things, those school knickers. Like twin carrier-bags. Girls used to keep all sorts of things tucked inside them. Pencils, money, apples, handkerchiefs, love letters. Boxes of matches. I used to keep my diary there.”

“Hot stuff, was it?”

“Oh, no. Soggy. Moist with tears. Amazing, really, when I think of the days and weeks and months I used to sob and weep my little heart out …”

“Well, it's no fun being unhappy.” Fitz almost took her hand. He felt strong and protective.

“I wasn't unhappy, I was conceited,” she said. “I thought I was a tragic figure.”

“You did? Why?”

“No special reason.” Fitz looked puzzled, so she said: “I was a remarkably stupid child, you see. Now you, I'm sure, had a happy childhood.”

Fitz shrugged and drank more brandy. His childhood had in fact been very cheerful, but that was an ordinary sort of fact and one he didn't feel like revealing; not yet, anyway. “Who's he?” He pointed at a photograph. “Don't tell me. A cousin. No, it's your brother.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Same eyes.”

She tugged at her lower lip while she studied the picture: a waist-upward shot of a young man glancing at the camera as he opened a bottle of wine. “He certainly had nice eyes,” she said. Fitz suddenly felt lost: he'd taken a wrong turning somewhere. “That's Paul,” she said. “My poor dead husband.”

The words were spoken so blankly that Fitz wasn't sure whether she was being candid or facetious. “Ah,” he said. “Yes … Good picture, isn't it? Did you take it?”

“No, he did. He had a special gadget on the camera. Paul was mad keen on photography. He took thousands of snaps of me.”

Discussing the late Paul Blandin made Fitz uncomfortable and he sought an escape. “Still got them?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Lots.”

“Show me.”

She fetched a leatherbound album. “You're taking an awful risk, you know,” she said. “You might be bored to tears.”

Fitz smiled. He balanced the album on his thighs and opened it at random. Three shots of Mary swimming in an outdoor pool. Something lurched softly in the pit of his stomach. “Nice,” he said. He would have liked to look more closely, but instead he turned the page, and his eyes widened. Mary standing at the poolside, drying herself. No costume. Mary stretched out on the towel, face down. Naked. Mary bouncing on a divingboard, caught by the camera in mid-air, arms upflung and knees slightly bent, skin shining with water; totally and magnificently nude. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said. “The work of an expert.” He shut the album and handed it back to her. He cleared his throat, and studied the chestnuts.

“Are you shocked?” She was leaning back with the album held against her chest and her pleated skirt spread like a seashell.

“No, of course not.” He glanced sideways, chin up to meet the challenge. They were both being so serious that spontaneously they laughed. “Well, maybe I was a bit shocked at first. Somewhat. Not unpleasantly. Far from it.”

“You see … I get very fed-up with men who keep looking at me and wondering what I'm like with no clothes on. It's …” She wrinkled her nose. “Waste of time,” she said.

“Point taken.” Fitz nodded several times. “So now I know, then.”

“It's simple curiosity, after all, isn't it?”

“Aren't you curious, too?” Fitz took a good grip of his ankles and hung on tight. “Don't you want to know what I look like?”

“I'm sure you're beautiful. Meanwhile I'll take all your sexual machinery on trust.”

“Very kind of you.”

They sat and listened to the hiss of the fire.

“Or perhaps I'm too trusting,” Mary said. “I mean, how do I know you're all there?” He recoiled slightly. “Well, let's face it, Fitz, you gave me this back in a bit of a hurry, didn't you? Two pages were enough for you.” He straightened up and squared his shoulders; his mouth was half-opened. “You didn't even see the best pictures,” she said, rubbing her chin on the top of the album. “They're in color, too. I had a lovely tan in those days, and—”

“Give me that damn book!”
Fitz shouted. He lunged for it, lost his balance and fell against her. She kissed him, easily and sweetly, on the lips. Behind them the chestnuts were beginning to smoke.

“Enjoy yourself?” Flash Gordon asked.

“Quiet. Very quiet. Family album by the fire, that sort of thing.” Fitz yawned. “You know.”

Flash changed gear and put on speed.

“How about you?” Fitz asked. “Good time?”

“Nicole's mother was there.”

“Ah. Tough luck.”

“We talked about biology. Nicole's an expert. I learned a lot. If you took all your veins and arteries and things and tied them together, how far d'you think they'd stretch?”

“Haven't the faintest.”

“Twelve thousand miles.”

“My goodness.”

“Yes,” Flash said. “Makes you think, doesn't it?”

A sheen of frost gave the airfield a fine, furry coating. Every blade of grass was cased in crystals. The wheels of the speeding Hurricane crushed the frost, creating narrow tracks of black-green. Its tail-wheel made a thinner line, just a pencil-stroke across the whiteness, and this line was the first to cease as the nose came down and Pip Patterson saw the horizon.

That was better; he felt happier when he could see where he was going. The field went past in a silvery rush. His cockpit hood was open and he could smell burned oil coming off the engine. The smell was sharp in this freezing air, and it reminded him of something. What was it? The rumbling bounce of the Hurricane turned to a racing tremble, and the plane took to the air. Patterson eased back the stick, raised the wheels, corrected a dip in the starboard wing, slid the hood shut, and remembered that smell: it was the reek of the fairground, especially the stink coming off the engine that drove the merry-go-round. Hot oil. Greatest thrill in a young lad's life, riding the galloping horses with that exciting stink in his nostrils. Nothing compared, after that. Not even driving a Hurricane at 300 mph. After all, what was a Hurricane? A bus. The kite was as big as a bus, half as comfortable, ten times as noisy, nowhere to put your luggage, bloody cold in this weather. So what did that make the pilot? A bus driver. Only difference, the scenery was a lot more interesting on the average bus route. The trouble with sky was it went on long after it ran out of anything to say. Especially on a day like today. Nothing but a lot of remote, blank grayness. You might as well go around with your head in a paper bag.

Patterson turned and flew back over the airfield, waggled his wings, and climbed away. Looking back, he could see the rest of the squadron standing beside Rex outside the pilots' hut. A couple of them waved; he waggled again in response.

“Good enough,” Rex said. Evidently Micky Marriott's drainage ditches had done their job: the ground was firm. “The rest of ‘B' flight—air-testing this morning, thirty-minute readiness this afternoon. ‘A' flight at readiness this morning, air-testing after lunch. Let's have all machines fully operational by tomorrow. Check everything! You'd be surprised how much can go wrong with a Hurricane when it's been left standing in a drafty hangar all week. Bronchitis and swollen ankles and God knows what. Right, adj, we'll stroll back, shall we? Where's Reilly?”

They walked toward the château, Reilly crisscrossing behind them, hunting scents.

“Beautiful air,” Kellaway said, inhaling vigorously. “I've always liked winter, ever since the last show. You can't beat a good hard freeze. It solves the mud problem, it kills the bugs and—”

“Gordon's a queer fish, isn't he?” Rex asked.

“Who? Young Flash?”

“Yes. Not quite …” Rex wrinkled his nose. “I don't know. Not quite up to snuff. What's his background?”

“Just … ordinary.”

“Yes …” Rex nodded in time with his pace. “Very ordinary. He picks his nose.”

Kellaway puffed out his cheeks. “Don't we all?”

“Not in public. And he gets unpleasant spots on the back of his neck.”

“That's scarcely his fault, sir. He's only twenty.”

“Nasty habits, adj, nasty habits. And while we're on the subject, what's the matter with Starr?”

“Oh, Dicky's a bit moody, that's all. I expect—”

“He looks thoroughly constipated. That's no good. I want all my pilots to be good squadron men. Starr looks like a constipated dwarf. He's letting the side down, adj.” Rex took a flying kick at a frozen thistle. “Why doesn't he grow up? Why don't they both grow up? 1 don't mind telling you, I'm getting a bit fed-up with some of these chaps. I want a squadron I can be proud of, not a lot of spotty pygmies.”

They passed the guardroom at the main gate. The sentry presented arms; they returned the salute. Reilly came cantering up and made a detour to sniff the sentry's legs. The man rapidly shouldered arms but Reilly jetted a sprinkle on his snowy gaiters and got away a second before the rifle hurtled down and its butt crashed to earth. The dog caught up with its master and licked his gloved hand.

“Time to bring in some new blood, uncle,” Rex said. “Breeding counts, you know.”

Pip Patterson sat hunched in his cockpit, checked the trim and let the Hurricane fly itself.

He felt tired and bored. He had done nothing much since he took off, just chucked the kite about to make sure everything worked. One of the rudder-pedals felt a bit sloppy; that was all. The Merlin was in good voice, the controls were responsive; he could go anywhere, do anything. He sat with his limbs slack and watched the gray sky drift by.

It was a familiar feeling. Patterson was often bored with his own
company. He needed other people to stimulate him. He wasn't stupid; in some subjects—navigation, Morse, radio—he was brighter than average. His trouble was that he
cared
about nothing very much; not even about himself.

Patterson's family owned several coal mines in Midlothian. Pip was the fourth child, third son, and he had been brought up comfortably, even generously. He'd gone to the school of his choice—Loretto College, near Edinburgh; his brothers were there already, so he didn't get bullied much. He was sixteen when he heard about a new international college in Geneva where boys and girls mixed and wine-drinking was encouraged. He spent a year there, learned how to meet girls, how to get drunk, how to ski, how to play cards. He was good on skis and bad with cards. He envied his friends' zest for poker, but there was no gambling instinct in him, no appetite feeding on risk, no sense of the theater of the game. If he made himself gamble he played bluntly and obviously, which was no fun for anyone.

He was more successful with girls because he was a good listener. One or two fell in love with him, or at least with his freshfaced Scottish looks, the dark lashes over the gray eyes and the straight, clean-lipped mouth. Nothing lasted, neither the poker schools nor the girls nor the snow. Pip came home a month early, bored.

His father gave him a blue BSA motorcycle, and later a red MG car with a leather strap across the bonnet. Nobody had anything special for him to do. He went off and took flying lessons. Flying came easily—it was a cross between skiing and driving the MG—and when someone suggested joining the RAF he couldn't think of a reason not to do it.

That was how he came to be sitting in this Hurricane, twelve thousand feet over eastern France. The land below looked as flat and dead as a sepia photograph. Nothing was happening outside the airplane. Or inside it.

Patterson tilted his head to his left and watched the blue-green flicker of flames in the exhaust-stubs. They looked like soft feathers, you could almost reach out and stroke them. A wandering gleam drifted into the corner of his eye: a feeble sunbeam, glinting on his canopy. The gleam got stronger. The sun wasn't on that side. He straightened his head with slow curiosity, and abruptly jerked it to the right. The gleam was a fighter coming at him, small at first
but magnifying with astounding speed so that even as his muscles tensed to respond it was too late, the plane was on him, huge as a house, filling the sky, and he gave a shout of terror, flung up an arm. With a brief blast of sound the fighter hopped over his Hurricane like a child playing leapfrog, and vanished.
“Bastard!”
Patterson screamed. His hands and feet were jumping with fright, his heart was banging, the Hurricane was trying to fly sideways. He shoved all the controls into a corner and sent the machine down in a slanting dive, away from danger. Too slow: another fighter whizzed from behind and boomed over him, so close that the wash rocked his wings. It banked to the right so he turned hard left, ramming the throttle. The Merlin couldn't be roused that fast and the Hurricane wallowed. Another fighter came from nowhere, zipped under him and rocketed away, screwing itself into the sky. Patterson's head was like a punchball flung all ways as he tried to dodge and search at once. Then the engine gave him its power and he stuffed the nose hard down and ran for his life.

Five thousand feet below, he leveled out and made damn sure there was nobody within a mile of him.

The fighters had disappeared. He'd never know who they were: Hurricanes from another squadron, perhaps, or French Moranes. Practical jokers, anyway. Full of high spirits. Skylarking. Happy to find a dreamer and scare the shits out of him. What fun.

Patterson turned for home. He felt angry with himself, disgusted. He'd been made to look a fool. Well, he was a fool. He certainly wasn't anything brilliant.
Silly sod
, he said to himself.
Why don't you get your finger out your ass for once?
He looked down and saw the town of Metz a couple of miles to his right.
Don't just look at it
, he told himself.