The Aerodrome: A Love Story (10 page)

Squire's farms had been liquidated and agriculture in our village had now come to an end) and to attend punctually the classes which were arranged for them in building and mechanical engineering. So a great many of the young men, while not exactly welcoming the occupation of the village, were at least prepared at first to adapt themselves as well as possible to the new conditions; and very soon a clear-cut division might be noticed between them and their elders whose whole life had been spent under a quite different régime and whose minds and bodies were alike unfitted for the learning of new kinds of work. In the pub the two groups, of the young and of the old, were more separated than they ever had been, and what was more remarkable was that the old men were no longer treated with any respect at all by the young, so that soon they were reduced to whispering together in corners, for no one would pay the slightest attention to them if they were ever to raise their voices. Between the two parties the landlord occupied a central position. He would speak gravely and respectfully of the past, but would at the same time encourage the young men in their schemes for their own advancement. "Progress," he would often declare, "is the law of life," and the young would agree enthusiastically with this sentiment. Though he would criticize some of the many new regulations which were coming into force amongst us--such as the one which forbade the sale of drinks during the hours when classes for men were in progress in the village schoolroom--on the whole he would assert his belief in discipline and obedience, qualities which, he informed us, had stood him in good stead during his military service in his youth. The young men, though these ideals were strange to them, would listen to him with respect: but among the old a comment frequently made was that the landlord knew which side his bread was buttered. In many of these discussions Bess, when she was serving in the bar, would join eagerly, and I would support her in everything that she said, although I believe now that I was at that time quite indifferent to the arguments on one side or the other, and only wished to further anything which gave her pleasure. Occasionally I would feel a twinge of something like conscience when I thought of how completely I had deserted the whole world of my upbringing, and I was sometimes almost offended by the indifference with which Bess would speak of the dead Squire and Rector, especially since I knew that she had been with the Rector a particular favourite among the village girls. But these impressions on my mind were most transitory; a smile or her next words would do away with them, and I would see in her beauty, her gentleness, and her ambition something infinitely fresher and more desirable than the world which I believed that both she and I had left behind. I would even begin myself to employ arguments which I had heard from her and in which I hardly believed, and would speak as she might speak even in front of the Squire's sister and the Rector's wife although I knew that my words must distress at least the former and probably both of these ladies. I say "probably" because at this time, though the Squire's sister was without doubt most bitterly opposed to the new order of things, it was hard to say what exactly was the attitude of the Rector's wife. She had been informed that she could remain in the Rectory for another month at the end of which time the building was to be converted into a gymnasium; and now the Squire's sister was staying there with her, for work on the Manor had begun almost immediately after the occupation of the village. The exterior was being camouflaged and the interior redecorated so as to serve as an officers' club house. I had imagined at first that the two ladies, after what had taken place amongst us, would wish to live in some other part of the country, and was surprised to find that they were now planning to take a house together just outside the limit of Government property. The Squire's sister would declare that she would never leave the scenes in which she and her brother had grown up, and that she even cherished hopes that at some future time the conditions of the past might be reestablished. Meanwhile she regarded the present with anger and with scorn. She would stop in the street for long conversations with those of the villagers who shared her views. She ceased to attend church from the time when the Flight-Lieutenant was appointed to its care, and she encouraged others to boycott the services. Indeed, I was surprised at the resolution and pertinacity which she now showed. It was almost as though her brother's death had given her fresh strength which she had decided to use, by what means she could, in attacking the organization which could be held, with some reason, responsible for that death; and her influence with the older men and women of the village might well make her, I feared, not a menace but a decided nuisance to the aerodrome authorities. Both the Rector's wife and I advised her on several occasions to be less outspoken in her opinions; but our advice had no effect on her whatever, and the bitterness of her feelings was such that she became, what she had never been in the past, somewhat eccentric in her manners. She had been seen to twirl her walking-stick round her head and even to spit in the gutter when the Flight-Lieutenant had passed her in the street; and altogether, though her character seemed to have gained surprisingly in resolution, one could not help observing in her face and gestures a kind of constraint and tenseness that was also new to her. The Rector's wife, on the other hand, was to all appearance quite unchanged by all the events which had certainly changed her way of living. While she would not often object verbally to the frequent strictures made by the Squire's sister against the aerodrome and its management, she would still make it clear that she was not greatly impressed by them. She attended church as regularly as before, and continued for the time being to organize the Sunday school, although it was clear that in the end this, together with all the other activities of the church, would be denied any kind of official existence by the authorities of the aerodrome. "One must resign oneself was one of her favourite expressions at this time, and she succeeded so well in this plan that her very presence in the house acted as a kind of balm for the agitated spirit of her friend who, somewhat surprisingly, was never offended when her tirades were met only by a gentle smile and even when in the course of an argument the Rector's wife would seem to incline rather to my side than to hers. But what had surprised me most of all was that, on one occasion not long after my marriage, she had taken me aside and actually recommended me to consider seriously the offer of help which had been made me by the Air Vice-Marshal. She had spoken uncertainly and almost apologetically. "I know," she had said, "that my husband would not have approved; but jobs are difficult to get nowadays, and it seems to me that the thing is worth thinking over." Then she had laid her hand against my cheek and patted it. "You would be nearer home, too," she said, and I remember feeling surprise at the fact that she still regarded me, even after the disclosure at the dinner party and the Rector's confession, as having any longer a home in which she was the central figure; for when I thought of home now, I thought of the shed where I had spent nights and afternoons with Bess. I had come gradually, perhaps almost insensibly, but quite finally to regard myself as cut off from the Rectory and all that it had once meant to me. What seemed to me stranger still was the fact that I felt no longer any curiosity about the early life of the Rector or about my true parents. If a secret existed I was prepared to allow it to remain a secret, indeed, I preferred it to be so and now, so far from wishing to question the Rector's wife about the confession which we had heard, I was actually relieved that she showed no signs of referring to the subject. My life in future was to be, so I told myself, my own, and if it were not that I had promised Bess that our marriage was to remain clandestine, I should probably have revealed it, so careless was I of what my old friends might think of what I had determined to do. I think that my surprise at the Rector's wife's unexpected attitude towards the Air Force was chiefly responsible for my not telling her that I had already applied to join it. Instead, I promised her that I would think the matter over, a course which I did not pursue, and never had done, for my constant preoccupation was with Bess, and in competition with my thoughts of her no career in the world would have occupied my attention for long. So I attended only half-heartedly to what I saw and heard in the village during these months; I thought little, if at all, of the two dead men who had exercised such an influence over my childhood. But I noticed the flowers beginning to blossom below the hedges and the dew which I kicked away from the grass in the early mornings. I listened to the birds and imagined that they and all the sky was friendly to me, thinking of my love which I found so full of joy and believed to be so strong.

CHAPTER X

A Disclosure

So PASSED THREE months in which I thought seriously of no single object, although I would pause now and then to admire and to reflect upon the novelty of my situation and what I imagined to be my freedom from all the associations of my childhood. Even when this period of time was almost over I had hardly begun to envisage the sort of life to which I had pledged myself when I had signed the papers applying for training at the aerodrome, although Bess would be constantly talking of the possibilities of my quick promotion, of the uniforms which I would wear, and of the probable date at which we should be able to afford a car. To all this I was wholly indifferent, and was indeed somewhat irritated by her apparent conviction that the future could hold for us anything more splendid than the present. Not that I was at all averse from joining the Air Force; but what to Bess seemed glamorous--the concealed houses of the officers' wives, the powerful organization, the very thought of flying in the air--appeared to me as trivial and easy things compared with the opening out to each other of our minds and bodies in love. I can remember often holding her in my arms and wishing, as people do, that this would last for ever; but if I said so she would wriggle away from me and say: "Oh yes, it would be nice. But think of all the places we've never been to!" And to me there was something infinitely endearing in her dismay at the thought of never going abroad or never flying in the air; for though these experiences attracted me too, their attraction was nothing at all like the force which she exercised over me. I would reassure her and say yes, we would go abroad, yes, we would fly, if need be, to the North Pole; and she would come close to me again and whisper into my ear or gently touch my eyes with her lips; and I would feel that between us we possessed a secret and an understanding certain to assure us both of happiness and success. Her occasional abstractions from me when she would sit in the doorway of our hut gazing, as though she were sleep-walking, over the shadows lengthening at sunset across the fields were, I thought at first, due to her preoccupation with the future and her reflections on our way of life that must soon come to an end; for when I questioned her as to what she was thinking, she would say it was either nothing, or else, with a smile, the aerodrome and what I should look like as an officer. But once I remember, almost at the end of our three months' honeymoon, when I asked my usual question as I watched her face in profile, moody and with a frown just weighing down the eyebrows, she turned to me without changing her expression, and said: "It's Mother, Roy. She seems to be against you for some reason." I laughed, and asked what did it matter, having no idea at this time of whither the conversation would lead me. I had noticed myself that Bess's mother, who had only returned to the village a week ago, had not been in these last few days as cordial to me as she had always been in the past. I had observed her looking at me in a manner that seemed to show hesitation as well as disapproval when I was sitting in the pub; and, though there were other times when she looked kindly at me, I had thought that even in her kindness there was something of constraint, and I had been puzzled to account for this change in her attitude, since always in the past I had been a favourite of hers, more at ease with her, indeed, than I ever was with her husband. Did she suspect, I wondered, the actual relationship between Bess and me? If so, her doubts could easily be set at rest. She had been at one time a maid in the service of the Rector's wife and had often looked after me in my childhood. The Rector himself had had, I knew, a high opinion of her. I imagined that she at least, whatever her husband might think, would be glad to have me as a son-in-law; and so I had been surprised by her attitude to me since her return to the village, and I was surprised by what Bess said now. "I'll go and see her," I said, "and ask what the trouble is. I don't know what I've done wrong. Certainly it wasn't marrying you." Bess's eyes were narrowed as she looked at me. It seemed that she had been struck by a new idea. "It is all right, isn't it?" she said. "I mean, we really are married, aren't we?" I came towards her and knelt down at her side; but she drew away from me, putting up her hand between us, not in anger or in playfulness, but with a kind of aversion, so that I too drew back from her. I felt unreasonably angry with her as I watched her looking away from me down the hill, and noticed the quick shadow of a cloud running towards us across the fields. When I saw that there were tears in her eyes I could see no reason for them and, though I was sorry for her, I was, in a way, indignant. "Of course we're married," I said. "And even if we weren't, we could be, and it wouldn't make any difference." She put her head in her hands and began to cry. When I touched her she shook her head without looking up, and I sat back on the ground, perplexed, and feeling for the first time remote from her. Soon she stopped crying and began to wipe her eyes with the corner of her dress. She looked at me and smiled, and began speaking; but, though I listened to her words, I thought still with amazement of how she had withdrawn herself from me, shaking off from her what comfort I had to give her; for this seemed to me then unnatural. "Mother worries me so much," she was saying. "She keeps telling me not to have anything to do with you, and she won't tell me why. Of course I haven't told her anything. But it makes me so sad. Because we. haven't done anything really wrong, have we?" She was smiling now in a way that showed that she knew that her suggestion to be a foolish one, and I looked at the skin of her face, flushed and wet in patches, but so smooth and tender an envelope for the flesh beneath. My anger with her had wholly disappeared, or rather had been transferred to her mother as it would have been transferred to any other person or object that could cause us unhappiness. "I'll go and see her," I said. "I'll go now. It's absurd for you to be worried like this. I won't tell her that we're married, but I'll make her see that I can't do you any harm if that's what she thinks I'm doing." As I spoke I felt, for some reason, peculiarly elated as though I were championing successfully some misunderstood but splendid cause. I was surprised that Bess did not seem to share my enthusiasm; for the expression of her face did not alter and, when I rose to my feet, she stretched out a hand as though to detain me. Then she smiled, but rather as if she were thinking of something else. "Go along, then," she said, "if you like. But you won't be able to see me again today. I'm going out to tea." She looked up at me from below her eyebrows in a way that I found particularly appealing, for there was a kind of secretiveness, even a kind of guiltiness in her expression. I said: "Never mind. We'll be here tomorrow"; and I looked into her eyes and saw them looking away from me down the path that led to the bottom of the field. I asked her whether she would come with me, but she said no, she would prefer to wait in the hut for a little and think. She was not feeling very well, she said, and I thought there was something pathetic in the look of her eyes when I kissed her before I went away. At the bottom of the field I turned round to wave to her, and I remember now, when I saw her raise her hand in reply to me, how I thought that the two gestures were a kind of pledge between us of the certainty of our love and, in spite of the distance, of our closeness. I walked quickly across another field, hot in the summer sun, and looked away to my right at the fields where three months ago we had heard the larks singing, and I had decided to do what I had done and what filled me with pride. Soon I reached the pub and saw over the low wall, among the masses of bright flowers that filled the beds at each side of the door, Bess's mother sitting on a hard chair with some knitting in her lap; and as I looked at her I no longer felt the anger that I had felt, for there was something in the woman before me that reminded me of Bess, and I remembered, too, her kindness to me when I had been a child. I was more bewildered now than indignant as I watched her with her head bent down over her knitting. I saw now what I had hardly noticed before, that she was exceptionally handsome. From her Bess must have inherited that charm that comes from a certain remoteness, a quality which caused the Squire's sister often to describe the landlord's wife as a "superior" woman. Her hair, though it was growing white at the sides, was light yellow on top, and though her face and body were plump, one could still imagine her as being in her youth lithe, active, and lovable as Bess was now. But her face was deeply lined and, as she knitted, there was an expression of worry and exasperation on her mouth. I opened the gate and she raised her eyes somewhat wearily, as though in dislike of the thought of visitors; but when she recognized me I fancied that I saw in her eyes a look of fear, and this look surprised me, although it soon passed away and she smiled in greeting. I went through the gate and sat down at her side on the bricks that bordered the flower-bed. There were red-hot pokers, delphiniums, and lupins behind me, and all around us the noise of insects buzzing in the air. I leant my head back towards the flowers, where there was some shade, straightened my shoulders, and pressed the palms of my hands into the friable earth of the flower-bed. Bess's mother was looking at me sharply. The sun was behind her, so that light gleamed from the top of her head, while her face, except for the eyes, was indistinct. "Listen, Eva," I said (for I had been taught to call her by her Christian name when she had been my nurse), "what's the matter?" For a moment her face seemed to soften towards me, but almost at once the look of affection was replaced by something which might have been pity or might have been distaste. "Has Bess been talking to you?" she asked. "Yes," I said, "she has. She tells me that you're always running me down." I paused and looked up at the landlord's wife, expecting an answer, but for some moments she did not speak. She was staring at the ground, her lips pursed together and a frown on her face; and in this posture she so reminded me of Bess that I almost laughed; for I was fond of her and was certain that she could have no serious objection to what had taken place between her daughter and me. When she looked at me she was smiling. I smiled back, fancying that we were on the verge of some scene of reconciliation. "I like you, my dear," she said. "You know I do. You mustn't think I'm against you. But I don't want you to go making love to my Bess. It wouldn't be right." "But I wouldn't make love to her," I said, "unless I was serious about it." She still smiled at me, but now I felt sure that there was something hidden behind her smiling. She began to speak to me as she would do when I was a child, and pointed out gently the obstacles that would prevent me from ever marrying Bess--my youth and Bess's youth, our different upbringings, what the Rector would have thought, how the Rector's wife would disapprove, my approaching examination. "It would never do," she said, "and I want you to promise me that you will never think of it." The expression on her face changed almost to one of desperation when she realized that her words were having little or no effect. For I was becoming indignant with what I regarded as an unwarrantable interference with something that I knew to be good. "Suppose I were to tell you," I said, "that I'd already asked her to marry me and that she's accepted?" I had spoken light-heartedly, but my words seemed to have startled her as though they had been the confession of some crime. She turned to me quickly and spoke with a kind of exasperation. "It's not true!" she said. "Tell me it's not true." Then she stretched out her hands to me, and I saw that she was almost in tears. "It is true," I said. "And why shouldn't we be married?" She made no reply to this but, after a pause, asked in a low and strangely businesslike voice, "When did you decide you wanted to do this?" I was on the point of telling her the whole story, but remembering my promise to Bess I decided to tell a lie. "We've only just been talking about it," I said, and I thought that the landlord's wife appeared relieved, though she smiled at me as one might smile at a child whom one has regretfully to disappoint. Then her mouth hardened and she rose suddenly from her chair. "Come with me," she said, and I followed her into the house. We went past the bar, in a corner of which the landlord was asleep in his shirtsleeves, with his pipe lying precariously on a barrel behind his neck, and we climbed the stairs to the bedroom next to Bess's room, where her parents slept. The windows were tightly closed and, as the full heat of the afternoon sun beat upon them, the room was stiflingly hot; but for the moment I hardly noticed the discomfort of the place, so surprised was I to be brought here at all, and I followed the landlord's wife as sheepishly as I might have done in my childhood, though previously I had been so full of confidence. I sat down beside her on the patchwork quilt which covered the bed and waited for her to speak. She was looking at me strangely and with an evident affection which somehow reassured me. There was a long pause as we sat staring at each other. Then she said: "I see that I shall have to tell you why I don't want you to marry Bess." I smiled, since on this subject I felt sure of myself. "Wait until I've opened the window, then," I said, and she waited while I did so and until I had come back and had sat down again by her side. She took one of my hands in her two hands and said: "Bess is your sister." Then she pressed my hand and looked hard into my eyes, as though estimating the effect of her words, and I remained as I was with my eyes not leaving her face. I felt dully the shock of the meaning of her words, as I had felt what I had now almost forgotten, the disclosure made to me by the Rector at the dinner party which had been supposed to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Then in a moment all the strength in me seemed to flow back into my heart to repudiate what I had heard. This was something which I would not believe. My face must have hardened and in this hardening perhaps the landlord's wife fancied that there was expressed either disappointment or despair. "Never mind, Roy dear," she said. "You'll get over it." I thought suddenly of the mystery surrounding my birth, and was at once bewildered. Could it be that the woman beside me was my mother, or was it that the man in the bar below was my father? Had