The Chequer Board (7 page)

He went into a long dissertation on the merits of the Spitfire versus the Mustang, which sent Captain Turner into a quiet doze. He had no conversation whatsoever beyond aeroplanes, except a queer hotchpotch of schoolboy prejudices. He referred to all foreigners as Dagoes, and deplored their moral habits with a frankness of speech that was novel to Mr Turner, who had not had the benefit of an English public school education. He affected superiority to these Dagoes on account of their low standards of life, and he affected superiority to the Americans because they made too much money. He thought money grubbing was frightfully bad form, never having had to grub for it himself. He was not a fool, but he was wholly undeveloped, and his commission in the R.A.F., which had conferred on him the status of an officer and a gentleman without much effort on his part, had bred in him a curious snobbishness. He was childlike in his ignorance
of many things, and as pathetic as a child in his blunders.

Once he said, “Are you married?”

“Aye,” said Mr Turner. “I got married when the war broke out.”

“I suppose you knew her before the war?”

“Worked in the same office, we did,” said Mr Turner. “Then we started going out together, evenings, ’n after a bit we got married. October 1939, that was; just before I joined up.”

“Really?” The boy stared at him in wonder. “It must have been funny working in the office with her.”

“I dunno. It was darned distracting.”

“Most people meet girls at a party, don’t they?” said the pilot. “That’s how I met Joyce. And what a party! At the Bull, in Stevenage, it was. We were all as blind as bloody bats.”

“Are you married, then?” asked Mr Turner. The boy seemed so young.

“I’m married,” he replied. “I got married just over a year ago, at the beginning of my second tour.” There was a faint tone of pride in his voice.

“Fine,” said Mr Turner. “Got any kids yet?”

“Oh no,” the boy said. “Joyce isn’t one of those. She’s got her work, you see. She’s on the stage. She’s awfully good, really.”

Mr Turner said, “Got her photograph?”

Morgan was very pleased. He went hobbling across the ward and fetched his wallet from the drawer of the bed table, and brought it back with him, and showed Mr Turner the photograph beneath a sheet of cellophane. Mr Turner took it in his hand and held it sideways to the
light, and looked at it with his sound eye. It showed a very luscious and provocative young woman, with downcast eyes and long hair flowing around her bare shoulders.

He gave it back to Morgan. “I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he said. “She’s perfectly lovely.”

The boy was pleased. He took the photograph back and studied it himself. “She is, isn’t she?” he said. “She’s more beautiful than that, really—it doesn’t do her justice. Everybody goes mad about her.” He hesitated, and then said, “Of course, she’s been married before.”

Mr Turner was amazed. “She has?” The girl seemed so young.

Morgan nodded. “She was married to an awfully good friend of mine, Jack Stratton. He went for a Burton over France last year. Joyce was frightfully cut up about it, of course—it was terrible for her, poor kid. She was only twenty then, and she’s had an awfully rough deal in her life. Jack was a jolly good friend of mine, and we knew he’d want me to look after her, so we got married two months later before I went out to Egypt.”

Captain Turner thought enviously that it was grand when duty to a friend turned out like that. “So you’re her second husband,” he said. “Well, I never!”

The boy seemed a little confused. “Well, as a matter of fact, she was married before that,” he said. “I’m her third husband, really. She was married first of all to a chap in 73 Squadron who bought it when they were operating in France back in 1940. She’s had frightfully bad luck. It’s always the best people get the worst luck, isn’t it? I wonder why that is?”

He was worried about an illegal package that he had
concealed in the rear fuselage of the Hudson. “There’s a stowage rack for parachute flares up in the roof, just above the little hatch in the bulkhead, aft of the gun bay, right in the rear fuselage,” he said. “I put it there. But it’ll be gone by now. Some wretched Ack Emma will have got it. It’s too bad.”

“What was it?”

“Perfume that I got in Algiers, and some lipsticks, and powder, and four pairs of silk stockings, and some silk.” He hesitated, and then said, “With a girl like Joyce, you’ve got to treat them right, you know. I mean, she’s accustomed to pretty things, and she feels awful if she can’t get them. I mean, she can make herself look so stunning, she’s just got to have the things.” He brooded for a minute, and then said, “I wish I hadn’t told her I was bringing her some stuff. Now I’ve got nothing to bring.”

“You’re bringing yourself back alive. That’s something.”

“Oh—yes. But she wanted some Coty.”

Turner learned that they had only lived together for a fortnight, in the Piccadilly Hotel, before he had been sent out to North Africa on his second tour. Since then they had been together for half-a-dozen week-ends only. “She’s got her work, you see.” Her work was playing the part of the chambermaid in “Smile Sweetly, Lady” at the Grafton Theatre. She had to speak three lines, smile, and exit into the bedroom.

Flying Officer Morgan wrote a letter to her every day; a long letter, scribbled in pencil in an irregular, unformed hand. But he never seemed to get a reply. He talked about it once. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong
or anything like that,” he said, “but she doesn’t like writing. It’s about three months since I got a letter from her. It’s just the way you’re made, you know. When she does write, they’re frightfully nice.” He showed Turner a little dog-eared sheaf of letters in his wallet, very few. “I carry them all around with me everywhere I go, and read them over and over again till they pretty well fall to pieces.” He examined his treasures. “I must get a bit of stamp paper for this one.”

Turner asked once if she was coming down to see him at Penzance, but he said, “Oh, I don’t expect so. She’s got her work, you see. She couldn’t leave that, could she?”

Mollie had left her job to come and see him, but Mr Turner said, “Well, no; I suppose not.”

Phil Morgan did not often get a letter from his wife, but his friends wrote to him from time to time. Two days before he left the hospital he came to talk to Captain Turner, troubled. “I do wish people wouldn’t write things like this,” he said. “It’s absolutely all right, of course …” He handed Turner one sheet of a letter:

 … and we had a wizard time. We couldn’t get anywhere to sleep in London because you have to book a room weeks ahead now, so we rang up Joyce and she said we could come and sleep at her flat. She had a chap called Bristow there, a two-striper from 602 Squadron, and he said he had given up looking for a bedroom in London now and he always went and slept with Joyce, in a manner of speaking, of course. We got some sausage and stuff from the NAAFI and cooked supper about one in the morning, and Bristow had a bottle of whiskey and I had one of gin so we were well away. We all felt like death the next day, but it was a good party.

Captain Turner read this through; the exposed portion of his face was a poker face. “Nothing in that,” he said. “It was kind of friendly of your wife to look after your friends.”

“I know …” The boy turned to the letter in his hands. “There’s only just the sitting room and the bedroom,” he said at last.

“Well, that’s all right. Your friends wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t like ’n go and write to you about it.”

“Oh, it’s not them.” He hesitated. “It’s this chap Bristow.”

“What about him?”

“Well, he’s got a lot of money, and he can give her things—furs and things I simply haven’t the money to get. He’s awfully kind. But …” He hesitated, and then said, “The poor kid’s had such a packet of losing husbands, she sort of feels she’s got to be safe, whatever happens. If I’d gone for a Burton on my second tour, or any time, I think this chap Bristow would be Number Four.”

“I see,” said Captain Turner thoughtfully.

“It’s all perfectly all right, of course,” said Morgan. “It’s only that she’s so attractive people go mad over her. It’s not her fault that happens.”

“Of course not,” said Turner.

Two days later Phil Morgan was discharged from hospital.

“I wish to God I hadn’t lost that parcel,” he said. “I don’t like going up to London with nothing for her. She gets such a lot of presents …”

In the moonlit garden his wife stirred beside Turner.
“Well, that’s nothing,” she said. “actresses and that, they’ve got different standards.”

“Actress, my foot!” said Mr Turner. “She wasn’t an actress at all, not till they brought in conscription for women and she had to get a job.” He turned to her. “You remember, we went to see ‘Smile Sweetly, Lady’? The chambermaid—she hadn’t got much to do.”

Mollie nodded. “Irene Morton wore a lovely pyjama suit. You remember them pyjamas? Ever so lovely they were. Silly sort of play, though. We went on and had dinner at Frascati’s. Remember?”

“Aye,” said Mr Turner thoughtfully. “Good evening, that one.”

He glanced at her. “I sort of worried more about Phil Morgan than either of the others,” he said. “He was married to a bitch that didn’t care a sausage for him. But a chap can butt his way through all that sort of trouble.”

He paused. “It was sort of—there was nothing to him, if you get me,” he said. “There he was, twenty-two years old, and not a thought in his head beyond the perishing aeroplanes. Might have been a kid of ten. Got himself in a bloody mess through marrying a bitch like that, and probably go on getting into mess after mess, unless he got killed in an aeroplane first. But I reckon he was too good for that. He was good at flying; the only thing he was good at. I dunno what would have become of a chap like that. He just knew nothing, absolutely nothing at all.”

His wife said, “Well, I dunno. People get more sense as they get older and get settled down in jobs. What about the nigger?”

“Aye,” said Mr Turner, “he was the last one. I was
much better when he got up. There was just the two of us left in the ward then, and the guard on the door just the same.” He paused, and then he said, “Funny thing about that chap,” he said. “He didn’t talk like a nigger at all. He talked just like any other Yank soldier—better than most, maybe.”

“Pretty simple, I suppose,” she said. “I mean they don’t know much, do they? I don’t suppose you found much to talk about with him.”

“Well, I dunno,” he said. “We got along all right.”

She glanced at him, puzzled. “Was he a proper nigger, then?”

“Oh yes, he was a nigger all right. Sort of milk chocolate colour, he was, with black kinky hair. He’d got some white blood in him, I should think, but not a lot.” He paused. “Quite young, he was—only about twenty.”

By the time Turner was allowed out of bed, the screen had been taken away from around him and the whole of his face was uncovered. He still had a dressing on the wound, but he was sitting up in bed and taking notice of things. He had spoken once or twice to the Negro before, but their beds were on opposite sides of the room, and that made conversation difficult for Turner with his wounded head and for the Negro with the deep wound in his throat. It was not until Lesurier was up and in a dressing gown that they were able to approach each other sufficiently closely for easy talk.

Turner said, “How does it feel, now you’re up?”

The Negro said, “I don’t feel so good right now. Say,
if I’d known that cutting your throat gave you septicaemia, I sure would have made a job of it.”

“Or else not done it at all,” said Turner.

The Negro paused for a moment in abstraction. “Well,” he said at last, “that would have been another way.” He turned to Turner. “Now I’m up and around, if you want anything, Cap’n, just say.”

“Righto,” said Turner, and went on reading his paper.

He could not read continuously at that time, or for very long; it made his eyes ache and he had to stop. The Negro also had a paper and copies of the “Stars and Stripes” and “Yank,” but most of the time he sat in sad, thoughtful abstraction in a wicker chair, or stood in silence looking out of the window at the pleasant, undulating Cornish country scene. In the middle of the afternoon Turner said, “What about a game of draughts? Can you play draughts?”

The other roused himself. “Surely, Cap’n.” He got up and fetched the board and the cardboard box that held the pieces. “You know,” he said, making conversation, “back home we call this checkers.”

They set up the board on Turner’s bed, and arranged the pieces.

“Where’s your home?” asked Turner, also making conversation. “What part of the States do you come from?”

“Nashville,” said the Negro. “Nashville, in the State of Tennessee.”

Turner thought for a moment. “That’s over somewhere in the West, isn’t it? Or is that Texas?”

“No,
sir
. Tennessee is in the South, between the Lakes
and Florida. Not right South like Mississippi or Louisiana, just halfway South.”

“I see,” said Turner, not much interested. “Been over here long?”

“Four-and-a-half months.” They began to play.

“Do you like it over here?”

“It’s a long way from home, Cap’n,” said the Negro quietly. “You get to feeling sometimes that you’re quite a ways from home, and then you get lonely. But most of us colored boys like England pretty well.”

Presently Turner asked, “What do you do in Nashville? What do you work at?”

“I got a job with the Filtair Corporation.”

“What’s that?”

The Negro glanced at him, surprised. “Why, that’s quite a business, Cap’n, back in Nashville. They got over five thousand hands working now, with war contracts. Make air cleaners for autos and trucks and tanks, and airplane engines, too.” He paused, and then he said, “My Dad, he’s been with them over twelve years now. That’s a long while to be with one corporation in the States, specially for a colored person.”

“What does he do there?”

“Runs the print machine, making the blueprints from the drawings. He’s a draftsman really, makes a darned fine engineering drawing. We lived up in Hartford when I was a lil’ boy, and he worked there as a draftsman. Then we moved back down South because his pa died and Grandma needed looking after. But I guess there’s difficulties in the South you don’t get in Connecticut. Yes, my dad works in the print room.” He said that he had
been sent to the James Hollis School for Colored Boys in Nashville.