The Night Stages (8 page)

“They demolished the village,” she had told Niall. “Absolutely everything went.”

He thought she was exaggerating. “Not the whole village,” he said.

“No, everything,” she assured him. Absolutely everything was gone except for the church and the gardener’s cottage, which was near the entrance gate. “My parents honestly believed that by sending me to the village school it would seem as if they too were experiencing a loss when that school was knocked down.”

She told him that when her mother had inquired, not unreasonably, about what was to become of the tenantry, her father had said confidently that she should not be concerned. The younger men would all soon be in uniform anyway, and the rest would have several months to make other arrangements.

During the year she attended the soon-to-be-destroyed village school, a boy called Teddy O’Brien – the owner of the dog beyond the walls – became her weekend and after-class friend. His father was the estate gardener of Edgeworth Hall
and the cottage they lived in hugged the outer walls and would, as such, survive the demolition that would soon obliterate the pubs and shops and homes a half a mile down the road. As a younger child Tam had played marbles in the dust of the road with Teddy, dismissing the game itself and instead giving the tiny round objects names and making up stories about them. A set of small vehicles, buses, lorries that Teddy had in his possession was called into service, and extreme dramas came into imaginary being among them – wrecks, sometimes even a love affair between an omnibus and a lorry, sometimes murders. Moving so close to him and to the ground they hovered over, Tam came to know the details of his hands and face and his bare knees so well that, years later, she could recall that pattern of his freckles and the shape of his fingernails, the tawny colour of his skin. He was a pleaser, always giving her access to his toys, his tools, his dog, and accepting as law all suggestions she made as to how their activities should progress.

Back in the St. Derwent playground on schooldays, she betrayed him utterly, making it clear to him that she preferred to try to curry favour with the kind of boys who most often ignored them both. The power of exclusion would always draw her toward certain events and people, at least until the war, when everything, including her barely formed character, changed. Teddy had a quiet air, somehow, which probably accounted for his dismissal by the pack. And he had, in summer, vague allergies that visited him in the form of a leaking nose. But during the summer she was thirteen years old, it was this
boy who had taken her to the far side of the airfield, where she could see the airplanes, which up until then had only dwelt in the skies, hum sedately down toward the earth or lift off with an unimaginable amount of noise. And it was he who had shown her how to scramble unnoticed through shrubbery and under the wire fence so that they could get dangerously close to these magical machines.

She accepted as rightfully hers all that Teddy revealed to her when they were together in those days, but, as she later realized, she never once gave him credit for the astonishing gift he was giving her. Once she was there, the experience of the airfield swept from her mind all credit for Teddy’s role as her guide.

She let Teddy lead the way to further adventures, never venturing forth alone. By the next summer they were not only braver but able to stay out later, and dusk sometimes found them cross-legged beneath the undercarriage of a Bristol Blenheim or, stunningly, on one occasion, a visiting Hawker Hurricane.

Eventually, the inevitable happened. By now they had become so bold as to stroll around in the gathering shadows, lounging casually against the fuselage of one airplane or another in a proprietary fashion, even moving a propeller or two. She was hanging on to a blade with both hands trying to budge it by swinging her body weight back and forth when she was caught around the waist by a pair of adult arms. “Run,” Teddy had yelled, preparing to do just that himself. But it was useless, and in no time he too was intercepted by
another official-looking figure, and the two of them were marched back in the direction of the fence, each man holding a child’s arm in his hand.

“What the hell are you two doing?” one of the men was asking.

“Guess you like it here,” the other said. “How about you stay a spell longer?”

“Cannot,” said Teddy, recognizing an adult trick. “I have to be home by half-nine.”

“He has to be home by nine-thirty,” the tallest man repeated. “How about that? And what about you, young lady, do you have to be home by nine-thirty? I think we’d like to keep the both of you out all night, that’s what I think.”

This was not what Tam had been expecting. A reprimand, maybe, but not an incarceration. The night was deepening; she suddenly and uncharacteristically wanted to go home to her parents. The planes seemed to be grinning at her, their windscreen-eyes dark except for one or two pinpricks of light, the lamps of the quiet airfield. She could hear Teddy sniffling and felt disdainful, even when she remembered the allergies. “Are you going to put us in jail?” she asked the man who was holding her shirt.

He laughed then and called to his companion, “Will we put them in jail?”

“Not sure,” the other man said. They were all standing close together now. Tam could smell the alcohol and smoke on the breath of this smaller man. “Can you climb?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I wasn’t asking you, actually.” He jerked his head in the direction of Teddy, who had stopped sniffling and was paying attention. “I want to know if
he
can climb.”

Suddenly Tam realized that these were men much younger than her father, and the fact of this calmed her considerably. They obviously had no idea where she came from.

“I can,” said Teddy in a surprisingly clear voice. “And so can she,” he added, wanting to be fair to her in everything.

“That’s the ticket then.” The taller man looked at the watch on the hand that was not holding Teddy’s arm. “If you can get over that fence, that one, over there” – he motioned toward the farthest side of the airfield – “if you can get over that fence and out of our sight in less than two minutes, you win. If not, we win.”

Both Teddy and Tam squirmed at the end of the men’s grasp. “Not so fast,” said the shorter of the two men. “There is something else. There is no school these days, correct?”

Tam wondered if she should disclose this information but Teddy nodded.

“
If
and only if you get over that fence in two minutes, we will not call the coppers. And if we don’t call the coppers, we want you to come back tomorrow morning early and climb back in using that exact piece of fence. If you don’t appear, the police will come to your house to get you.”

Tam wanted to point out that it was far easier for them to crawl
under
the fence but doubted that facility of entrance and exit was what the man had in mind.

“You don’t know where we live,” she said.

“Ah, but we have ways of finding out,” one of the men said. “Isn’t that right, Teddy?”

This knowledge of her friend’s name genuinely interested her.

“Isn’t that right, Teddy?” the man repeated. Tam recognized his accent as being one not unlike her own, and one entirely different from Teddy’s. In the distance she could hear the sound of revelry by night, coming from a long, lit Quonset hut in the distance, one she had not paid attention to until that minute. It was a phrase she liked, the sound of revelry by night, but she wished she had noticed this revelry earlier.

“Right,” said Teddy softly.

Suddenly they were both running, she without any real memory of being released. They hit the fence at full speed and tore their way up the clanging chainlink, vaulted over the top, then fell into the weedy ditch on the other side. To get back to the road that led to Teddy’s cottage and the entrance to Edgeworth Hall, they had to run the full length of the airfield in the opposite direction. She didn’t look to see if the men were watching, but as they turned the corner she heard a masculine voice call out, “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Or the law. Your choice!” and then a lot of laughter, which made her realize that this might well have all been a joke. But, just in case it wasn’t, she ran faster and for longer than she ever had before.

Several minutes later they slowed to a trot. When she could speak again, Tam asked him who the men were and how they knew his name. Was he known to the police? Had
he a secret life of crime? Was that why he knew how to sneak onto the airfield? Teddy had suddenly become more appealing to her.

“My sister’s used-to-be boyfriend,” Teddy wheezed. He stopped, leaned against a tree, and pulled out the handkerchief for which Tam had always had nothing but disgust – couldn’t he just hork and spit like the older boys at school whose attention she coveted? – and coughed into it once or twice before folding it neatly and putting it back in his pocket. But she was too intrigued by this mention of romance to think long about the handkerchief or to take into consideration that Teddy was on the edge of a full-blown attack of asthma.

“Who is he exactly? Why was he there?”

“A heartbreaker,” Teddy said, “that’s what my mother told my aunt. When he didn’t come to our house anymore, my sister locked herself in her room and played the radio and cried. My father says he’s a good-for-nothing toff, a real bad character. Rubbish, is what he said.”

Tam digested this information.

“He flies planes,” Teddy went on. “And I think he’s part of some university flying club or something. Or he might be in the Air Force. They have dances there at the airfield sometimes with boys who fly planes. That’s where my sister first …”

Tam was filled with astonishment. No wonder the sister locked herself up in that room and cried. “Did he take your sister up in a plane?” she interjected. Teddy nodded, though Tam would later realize that this was highly unlikely. But at this moment she felt that there could be no real life after
having, and then losing, access to flight. And yet, she had seen his sister recently; so she was out of her room. She had a new permanent hairdo, and she seemed serene, if a little vacant. The world of older girls was still mystifying to her. They were nearing Teddy’s cottage now. All the lights were on, as if there might be trouble. “I better go in,” he said.

“If we don’t go back tomorrow,” Tam said, “I don’t know. Your father told you he’s a real bad sort.” And then, “Do you think he’s a bad sort?”

“Yes … well, no. But tonight … he would have called the coppers for sure.”

“I’m going back,” said Tam. “You’re going to come with me as well, because I am going to make that one take us up in a plane.”

“Yes.” Teddy wheezed. “I suppose so.” She knew he thought there wasn’t much that she couldn’t accomplish.

She turned to go, but he caught her arm. “Tam,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh nothing.” His nose was running. He reached for his handkerchief.

“What’s his name, by the way?” she suddenly asked.

“Reginald.” Teddy was looking nervously at his own door. “My sister called him Reggie.”

Tam married Reggie three years later, the summer she turned seventeen, he having been deemed suitable by her parents because of Cambridge, the Air Force, and certain Byzantine
and ancient family connections stretching back to the Wars of the Roses. By then the village of St. Derwent was completely gone and the airfield, being in a position to protect the Cornish coastline, was fully operational. The war was in full swing, and Reggie was a glamorous flying officer (whose squadron was sometimes stationed at St. Derwent), and she was once again languishing in the dormitory of another boarding school from which she wished to bolt. She once told Niall that the mere sight of walls covered with ivy could bring out the truant in her.

Reggie, who had been much taken with her during the holidays of the summer before, seemed to her to provide the perfect avenue for escape. She had made flying lessons a condition of their engagement, having never until then managed to get up in one of the planes, and these he had arranged for her at a nearby private field, never once, she later realized, believing that she had been serious. He found her interest in flying amusing rather than alarming, assuming it was a feminine whim, and that one experience behind the controls would frighten the wits out of her and that would be that.

“My little shrinking violet,” he sometimes said to her teasingly during their intimate moments, and before she had achieved her licence and joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, “the Spitfire pilot.”

REGGIE HAD PROVED TO BE UNKILLABLE DURING
the war, perhaps because of his unflagging good nature that in no time had begun to wear on Tam’s nerves. He was not a particularly skilful pilot but was for some reason blessed with such reliable good fortune that his mates began calling him “Lucky Lenthall.” His surname, which Tam had never been fond of, was pronounced in the same manner as the beans that went into the making of a soup that she had always refused to eat. She sometimes thought of this when their leaves overlapped, or when his squadron was posted near enough to the home base of the Air Transport Auxiliary that she saw him regularly. During these spells of togetherness she would try not to be put off by the way he talked like a two-year-old while nuzzling her neck, his saluting and heel-clicking whenever she asked him to do something for her, the dandruff on the collar of his uniform. But things of this ilk would always slip into her mind the moment he suggested she remove her clothes. When he was far away, however, she could muster some fondness for him, mostly based on her completely reinventing his character to fit that of the other airmen who were regularly in her vicinity. She often thought of them in a way that she never thought of her husband. And she was
thinking of them now, looking at the few figures in uniform on the mural. All the bright, handsome young men whose lives were often over in an instant, and who were at times intense in their dealings with others, at times witty and seemingly carefree, and always touching in the way they walked cheerfully toward their machines and leapt eagerly on board.