The Road Between Us (17 page)

When she starts to unbutton the flies on his trousers and reaches her hand inside, he stops her. ‘Not here,’ he whispers. ‘How far is your place?’

‘A taxi ride.’

IV

OPENING HIS EYES WITH A SUCCESSION OF BLINKS, CHARLES TRIES
to work out through the blurred morning light where he is. There is a smell of cigarette ash and damp carpet. The blackout curtains haven’t been closed properly and are framing a shaft of sunlight. On the floor is a trail of clothes, their shapes and texture unfamiliar to him because of their femininity: a bra, a satin camisole, a khaki shirt with buttons on the wrong side.

With hungover eyes, he follows them backwards to an old and opened Advent calendar and a drawing pad propped against a chair. On the pad there is a female nude with crescent breasts, one slightly bigger than the other, standing with one hand on her hip in a coquettish pose. She is wearing an officer’s cap and her hair is loose underneath it. She is blowing a kiss. She looks like one of the pinups he recalls from his RAF days.

He remembers drawing it now and, without turning round, feels under the sheets with the back of his hand. The shin he encounters is hairless. Half roused from sleep by his touch, Maggie rolls over, taking the sheets with her. They are in two single beds that have been pushed together and, as this movement disturbs the air, Charles smells her flowery scent and is reminded of the night before. His first time with a woman.

True, he had seen them naked in life classes before, and had appreciated their form, their curving lines, their aesthetic qualities,
but back then he had thought there was something a little off-putting about the join of their legs, as if they were incomplete down there, deformed. He doesn’t any more.

But when he tries to recall what the act itself felt like, he struggles. He thinks it probably felt … different. He had felt tenderness towards her, but her softness, the pliancy of her flesh, had seemed wrong. It was something to do with the lack of muscle fibre, with her being more yielding.

The memory of their lovemaking induces a stab of guilt. Yet it wasn’t betrayal. Not really. In the darkness, as she lay on her front, he had imagined she was Anselm. He remembers this now. He hadn’t felt guilty during the sweaty abandon of coitus, only afterwards.

Maggie yawns and gathers the sheet around her as she sits up in bed. ‘Morning, handsome,’ she says sleepily. ‘What time is it?’

Charles checks his watch. ‘Almost seven.’

She swings her legs out of the bed, reaches for a dressing gown and, as she walks to the bathroom, reveals the seam of her drawn-on stocking. It has smudged.

When Maggie emerges from the bathroom she is brushing her hair. ‘I had a jolly time last night,’ she says, crawling on to the bed and nibbling his ear. ‘I’d never tried that position before. Where did you learn to do it that way?’

Charles does not answer. Smiles. Again he’s thinking how much easier things would be if he could find it in his heart to fall in love with this woman. He tries to imagine his life with her. A pipe and a newspaper. Sunday roast. Perhaps even children. Would that be so bad?

‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’

Charles remains silent. Closes his eyes. He feels the warmth of her honeyed breath on his face a fraction before the gentle brush of her lips against his closed eyelids.

‘Do you love her?’

He thinks about this for a moment before he finds himself nodding.

‘Then what are you doing here with me? Captain? Mm?’

He opens his eyes, strokes her hair and says: ‘
Carpe
-ing the
diem
.’

Maggie laughs and, adopting her southern belle accent, says: ‘Well, fiddle-dee-dee!’

By the time Charles arrives at Biggin Hill and sets up, Hardy has already been up for a sortie over Dover. When the young pilot sees him he ambles over, pulls a silver hip flask from his flying jacket, takes a swig and offers it. ‘Hair of the dog,’ he says.

‘Thank you.’ Charles takes a sip. Wipes his mouth. Brandy.

‘How’s Maggie?’

‘Fine. Gloria?’

‘More than fine. She’s the cat’s meow. Where did you find her?’

‘I didn’t. Maggie did.’

‘Well thank you. I tell you, Charlie, it’s love. Chocks away!’

Charles feels a sudden urge to share his news with Hardy: he is like him now. He too knows the feel of a woman’s belly and hips, the soft wetness of her mouth, the heft of her buttocks. He imagines himself stroking Hardy’s hair as he explains to him that his conduct is no longer unbecoming a gentleman, an RAF officer …

A siren sounds and the airfield becomes alive with mechanics in pale blue overalls – sceneshifters running to remove the camouflage netting from the planes. Hardy grabs his parachute off the tail and shouts: ‘We’ll have to finish this conversation later. I wouldn’t stand too close if I were you.’

Charles fights down an adrenaline-wrought urge to join in. Instead, with a flush of disappointment, he gathers his easel, runs back to a safe distance and turns to watch Hardy, now in his cockpit and wearing his leather helmet, giving a thumbs-up signal to an engineer. Small flames shoot from the engine as it starts and the still afternoon air reverberates with the sound of harnessed energy. The grass behind the aircraft dances in the slipstream. The engineer pulls the chocks clear and the Spitfire quivers for a moment before its plump tyres prowl forward.

Then Charles hears a noise like hailstones on a tin roof and, as
he looks up, sees a blue-bellied Junkers 88 dive-bomber, its twin engines bulking enormously, barely a few thousand feet above the hangar, gliding like a giant bat. It seems suspended in space and, for a surreal moment, benign. Then its bomb doors open and half a dozen small dark tubes tumble out, a point at one end, a fin at the other. He watches transfixed as gravity tugs their noses down first. They don’t fall vertically, but on a trajectory, towards him.

Abruptly it feels personal. These small dark objects are filled not with curiosity but with death and hate.

He dives headlong towards some sandbags as the bombs explode behind him, sucking up the air and lifting him from the ground. Time seems to slow down, allowing his brain to shift gears for a few postponed seconds and perceive the world at half speed. Then, realizing his face is pressed against broken glass, he looks up to see the Junkers curving steeply away. A moment later he is shrouded in white dust.

He is on his knees now and, looking up again, sees another Junkers on a course towards the airfield, its bomb doors open. As the black objects tumble from it his eyes dilate and he dives for cover again. There is a screech of tearing metal then smoke plumes from the gutted hangars to his right. The entrance, a spawning cloud of rubble, is more like an abattoir – a foot blown off an airman, an arm torn from a shoulder. Three men lie dead, their torsos a tangle of white tripe rapidly turning red.

Coughing and retching through a fine rain of chalk dust, Charles runs for cover again, this time to a slit trench, but another explosion knocks him off balance before he can reach it. He staggers to his feet, one hand clapped to his head, and gropes his way through the writhing smoke. Once he is clear of it, he sees a Dornier that is trailing a thin ribbon of black from its cowling. For a moment it hangs like a torch in the air before tearing into a tree a few miles away.

His attention is now caught by a Spitfire taxi-ing blindly through the smoke. The cartoon of Doc on the side reveals it is Hardy’s. His wheels are skidding and scarring the soft turf. The plane takes off
briefly then cartwheels across the airfield before slewing round into a hedge. The Spitfire’s back now broken, it catches fire almost as an afterthought. Lazily. Hypnotically. As Hardy struggles to open the canopy, Charles limps over as quickly as he can to help him, levering himself up on to the wing. The flames are licking the cockpit now and, as Charles tries to break the glass with frantic blows from his elbow, he sees the skin melting off Hardy’s face. It looks like molten wax. Hardy’s mouth is open but Charles cannot hear his screams.

Hosing towards him now are heavy jets of liquid. His face feels wet and hot, as if he is being scalded, and when he looks at his hands he sees flames dancing on them. Realizing he is being doused in aviation fuel, he jumps down off the wing and staggers clear of the wreckage.

The next thing he knows he has been knocked to the ground – a rugby tackle – and a blanket is smothering him.

He doesn’t know for how long he is unconscious, perhaps only a few seconds, but when he emerges from under the rug he is on his own. Through his one good eye he sees that heat has cracked the glass of his wristwatch. The strap hangs by a charred thread. On the ground next to him is Hardy’s hip flask, now blackened with soot. All around him are grey-white mounds of chalk and concrete. In his nostrils is the pungent reek of gas and plaster dust. Shadows are gathering over the hayricks. His face is numb. The Spitfire is now a charred skeleton.

When, three weeks later, the gauze and bandages are removed from Charles’s face, he is given an intimation of the extent of his disfigurement by the reaction of the nurse. She hides her horror well, clenching her jaw as she smiles, but her eyes give her away as they widen. The coolness of the air on his skin is a relief and his first instinct is to scratch it, but the nurse gently holds down his hands.

‘Can I have a mirror?’

‘All in good time.’

‘A mirror. Please.’

‘There’s one above the sink.’

The nurse supports him under the armpit as he levers himself out of the bed and shuffles three paces. When he looks in the mirror he is immediately sick into the basin, a reflex prompted not so much by vanity as shock. The skin on one side of his face, from his brow to his jaw, is tarry black and swollen. The act of vomiting hurts because it stretches the skin further, but he is unable to weep in pain, his tear ducts having been cauterized. Where once he had eyelashes, eyebrows and hair, he now has only charcoal.

The nurse helps him back to the bed and he lies down and closes his eyes. When he opens them again it is dark. He turns towards the wall so that he can retreat once more into sleep. When next he opens them it is daylight and the nurse is sitting beside his bed.

‘Mr Northcote, there’s a visitor to see you.’

Charles turns his head awkwardly and sees Maggie standing in the doorway. She is holding a bunch of flowers. ‘Hello, Captain,’ she says too lightly, keeping intense contact with his eyes for fear of straying to his cheek and neck. ‘How are you feeling?’

Charles blocks her sightline with his hand. ‘Don’t look at me,’ he says. ‘Please.’ He turns his face to the wall. ‘Go away.’

Three weeks later when a letter arrives from Buckingham Palace informing him he is to be awarded the George Cross ‘for conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger’, he lets it fall from his grip to the floor.

The day after that another letter arrives. When Charles sees Maggie’s signature at the bottom of it, he stops reading. She has written almost every day. He wants to weep, but cannot. It will be kinder this way, kinder to her. She need not feel guilty about abandoning him if he abandons her first.

V

Alsace. Autumn 1943

ANSELM
’
S ONLY DISTRACTION DURING THE DAY IS WORK, THE SS ARE
right about that.
Arbeit Macht Frei
. Work does set you free – the freedom of the emptied mind. But it also kills you. It had not taken him long to determine the true purpose of this maze of compounds and sub-compounds divided by high fences and watchtowers. It has not been built to provide slave labour for the Reich – that is a moderately useful by-product – but to work prisoners to death.

As this is an
Arbeitslager
, a work camp, the prisoners must march every day to one of three destinations: the granite quarry, the forest or the construction site. All are within a mile radius but even this distance is enough to leave a starving man exhausted. The work at the quarry involves breaking rocks and carrying them to boxcars mounted on rails and is considered the hardest, leaving men crippled in pain. Those sent to clear the forest must transport sleepers and this is considered easier, because a single man cannot lift one on his own – it takes four or five – and so the burden is shared. But the work at the construction site is the most survivable.

The depth of the ferrous concrete here suggests that the underground tunnels and caves being built into the sides of the Vosges mountains are intended to withstand a heavy air raid. The rumour
is that this is to be a site for one of the Führer’s
Wunderwaffen
– a rocket of some kind. But, in a most unGermanic way, there appears to be no deadline for completion. Sometimes there are iron girders to move, but mostly the work involves the stacking of cement bags, and these are light enough for one man to carry, with the cement powder moulding itself into the shape of the neck and shoulders.

This is their ‘education’. Political prisoners must be taught the error of their Bolshevik ways. Homosexuals must be taught the unnaturalness of their base appetites. Only the Jews cannot be re-educated. They have no place here, other than those few who arrive because of an administrative mistake.

The other prisoners consider them untouchable; such is the efficiency with which their golden-haired masters have educated them. All respect the caste system here. First come the elegant, swaggering SS officers with their love of
Musik
and
Hunden
. Then come the dogs themselves, their hot breath pluming in the cold, straining to be let loose on the prisoners. Then come the prisoners, dead a thousand times over, without hope, without pride. They jump to attention, they run, they eat the non-nourishing, liquid food they are served not out of any desire but habit. They try to survive another day but know they are at the mercy of men capable only of cruelty and contempt. And thanks to the complex social structure that has been imposed on them, the political prisoners know they are superior to the homosexuals, and the homosexuals, the non-Jewish ones at least, know they marginally outrank the Jews.