The Young Lions (52 page)

"I am not very interested in the war," Pavone was saying. The guns in the distance coughed the overture to the raid. "I am a civilian, no matter what the uniform says. I am more interested in the peace later."

The planes were overhead by now, and the guns were loud outside the house. The planes seemed to be coming over in ones and twos. Mrs Kearney was handing a card to the MP Top Sergeant who was coming from the kitchen now with his fish.

"Oh, what a beautiful mornin'," sang an American voice near the piano, "Oh, what a beautiful day. I got a beautiful feelin', Everything's goin' my way…"

"America cannot lose a war," said Pavone. "You know it, I know it, by now even the Japs and the Germans know it. I repeat," he said, making his clown's grimace, pulling heavily on his cigar, "I am not interested in the war. I am interested in the peace, because that issue is still in doubt."

Two Polish Captains came in, in their harsh pointed caps, that always reminded Michael of barbed wire and spurs, and went, with set, disapproving faces, over to the bar.

"The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world, except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that America will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure…"

There was a high whistle outside and above, a roaring, crowding, thundering, clattering scream, that grew out of the blackness like a train wreck in a storm, and hurtled towards them. Everyone hit the floor.

The explosion crashed through every eardrum. The floor heaved. There was the sound of a thousand windowpanes blowing out. The lights flickered, and in the crazy moment before they went out, Michael saw the sleeping proprietress slide sideways out of her chair, her glasses still hanging from one ear. The explosion rumbled on in waves, each one less strong, as buildings collapsed, walls broke, brick tumbled into living-rooms and areas. The piano in the back room hummed as though ten men had struck chords on it all at once.

The lights flickered on. Everyone got to his feet. Somebody lifted the proprietress from the floor and put her back on the chair, still sleeping. She opened her eyes and stared coldly out in front of her. "I think it's despicable," she said, "stealing an old woman's scarf while she sleeps." She closed her eyes again.

The two Polish Captains put on their pointed caps. They looked around them disdainfully, then started out. At the door they stopped. On the wall was a poster of Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin. One of the Poles reached up and tore off the picture of Stalin. Then he ripped the picture in quarters, swiftly, and threw it back into the room, in angular confetti. "Bolshevik pigs!" he shouted.

The Frenchman who ate martini glasses got up from the floor and threw a chair at the Poles. It clattered on the wall next to the pointed caps. The Poles turned and fled.

"Salauds!" shouted the Frenchman, wavering at his table.

"Come back here and I will…"

"Those gentlemen," said the proprietress, keeping her eyes closed, "are to be denied admission to these premises from now on."

Michael looked over to the end of the bar. The Major-General had his arms comfortingly around Louise and was tenderly patting her buttocks. "There, there, little woman," he was saying.

"All right, General." Louise was smiling icily. "The battle is over. Disengage."

The siren went off, indicating, in its long, sustained note, that the raid was over.

Then Michael began to shake. He gripped the bottom of his chair with his hands and he set his teeth, but they clattered in his jaws. He smiled woodenly at Pavone, who was relighting his cigar.

"Whitacre," said Pavone, "what the hell do you do in the Army? Whenever I see you, you're holding up a bar some place."

"I don't do anything much, Colonel," Michael said, then kept quiet, because one more word would have been too much, and his jaw would have worked loose.

"Can you speak French?"

"A little."

"Can you drive a car?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Would you like to work for me?" Pavone asked.

"Yes, Sir," said Michael, because Pavone outranked him.

"We'll see, we'll see," said Pavone. "The man I had working for me is up for court-martial, and I think he's going to be found guilty."

"Yes, Sir."

"Call me up in a couple of weeks," said Pavone. "It may turn out to be interesting."

"Thank you, Sir," said Michael.

"Do you smoke cigars?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Here." Pavone held out three cigars and Michael took them.

"I don't know why I think so, but I think you have an intelligent look in your eye."

"Thanks."

Pavone looked over at General Rockland. "You'd better get back there," Pavone said, "before the General goes off with your girl."

Michael stuffed the cigars into his pocket. He had considerable trouble with the pocket button because his fingers were shaking as though he were plugged into an electric circuit.

"I am still sweating," Ahearn was saying as Michael left the table, "but everything is extraordinarily clear."

Michael stood respectfully but firmly next to General Rockland. He coughed discreetly. "I'm afraid, Sir," he said, "I have to take the lady home. I promised her mother I'd bring her back by midnight."

"Your mother in London?" the General demanded of Louise.

"No," said Louise. "But PFC Whitacre knew her back in St Louis."

The General laughed hoarsely and good-naturedly. "I know when I'm being given the business," he said. "Her mother. That's a new one." He clapped Michael heavily on the back.

"Good luck, Son," he said, "glad to have met you." He peered around the room. "Where's Ottilie?" he demanded. "Is she giving out those damned cards here, too?" He strode off, the Captain with the moustache in his wake, looking for Mrs Kearney, who was locked by now in the bathroom, with one of the sergeant pilots.

Louise smiled at Michael.

"Having a good time?" Michael asked.

"Charming," Louise said. "The General fell right on top of me when the bomb hit. I thought he was going to spend the summer there. Ready to go?"

"Ready," said Michael.

He took her hand and they went out.

Outside there was a sullen smell of smoke in the air, foul and threatening. For a moment, Michael stopped, feeling his jaws and his nerves panicking again, and he nearly turned round and ran back inside. Then he controlled himself, and started down the dark, smoky street with Louise.

From St James's Street came the thin tinkle of glass, and the heavy orange flicker of fire, spitting up through the smoke, and a new sound, thick and gurgling, that he had not heard before. They turned the corner and looked down towards the Palace. The street reflected the quivering orange fire in a million angles of broken glass. Down in front of the Palace, the fire shone back off a small lake of water. The gurgling was being made by ambulances and fire engines pushing through the water in bottom gear. Without saying anything to each other, Michael and Louise walked swiftly, their shoes crackling on the glass, making a sound like people walking through a frozen meadow, towards the spot where the bomb had fallen.

A small car had been hit right in front of the Palace. It was lying against a wall, crushed and compressed, as though it had been put through a giant baling machine. There was no sign of the driver or any of the passengers, unless what an old man on the right-hand side of the street was carefully sweeping into a small pile might be they. A woman's beret, dark blue and gay, rested, almost untouched by the catastrophe, a little to one side of the car.

The houses facing the Palace still stood, although their fronts had slipped down into rubble. There was the familiar and sorrowful picture of rooms, ready for living, with tablecloths laid, and counterpanes turned back, and clocks still ticking the time, laid open to the eye of the night by the knifelike effect of the blast. It is what they are always striving to achieve in the theatre, Michael thought, the removal of the fourth wall and a peep at the life inside.

No sounds came from the broken houses, and somehow Michael felt that very few people had been caught by the bomb. There were many deep air-raid shelters in the neighbourhood, he comforted himself, and probably the inhabitants of the houses had been cautious.

Nobody seemed to be making any effort to rescue anybody who might still be in the blasted buildings. Firemen sloshed methodically through the pond of water, from the gushing, ruptured main. Air Raid Rescue people pushed desultorily and quietly at the more obvious bits of the wreckage. That was all.

Against the wall of the Palace, where the sentry boxes had stood, and the sentries had marched and saluted in their absurd wooden-toy manner whenever they saw an officer half a block away, there was nothing now. The sentries, Michael knew, had not been permitted to leave their posts, and they had merely stood there, in their stiff, pompous, old-fashioned version of soldiers, and had accepted the whistle of the bomb, accepted the explosion, stiffly died as the windows evaporated behind them, and the old clock in the tower above them tore loose from its hinges and hung greyly out from its springs. While he, Michael, a hundred yards away, had been sitting with the whisky in his hand, smiling. And overhead, the desperate boy had crouched in the bucking plane, blinded by the searchlights, with London spinning crazily below him in an erupting glitter of explosions, with the Thames and the Houses of Parliament and Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch swinging murderously around his head, and the flak flicking at the wings. The boy had crouched in the plane, peering shakily down, and had pressed, finally, whatever button the German Air Force pressed to kill Englishmen, and the bomb had come down, on the automobile and the girl with the beret and the houses that had stood there for a hundred years and on the two sentries whose units had been relieved from other duty and honoured with the job of guarding the Palace. And if the boy in the plane above had touched the button a half-second sooner, or a half-second later, if the plane had not at that moment bucked to port in a sudden blast, if the searchlights hadn't blinded the pilot for a second earlier in the evening, if, if, if… then he, Michael, would be lying in his own blood now in the wreck of the Canteen of the Allies, and the sentries would be alive, the girl with the beret alive, the houses standing, the clock running…

It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.

"Come on, darling," Louise said. He could feel that she was shivering, and he was surprised, because she had always been so cool, so contained. "We're not doing any good here. Let's go home."

Silently, they turned and walked away. Behind them, the firemen had managed to reach some valve and the gushing from the broken main diminished, then stopped completely. The water in front of the Palace was calm and black.

Four days after the opening of Hamlet, Michael was called into the orderly room of the Special Services Company to which he was attached for rations and quarters and told that he was ordered to report to the Infantry Replacement Depot at Lichfield. He was given two hours to pack his bags.

THE landing barge went round in a monotonous circle. The spray heaved in over the side, puddling on the slippery deck. The men crouched over their weapons, trying to keep them dry. The barges had been rolling a mile off the beach since three o'clock in the morning. It was seven-thirty now, and all conversation had long ago ceased. The preliminary barrage from the ships was almost over, and the simulated air attack. The smoke screen thrown across the cove by a low-flying Cub was even now settling on the water's edge. Everybody was wet, everybody was cold, everybody, except for the men who felt like throwing up, was hungry.

Noah was enjoying it.

Crouched in the bow of the barge, tenderly keeping dry the charges of TNT that were his special care, feeling the salt spray of the North Sea batter against his helmet, breathing the sharp, wild, morning air, Noah was enjoying himself.

It was the final exercise for his regiment in their assault training. It was a full-dress rehearsal, complete with naval and air support and live ammunition, for the coast of Europe. For three weeks they had practised in thirty-man teams, each team to a pillbox, riflemen, bazooka men, flame-throwers, detonation men. This was the last time before the real thing. And there was a three-day pass, waiting like a promise of Heaven, in the orderly room for Noah.

Burnecker was pale green from seasickness, his large farmer's hands gripping his rifle convulsively, as though there, at least, might be found something steady, something secure in a heaving world. He grinned weakly at Noah.

"Holy jumping mule," he said, "I am not a healthy man."

Noah smiled at him. He had grown to know Burnecker well in the last three weeks of working together. "It won't be long now," Noah said.

"How do you feel?" Burnecker asked.

"O.K.," said Noah.

"I'd trade you the mortgage on my father's eighty acres," Burnecker said, "for your stomach."

There was a confusion of amplified voices across the sliding water. The barge veered sharply and picked up speed as it headed for the beach. Noah crouched against the damp steel side, ready to jump when the ramp went down. Maybe, he thought, as the waves slapped with increasing force against the speeding hull, maybe there will be a cable from Hope when I get back to camp, saying it is all over. Then, later, he thought, I will sit back and tell my son, "The day you were born, I was landing on the coast of England with twenty pounds of dynamite." Noah grinned. It would have been better, of course, to have been with Hope while it was happening, but this really had its advantages. You were too occupied to worry very much. There was no anxious pacing of corridors, no smoking of too many cigarettes, no listening to the screams. It was selfish, of course, but it had its points.