A Song At Twilight (9 page)

He turned and walked away, his back as stiff as if an iron rod had been inserted in his jacket. The other two looked at each other and Ben blew out his cheeks.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘I know he’s right, but he’s not exactly the sort of company you want at a party, is he? I just hope he leaves his cloak of misery behind on Saturday evening.’

They got up and drifted over to join a crowd of pilots who were roaring with laughter at Duncan Aird, a tall, rangy Scotsman with a pawky sense of humour and an inexhaustible fund of dirty jokes. For a while, they tried to forget about Tubby Marsh’s death, and the passionate intensity of Stefan’s words. But it wasn’t long before Tony wandered off and disappeared through the door, and a few minutes later Ben followed and found him making his way towards the huts where they had their rooms.

Above them, the stars hung in a huge, inverted bowl of darkest blue. There was no ‘bomber’s moon’ and except for the occasional hoot of an owl the night was silent. There were no lights to be seen anywhere, either on the bleak wilderness of the moor, or from the towns of Tavistock to the north and the ruins of Plymouth to the south. The darkness was almost solid.

Yet there was no sense of peace. It was as if the profound darkness and silence were a threat rather than a reassurance. At any moment, the alarm could sound and send men scurrying to their aircraft. Or a flight of enemy planes could come screaming out of that huge inverted bowl, scattering bombs and gunfire over the entire airfield. The men they were growing to know, the men they would fly with, even they themselves, could all be killed in the moment it took to visualise the scene.

‘I think we know what war is,’ Ben said at last.

May was delighted to help out at the party and accepted the offer of payment without demur. Alison understood that the situation between them was now accepted; on the one part was friendship, with favours given and received on both sides, on the other a purely business relationship. Apples, eggs and cream could be offered as gifts, or requested and paid for, and the servant was worthy of her hire.

‘Not that I think of you as a servant,’ Alison said quickly. ‘We had a cook and a couple of maids at home – my parents’ home, I mean. But that was before the war. My mother doesn’t have any help now, except for a village woman who comes in three days a week. Most of them are doing war work.’

They had been making bread in the Prettyjohns’ kitchen as they talked. It was a long-drawn-out but satisfying process, with time while the dough was ‘resting’ to complete other tasks, such as bottling plums or making more jam.

Although Alison had known the family for less than a fortnight, she felt almost as at home in their cottage as she did in her own. The rooms were comfortably cluttered, with old-fashioned ornaments and china on the shelves and a row of gleaming horse-brasses hanging from the oak mantelpiece. Sagging armchairs stood on either side of the fireplace, piled with cushions and, as often as not, occupied by the two cats, Ginger and Blackbird. The kitchen was always warm and smelled of cooking, either the bread they were making now, the fruit and sugar for jam, or whatever was being prepared for that day’s dinner.

Hughie, too, enjoyed going to the Prettyjohns’ cottage. He had struck up a firm friendship with old Mr Prettyjohn and the two spent hours out in the garden, tidying and digging, or just sitting in the sun holding long conversations. Alison often thought that Hughie sounded like an old man himself, earnestly discussing the ways of birds and animals or other mysteries of the natural world.

‘My daddy flies up the sky,’ she heard him say one day. ‘He can go right up to the sun. He fights Germans.’

Alison paused in what she was doing, wondering how on earth he knew that. She and Andrew never discussed the war in front of him, thinking that at three years old he was too young to understand. But it was inevitable that he would pick up something from the talk that was all around, from the people they met in the village street and the airmen who came to the house to drink tea, to the wireless with its talks and news and comedy programmes like
ITMA
and the Charlie Chester show. It might seem to go over his head, but he was bound to hear and repeat some of it. He probably didn’t even know what a German was.

By now, Alison had also met May’s father, William Prettyjohn, who spent his time in bed upstairs. She had been relieved to find that his room wasn’t a bit like a sickroom – his wife and daughter had done their best to make it as much like a living room as possible, with chairs for the rest of the family to sit in when they were spending time with him. The bed was close to the window so that he could look down into the garden and across the fields, and his view stretched all the way across the Tavy valley to Cornwall. Beside the bed was a small table and a bookshelf, and it was obvious that he was a great reader. He also oversaw the work in the garden, planning what would be grown and where it should be planted, and conferring with his own father, the gnarled old man who did most of the work.

‘I may be paralysed,’ he said to Alison the first time they met, ‘but that don’t mean I can’t do my bit.’ He looked at her with bright eyes. ‘I dare say you’m somethin’ of a reader, too.’

‘Well, I do like reading,’ she agreed, surprised by some of the titles on his bookshelf. He had all Dickens’s works and most of Trollope’s and Jane Austen’s, as well as Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle. He caught her glance and his mouth twitched.

‘Us was lucky to have a teacher down in Buckland school that knew what a good book was,’ he said. ‘Not like they read today, all these comics and Enid Blyton. And I’ve had time to catch up since me fall.’

‘Have you read all of them?’ she asked. Although she had read Jane Austen and some of Dickens, she had never tried Collins or Trollope and felt slightly ashamed.

‘Over and over again,’ he answered. ‘You can always go back to a good book, you know.’

Since then they’d had several chats. Alison had borrowed
Barchester Towers
and promised to look out for books for him. He wanted some more of Eden Philpotts’ books, explaining that this was a Devon author who wrote very fine tales about Dartmoor. ‘’Tis good to read about places you know,’ he said. ‘And he’ve got good things to say, too.
Understanding
things. He makes you think a bit. I get plenty of time for thinking, these days.’

Alison had time for thinking too, as she picked blackberries, made jam and bread, played with Hughie and tried to dream up interesting meals to give to Andrew when he came home in the evenings. It wasn’t always easy, because she never knew for certain that he would be in. Sometimes the squadron was kept busy flying almost all day, and as soon as the mechanics had made sure the planes were fit to fly again, they could be back in the sky. Mostly, they were patrolling the Channel, guarding both naval and merchant ships, but an alarm meant they were up within minutes, and then a battle would ensue and those on the ground could do no more than wait anxiously until it was over and the planes were safely back. Since Hitler had invaded Russia, however, there were fewer raids over Britain and the work of the fighters was mostly confined to patrols, shipping protection and accompanying bombers on their own raids.

Still, as often as not, there would be one or more missing when the squadrons returned. And although, as now, the loss seemed almost too painful to bear sometimes, she had learned, as they had all had to learn, to put away her sorrow and concentrate on the joy.

It was all anyone could do.

There were no alarms on Saturday evening, but the squadron had been flying all day and by the time Andrew arrived home, Hughie was fast asleep in bed and Alison and May had laid out a spread of sausage rolls and sandwiches. There was plenty of beer and a couple of bottles of sherry, together with two large jugs of orange squash. The gramophone was ready, with some fresh needles and a pile of dance records beside it, and the square of carpet in the front part of the living room had been rolled back to expose the floorboards, which May had insisted on polishing.

‘I don’t want you coming here to clean and polish,’ Alison protested, trying to take the cloth away from her hand, but May held on to it firmly.

‘If you’m going to pay me to be here, I ought to be doing something. I don’t want to be paid for sitting doing nothing.’ She glinted a look at Alison from her dark brown eyes. ‘Besides, you didn’t ought to be doing this sort of work, in your condition.’

‘My condition!’ Alison exclaimed, feeling the blush rise up from her neck. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything because I might be talking out of turn, but Mother thinks you’m expecting. She can always tell, she says, when a woman’s in her third month. So you can ask me to mind my own business if you like, but—’

‘No, it’s all right. I’m just surprised, that’s all.’ Alison glanced down at her slim figure. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to see yet, and I haven’t been sick or anything – in fact, I didn’t really think I could be pregnant, until I saw the doctor. But you’re right. Perhaps I ought to have come to see your mother first!’

May sat back on her heels and beamed up at her. ‘Well, there’s some nice news. So it’s all right if I tell Mother, is it? She’ll be well pleased, and so will Father. And Grandpa, too. ‘Twill be nice to have another little tacker about the place.’ She hesitated, then added a trifle anxiously, ‘You’m pleased about it, I hope? And Mr Knight?’

‘Oh yes, we’re thrilled. We hadn’t intended it to happen just yet, not with the way things are, with the war and everything. I mean, you wonder if it’s right to bring children into the world just now, don’t you? But it all seems to be going on for so long, we just didn’t want to wait any longer to give Hughie a brother or sister. And so here I am.’ She laid her hand on her flat stomach. ‘It’s rather hard to believe, that’s all. That there’s a new human being just starting to grow in here. It’s like a sort of miracle.’ She laughed, feeling suddenly embarrassed. ‘I suppose everyone thinks that, yet it’s happening every day. It’s not even as though it’s my first time.’

‘That don’t stop it being a miracle.’ May finished her polishing and got up. ‘If you ask me, all life’s a miracle and that’s why we’ve got to try to look after it. From a tiny baby to the whole world.’ She took her cloth and tin of polish out to the kitchen and put them away in the cupboard. ‘There, that’s done, and it looks all the better for it. Smells good, too.’

‘It’s lovely. Thank you, May.’ Alison went to the window and looked out along the narrow lane. ‘They should be arriving any minute – oh, here comes Andrew now.’

Andrew wheeled his bicycle up the path and leaned it against the front of the house. The Morris 8 had been put into a corner of one of the barns at the nearby farm, for use only on high days and holidays, and only then when the petrol could be obtained. Most of the time, like all the other men on the station, he used the cycle he’d been issued with.

He had taken his time cycling home this evening. His mind had been filled with thoughts of the friend he had lost, the gap that had been left in his life. He had been disconcerted by the depth of his feeling for Tubby Marsh, and didn’t really know how to deal with the grief he was experiencing. Accustomed as he was to losing pilots – particularly during the Battle of Britain, when he had had his own crash, but also since then – he had also grown accustomed to buttoning his feelings down tightly beneath the surface. But with Tubby, it was different. With Tubby, he had lost his best friend – almost, as Alison had said, a brother – and, it seemed, a part of himself.

To make it worse, he had seen that last desperate downward spiral into the sea. And he had heard Tubby’s screams in his ears.

Cycling home along the darkened lane, Andrew had found himself trembling, so violently that he had been forced to stop and lean on a field gate for support. He rested his arms along the top rail and bent his head, wondering if he was going to be sick. The nausea passed slowly, and he lifted his head again, staring out over the twilit landscape. The hedges were filled with twittering birds, settling down for the night, and he wondered dully what the war meant to them. Did they notice the noise, or did they accustom themselves to it? Did they begrudge the loss of so much habitat on the moor, when the airfield had been built, or did they welcome the increase in food scraps from the kitchens and canteens? Did any of the things that humans did, to the world and to each other, matter to them or did they simply adapt?

He became aware of a snuffling and snorting in the field. It was part of a large farm and pigs were kept here, to provide bacon and pork for Harrowbeer and for the national meat ration. The farmer and his son collected the waste from the kitchens at the airfield, and Alison had told him that the farmer would often find cutlery mixed up with it. You could hear the pigs playing with the knives and forks in the troughs when they had eaten the swill. Sometimes, when the wind was in the wrong direction, you were all too aware of the pigs not far away, but usually the smell blew the other way.

As he stood there, leaning on the gate, Andrew tried to force his mind away from thoughts of Tubby and into these other byways – birds, pigs, the twilit fields, the glitter of the sea far away in Plymouth Sound. But however hard he tried, he could not forget. The rosy, cheerful face kept returning to his mind, and the shadow he had sometimes glimpsed in the twinkling blue eyes.

Andrew had known all the time. He had known that Tubby was afraid, and he had done nothing about it.

He came into the cottage at last, rubbing his hands and beaming. ‘Everything ready? The others’ll be along pretty soon. I say, this all looks terrific. Can I have one of those sausage rolls now?’

‘No!’ the two women said in unison, and Alison slapped his hand away. May coloured up with confusion and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Knight. Fancy me shouting at you in your own house. I don’t know what came over me!’

Andrew laughed, aware that it was a little too loudly.

‘I deserved it. And don’t call me Mr Knight – Andrew will do.’ He overrode her embarrassed dissent. ‘You call Alison by her name, don’t you? Well, then.’