The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (25 page)

“The trouble was he took it too seriously,” I said.

“Ah, go on,” Alf said.

“He never had any luck,” I said. I looked at the glass on the bar, and then up at Alf and his wife again. Their eyes were big with surprise and a sort of vacant tenderness as I began to tell them how it had been with Mr. Lockley. I began to tell them how, both in his personal life and his service life, Mr. Lockley had never had much luck: how he had lost his family in an air raid in London, how when he had come to the squadron he had never seemed to be able to land an aircraft as it should be landed, how little incidents and little accidents seemed to fill his life with a sort of haunting fatalism until he was almost afraid to fly. I told them how hard he tried; and how, the harder he tried, the worse it seemed to get for him. I told them how, through one of those unaccountable misjudgements, he landed a Halifax fifty feet off the runway and survived to face the problem of his own utter despair.

“Well, you wouldn't hardly credit it,” Alf said. “You wouldn't hardly credit it.”

And finally I told them how, behind all the foolery and the larking and the tipsy lightheartedness and the practical joking, Lockley went out over Bremen and conquered at last the fears and failures and the accidents and incidents of despair.

“He rang the bell alright that night,” I said. “His leg was smashed by flak but he didn't say anything. He went on and made one bombing run, and then another. His leg was very bad and the aircraft was falling to pieces. But he let all the crew get out, and then, at the very last, got out himself. He baled out with a smashed leg and they took him prisoner.”

There was silence in the bar as I finished speaking. I looked up at the big eyes of Alf, big and stupid and friendly, and of Mrs. Alf, florid and kind-hearted and full of wonder. They were shining with unfallen tears.

“It just shows you, don't it?” Alf said.

“They gave him a medal for it,” I said.

“He earned it,” Alf said.

I looked at Mrs. Alf, tenderhearted behind all the powdered floridity, the lipstick cracked on her big lips, the tight rings on her too-fat fingers. “He earned more than that,” she said.

A little later Alf himself ferried us back over the river. We shook hands and then at last drew slowly away along the river banks as Alf began to pull the ferry boat back towards the sallow-trees, glowing now like misty cream dust by the dark walls of the pub.

“Good night, sir,” Alf said. “Nice to see you. Nice to hear about Mr. Lockley.”

“Good night, Alf,” we said. “Good night.”

We drove away along the empty river bank. The water was dark and smooth in the falling light. We drove about a mile and then stopped before making a turn in the road. And as we stopped I could hear a sound coming up way we had come, over the darkening water.

Someone was ringing the bell.

In the late autumn when Bradshaw was killed the beech-woods in the hills beyond the 'drome were bronze with frost and rain. The leaves were falling fast and the Hurricanes looked blacker than ever they did in the light of summer. If Bradshaw had lived a little longer he would have been twenty.

The week after we knew he was dead I had a long letter from his sister. It seemed that she was some years older than Bradshaw and the letter was bitter, painful and disjointed. It placed what seemed to me a slightly hysterical emphasis on the futility of things. It seemed also that she had written to the Authorities. I did not know quite whom she meant by the Authorities, but I knew what she wanted them to say. She wanted them to say, as she now wanted me to say, that he was not dead. “I cannot sleep at night,” she said. “I can't do anything. I feel I shall never do anything again.” It seemed that they had been much more than brother and sister. “We knew each other,” she wrote. “We knew each other as no two people ever did. He belonged to me. We were sort of telepathic. I knew when he was coming home. I knew everything about him. He was clean and decent and good. And sometimes I know he isn't dead. I know. I know.”

A week later there was another letter: this time from his mother. It was very short. “Perhaps you would come to see us,” it said.

Three days later I went down to see them in Hampshire. It was one of those houses with a big white drawing-room and French windows leading to a gravel terrace outside. There were many large photographs on the black grand piano under the window, and on the white mantelpiece, above the fire and the little silver spirit kettle that was never used, there were more photographs in silver frames. Among them were several photographs of Bradshaw. Bradshaw as a baby with no hair, as a small boy in a school football team, as a larger boy with a soft, blond face, and thick, blond hair, as a young man in pilot's uniform. They were all very carefully and beautifully displayed, but I could not see in any one of them the Bradshaw I knew.

For a long time during tea we did not talk about Bradshaw. The sister had a fair, plain, rather aristocratic face, with pale golden eyebrows and eyes that had a steadfast hostility. She was older than Bradshaw, I felt, by about eight or nine years. She was conscious that she was not very good looking. It was not only easy to see that she did not like men, but it was still easier to see that she wanted men to like her and had not succeeded. So she sat rather aloof from me, pretending not to watch, but watching, pretending not to care, but caring very much for what I had to say.

“I'm afraid there's not much for tea,” she said. “Not very lavish. I know what you men are.”

Suddenly the mother spoke.

“How long have you been on the station?” she said.

She was rather tall and thin, her face and hair both quite colourless. She had high cheek-bones and wore gold pince-nez on a gold chain, but she kept them mostly in her hands, opening and shutting the glasses with her long, cold, colourless fingers.

“Three months,” I said.

“Then you were there when Roger had the accident with the tail-wing.”

I sat trying to remember.

“He told us how he was standing by the tail-wing of a 'plane and how it swung round and hit him. It hashed his forehead. Another fraction of an inch and it would have been his temple.”

“Yes, oh, yes,” I said.

I sat still trying to remember. All I could remember was a time when we were arguing with a man in a snack bar and how he said: “I'm asking you where the bloody R.A.F was at Dunkirk? Go on, I'm asking you,” and how Bradshaw, who was not very sober, got up to hit him and how the man, who was not very sober either, seized a fork from the snack counter and struck him across the forehead.

I did not think either the mother or the sister knew about this. Bradshaw often got into a violent temper with dead-beats.

“You can't be too careful near aircraft,” I said.

At this moment there was a whining from outside the French windows, on the terrace. I looked up and saw a big cream collie breathing a grey cloud against the glass.

“It Caesar,” the mother said. “Let him in.”

The sister got up, opening the windows, and let in a delicate and excitable dog who lashed his tail against the chintz chairs and the leg of the tea-table.

“It's really Roger's dog,” the mother said.

“He loved animals,” the sister said. “He'd never see one hurt. He'd never kill anything or see anything killed. Do you remember how he cried, Mother, when Ranger had to be killed? He hated the thought of anything being killed.”

I did not say anything; it was simply that I did not know this Bradshaw. The Bradshaw I knew had killed a great many people. His job was night intrusion; he had shot up a great many trains, cannon-gunned many aerodromes. He had taken ruthless delight in attacking small ships. I had never thought of him as having been sensitive about killing things, and if he seemed to place less value on human life than apparently he had placed on the lives of dogs you could excuse him this because he was, after all, very young. At the time of Munich he was sixteen; he could not have understood or cared very much about what was going on. At nineteen he had begun to kill things.

My tea got cold in my cup, and Mrs. Bradshaw asked if she could pour out some more. I gave her my cup and she put the milk into the cup very slowly, and then sat with a lump of sugar poised between the tongs. I knew that the time was coming when she was going to ask me if Bradshaw was really dead.

But it was not she who asked, after all, but the sister.

“I know you'll think this is foolish,” she said. “But I don't believe Roger is dead. In fact, I know he isn't. I know.”

There was nothing I could say. I knew that Bradshaw was very dead. He had gone out in a full moon with a very good pilot, Sergeant Thompson, over Northern France, on intruder patrol. It was so light that you could see the lines of the railway tracks running like silver pipes across the flat countryside road as Bradshaw went down to machine-gun a north-bound train. Thompson saw him hit the telegraph post and burst into flame. After this, Thompson went down very low himself and circled over the tracks, looking out, but there was no one beside the burning 'plane.

Bradshaw was very dead and I had liked him. The tea was quite cold now as I sipped it. It was hard to say why we had liked each other. He was quite mad and had a violent temper and no values at all; in the evenings after the day's operations one of the things he liked to do most was to drive fast in the darkness down to an hotel by the sea. He drove very fast going down, never slowing up at cross-roads, often jumping traffic lights, behaving most of the time as if the car were an aircraft and the road simply the sky; and he drove even faster coming back. He had already shot down three by night and two by day, and he began to have some of that aristocratic arrogance that the fighter-boy often acquires after success. He was something of the hero. The hotel was a place for drinking: the darkness was the place to take a girl. He liked the kind of girl his mother and his sister probably did not really believe existed: big blonde girls with cherry squash lips and short fur coats that they kept undone as they leaned loosely on the bar. He treated them all as they had no identity except the identity of ripe flesh; he gave them nothing of what was inside himself, no thought, no emotion, no consideration, and there was only one who ever got under his skin. She was a big shrewd girl, older than himself, who decided she wanted to possess him because he was fresh, aristocratic, and a fighter. She wanted something like a permanent attachment. Because of this he decided not to see her again. “O.K.” she said, “you lead me to expect you want to go steady, and then all you want is a date just when you fancy it. I've a damn good mind to write to your mother and tell just what sort of a son she's got.” I was waiting by the car in the darkness outside the hotel as the argument went on, and I heard his voice beseeching her almost hysterically in answer: “Please,” he said. “Please. My God, don't do that. Do what you like, but don't do that. Please don't!”

I set my cup on the table and Mrs. Bradshaw, slightly inclining her head again, asked me if I would like more tea. I said no, thank you, and I saw her take a long deep breath, her face growing suddenly rigid with the effort of what she had to say.

“It's the uncertainty,” she said, “the awful uncertainty.”

Suddenly I felt it was hypocrisy, and in a sense of betrayal of him, not to tell her that he was dead.

“There was not uncertainty.” I tried to tell her tenderly and quietly what I knew. “He was seen to crash. We know. He was seen by a very experienced pilot who couldn't be mistaken.”

“Why couldn't he have been mistaken?” The sister's voice was suddenly very hard and hostile. “Why not?”

“Because it was full moon. The pilot was very experienced. He circled and searched until he couldn't stay any longer.”

“But he's only human. He could make a mistake.”

“I don't think he could.”

“You think! But you don't know, do you?” she said.

“You don't know! You don't know!”

“We do know,” I said. “So far as is humanly possible”

“Then you don't know, do you? Not finally. Not absolutely. Not finally.”

“well—”

“No! But I know. I know. I know in here.” She put her hand on her chest and clenched her thin fingers and tapped her chest with them. “In here, that's where I know, and I shall always know. I always have known because I knew him better than anyone ever did. But I always shall know.”

“Dorothy,” the mother said, “Dorothy.”

“I can't take that from you,” I said.

“I'm glad you think that,” she said bitterly. “I'm glad, I'm glad you grant me that.” She stood up. She was very excited now and she could not have known how much she was trembling. “And I know something else.”

“Dorothy, Dorothy,” the mother said.

“I know it was wrong for him to be doing what he was doing. He was young and clean and decent and he hated killing. He did it because he had to, not because he liked it. He wasn't like that. He was just a clean, decent, honest boy. You never saw him cry when his dog died, did you? No! But I did! I did, and I know! I know!”

She began to go out of the room and just before she finished speaking, and the mother sat staring silently at the tea-table after she had gone.

“I'm very sorry,” I said.

The mother did not speak. Very slowly she began to pack one saucer on top of another, and then the plates and the cups and the spoons together. The noise of crockery was harsh in the silence left by the upraised voice of the sister. I waited a little longer, watching the mother and now thinking again of Bradshaw. I was not thinking of him now as the wild person he was in the evenings at the hotel by the sea, with his drinking and his arrogance and the blondes; or as he was when he was afraid that someone would reveal him to his mother; or as he was when the newspaper printed him as a night-fighter hero with eyes that saw in the dark; or as he was as his sister knew him, decent and brotherly and very much the product of his class, coming home on leave to behave as the clean and virgin idol of youth who cried over the death of a dog.