Winter of Discontent (10 page)
“Died of a heart attack, didn’t he? Or is that a load of whitewash?”
“No, you’re right. Or it may have been a stroke. They haven’t finished the autopsy yet. But natural causes, almost certainly.”
“Then what do you mean about ‘why he died’? Obvious, isn’t it?”
I didn’t intend to tell him much about my reasoning. I’d read enough mysteries to know that saying very little is almost always the wisest course. “I can’t tell you, really. It’s just a feeling I have, that there are some unexplained factors in here somewhere. Indulge me, will you? I promise I’ll come back and tell you the whole story if I ever figure it out.”
“Not talking, eh? Well, Jane here will tell you I can do enough talking for two.” Stanley cackled a laugh that turned into a coughing fit.
“Shall I get you some water?” I asked, alarmed.
“No—no,” he gasped out between coughs. “Be all right in a minute.” He pulled an inhaler from his pocket and sprayed it into his mouth, and gradually the coughing slowed down and he began to catch his breath.
“Lung cancer?” I asked Jane in an undertone.
“Emphysema, he says.”
Stanley blew his nose again, put away his inhaler, and settled his shawl around his shoulders. Then he shifted his gaze from Jane and me to some point in the middle distance and began to talk.
“YOU’LL WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE WAR. WHAT A TIME THAT was, what a time! I joined up first thing, you know, September, 1939, the day after Warsaw fell. I was in some of those first raids over Germany. Raids, they called them! I mean to say! Dropping propaganda leaflets! There were some, you see, back then, who thought Jerry didn’t mean it, that we could negotiate with him. Negotiate! He was killing Jews and Poles, little children and all. We were sick as mud when we had to fly over there dropping leaflets! The confetti war. Pah!
“But then the Hun started bombing English ships, and we got down to real work. Ran night raids, mostly. Ah, many’s the day I set out in the evening not knowing whether I’d be alive by breakfast. I wasn’t an officer, you know. Tail gunner in a Typhoon, and oh, she whipped us around like a typhoon when there was a wind up. But I did my job, even if I did have to be sick in a bucket every few minutes. And cold! So ruddy cold up there I thought my fingers would freeze off working that gun. But I did it, all the same. Fifty-seven targets I hit, planes and submarines and all. And the plane was shot down, too, did you know? In the Battle of Britain, that was, long before Bill joined up. We all got out alive, but wounded. Did I ever show you my medals, Jane? I gave the rest of my gear to the museum, but not the medals. Wouldn’t part with them. They’re here somewhere, if Caroline hasn’t lost them, or the ruddy kids—”
He started to organize himself to stand up, and Jane said hastily. “Seen them, Stanley. No need to show Dorothy now. What about Bill? When did he join up?”
She knew, of course, but it got Stanley back on track.
“Not until ’43. He was just a youngster then, of course, and green as grass, but he got a commission because he could fly. We needed pilots then. We’d lost a lot of good men. So Bill found himself in the same squadron as me, and I taught him a thing or two.” Stanley chuckled. “It wasn’t easy, mind you. He was young and thought he knew it all. He soon learned. War’ll do that to you. You learn or you die.”
The smile was still on his lips, but it had left his voice. The old, rheumy blue eyes focused again on some distant point and I knew he was seeing things and people sixty-odd years ago, young men long dead, beautiful swift airplanes long reduced to splinters. I cleared my throat. “Were you and Bill in the same plane?”
“Sometimes. Not always. Depended on who was fit and ready to fly on any given day. There was a lot of illness, you know, specially in the winter. God, we were cold! Our barracks wasn’t heated, nor the officers’ quarters, neither. They fed us well, of course, and there was a fire in the mess, but we all had chilblains and colds in the head nearly all the time. The planes weren’t pressurized as well as they are nowadays, either. You went up in one of those Typhoons with a cold in the head and you’d think the top of your head would come off, the pain was that bad. We all should have had those Purple Hearts the Yanks gave out. But we were tough, mind you. Took more than a cold in the head to keep us from our duty. I was sick that day, really sick, couldn’t hold my head up. Turned out to be the flu coming on. I couldn’t go up for three weeks. Flu was a real disease back in those days, not a glorified cold like now.”
He paused to blow his nose again, possibly remembering the bout with flu. Slightly confused, I got in another quick question. “So you weren’t in the plane the day Bill was shot down?”
“I’d be dead if I was, wouldn’t I? The other two men in that plane were killed. Only Bill and the pilot got away. They both bailed out—”
Jane interrupted. “John Merrifield, was it? The pilot?”
Stanley made a disgusted sound. “Him! Those men’d be alive today but for him. He thought he was a hotshot, a real ace pilot, and he took chances.”
This time it was I who interrupted. “But surely you have to take chances in wartime.”
“Risks, yes. It’s always a risk going up against the enemy. Many’s the time I was shot at, and caught a few bullets, too. My scars—”
“But tell us about the day when Bill’s plane went down,” Jane prodded.
“I was telling you, wasn’t I? If you’d let me talk!” He gave both of us a severe look and continued. “So Merrifield took Bill up—Bill was second pilot—and they headed out for Berlin. It was the night of August 24, you see.”
He looked at me meaningfully. I shook my head. “I was a child at the time. I’m afraid I don’t know many of the details of the war, only a broad outline.”
“Hmph! You Yanks had it soft. Nobody bombed
your
houses.”
your
houses.”
“We lost a lot of men,” I pointed out, slightly nettled. It was all right for
me
to acknowledge that American civilians hadn’t been subject to the horrors of war, but it was another matter to hear someone else say it. “And we helped win the war. If we hadn’t been there for D-day—”
me
to acknowledge that American civilians hadn’t been subject to the horrors of war, but it was another matter to hear someone else say it. “And we helped win the war. If we hadn’t been there for D-day—”
“All right, all right! I thought you wanted to hear about Bill.”
“I do. Sorry.”
“August 24 was the night of the Battle of Berlin. The plan was to do to Berlin what we’d done to Hamburg. Jerry was on the run by that time. Too many fronts to fight on, too many men lost, and the war’d gone on too long. Hitler’d begun to realize he might lose, and we wanted him to keep on thinking that. So we set out for Berlin. Not me, I don’t mean,” he said impatiently, as I opened my mouth. “I told you I was sick. And just about fed up over missing that raid, I can tell you. But our men went up, and by God, they did the job. We gave Jerry what for that night! But we lost a lot of men and a lot of planes ourselves. Bill’s plane bought it, because Smartypants Merrifield was flying too low and too slow. He was trying to stay under their radar, I suppose, but he didn’t get away fast enough from the antiaircraft fire on the ground. The kite was hit just as they were about to fly back over the Channel. Just blew up in their faces, the way I heard it. He and Bill bailed out, as I said, but they drifted in different directions. Merrifield landed in a field and got lucky. The farmer, who was in the Resistance, got different clothes for the blighter and helped smuggle him to the coast and off for home.
“Bill landed a couple of miles away in the village, straight into a nest of Nazis. He was taken prisoner, and that was that.”
“How did you know all of this if Bill was taken prisoner and the rest of the crew died? I don’t suppose Lieutenant Merrifield—he was a lieutenant?”
“Wing commander then. Ended his service as air commodore. RAF used naval ranks.”
“I see. Wing Commander Merrifield, then. I don’t suppose he would have told you he made mistakes.”
“Hah! Not he. He never talked to anyone but an officer if he could help it. No, I got it from Bill years later, when he came home. I had to drag it out of him, mind you. He didn’t like talking about it. He had a bad war.”
And Stanley was away again, seeing the past, the days of excitement and glory and fear and blood and death. But only for a moment. He shook his head and looked sharply at Jane. “He must have told you all this.”
Slowly Jane shook her head. “No details. Didn’t want to hear. Bad enough that he was captured, crippled, that we …” She turned her head away, but not before I saw that her jaw was working.
I was too astounded to hear Stanley as he droned on and on. Was this the Jane I knew, sticking her head in the sand? Jane, the capable, forthright, salt-of-the-earth sort?
Jane hadn’t really wanted me to dig into Bill’s past. She’d tried to pooh-pooh the idea that anything relevant to the present could be buried in his wartime experiences. Could it possibly be that she was afraid of something I might find?
Had Bill really told her more than she was admitting? And why would she hide it, unless …
“ … wasn’t all on the up and up on the home front, either.” Stanley’s voice had dropped to a confidential near-whisper, so conspiratorial that it jerked me back from my uncomfortable thoughts. “There were rumors … oh, I could tell you—what was that?”
Stanley jerked upright in his chair, startled by a noise at the door. More than startled? Afraid?
Of course not. Stop imagining things, Dorothy. What could an old man be afraid of in his own home?
Actually it wasn’t his own home. It was his granddaughter’s home. That fact was brought forcefully home in a moment as the door into the front room was banged open and a harried woman of about forty strode in, a cigarette in one corner of her mouth.
“Entertaining visitors, are we then, Stan?”
“Caroline, my dear, you’ll remember my old friend Jane Langland, and this is—”
“Yes, well, it’s not exactly the day for a party, is it? Or had you forgotten the kids have a half day off school today? They’ll be home any minute,
and
bringing their friends to lunch, and look at this lounge! You
said
you’d spend the day in your room, so I’d have the space to clean.”
and
bringing their friends to lunch, and look at this lounge! You
said
you’d spend the day in your room, so I’d have the space to clean.”
“I was only—they wanted to talk about the war—”
“I can imagine how much talking they got to do, can’t I?” She stooped, glared at me, and picked up the pile of assorted debris I had dumped on the floor, dropping ashes on the floor as she bent over. “Mental, that’s what he is,” she muttered in a furious undertone. Stanley began to cough.
“I’m sorry if we came at an inconvenient time, Mrs. Rutherford,” I began.
“The name’s Simmons.” She squeezed past me, pointedly, to pick up a few more things.
“Just leaving,” said Jane, standing. It might have been accidental that she stood in Mrs. Simmons’s way, but I didn’t think so. As she moved over to shake Stanley’s hand, Jane managed to fill most of the available space in the room. “Good to see you again. I’ll ring up soon, take you out to tea.” Ignoring Mrs. Simmons completely, Jane took me by the elbow and steered me out of the room. I glanced back at Stanley, who had controlled his coughing and sat looking like a whipped puppy, and winked at him. I don’t know if he saw.
“Whew!” I said when we were safely back in the car. “What a shrew! Poor Stanley”
Jane made an eloquent sound of disgust. “Only keeps him for the sake of his pension. Spends most of it on herself and those kids of hers, I shouldn’t wonder. Count yourself lucky you didn’t get to meet them. Spoiled brats, the lot of them.”
“And no wonder, with a mother like that. Is she really his granddaughter, or the wife of his grandson?”
“Really his granddaughter. Doesn’t act like it, does she?”
I thought about Alan’s grandchildren. They were younger, true. Caroline Simmons must have been about thirty-five or forty, and Alan’s oldest granddaughter, Cynthia, was twenty-two, if I remembered correctly. But they adored their grandfather, all of them, and treated him with both respect and affection. They were warm and friendly with me, too, which was nice of them, for they could well have resented me, taking the place of their real grandmother.
Would it be different if we ever had to live with one of them? Suppose we became so feeble we couldn’t manage on our own, and had to impose on one of them, or on Elizabeth, his daughter, who still lived in Sherebury. Would they treat us like nuisances, make it quite clear that our room would be preferable to our company? I didn’t think so, but then I hoped the situation would never arise. How awful it would be! Sitting there lonely and useless, knowing oneself a burden …
“Where are you?” demanded Jane. “Asked you three times if Stanley was any use.”
“Sorry. I
was
far away. In a place I didn’t like much. Anyway, I liked Stanley. Yes, he does tend to go on and on, but the poor old man doesn’t have anybody to talk to. He’d be better off at Heatherwood House, I should think. At least there they’d be nice to him, and look after him properly. I wonder if that woman even gives him enough to eat.”
was
far away. In a place I didn’t like much. Anyway, I liked Stanley. Yes, he does tend to go on and on, but the poor old man doesn’t have anybody to talk to. He’d be better off at Heatherwood House, I should think. At least there they’d be nice to him, and look after him properly. I wonder if that woman even gives him enough to eat.”
“If he dies, the pension dies. Imagine she feeds him.”
“She surely doesn’t nourish his soul. And can you imagine her smoking in front of him, when he has emphysema? We’ve got to follow up on that promise to take him to tea, Jane.”
“Want to pick his brains again?” Jane chuckled.
“No,” I retorted, “just be nice to him. I don’t think he really has much to tell us, though I did get something of a feel for the war. I hate to admit it, but he’s right about Americans, at least this American. I’m woefully ignorant about the period. I missed some of what he said, though. I got to thinking about something else just before that awful woman came in. He was making all sorts of dark hints. What was that all about?”
Jane’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. She became very busy negotiating a corner where there was no traffic at all. “No idea,” she said after an interval. “Likes to think he’s important and knows all sorts of things other people don’t. Load of rubbish. I’ve errands to run. Okay to drop you off at the end of the street?”
She took off like a scalded cat the moment she’d let me out, and I stood looking after the car and wondering more than ever what desperate worries could make Jane Langland rude.
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