A Place Of Strangers (8 page)

‘We may only have a short time.’

‘Does that make you afraid?’

‘I could lie and say it didn’t.’

‘I feel quite hopeless... as if nothing we could do would be
enough.’

‘Well, I’m damned if I’m giving in.’

‘No, we don’t have any choice.’

‘Look, Bea... you must know by now what I feel about you.
It’s as if I’ve known you all my life... from that very moment I first saw
you.’

‘That doesn’t make much sense.’

‘Maybe not but I could be dead in a few weeks. That’s what
doesn’t make any sense.’

They walk into the churchyard, shielding their eyes
from the glaring sun. Bea’s in a sleeveless cotton dress, navy blue with small
white dots. She is fair skinned and burns easily so Lavinia has lent her a
boater. They wander between the ivied tombstones, set under spreads of
sycamores and yews which darken the day.

Bea finds the stone of Mary, laid to rest in 1811, aged
three or thirty – it is crumbling to dust to they cannot be sure. But her
inscription can just be finger traced.

Death, like an overflowing stream,

Sweeps us away, our life’s a dream,

An empty tale, a morning flower,

Out, down and withered in an hour
.

They are kneeling, face to face, in new mown grass by Mary’s
grave. They kiss by silent, mutual agreement. Then his hands move down her
shoulders and around her waist. Bea lies back and draws him closer to her and
feels how much he wants her. She unbuttons her dress and parts it. Francis,
made child again, takes her breasts and dares to touch the inside of her leg
which is silkier than swansdown. In a moment more, she frees him to come into
her and his body bucks as if electrified. He moves urgently and crudely and it
is over quite quickly. She smiles and kisses him and they lie together on that
airless, windless day, as still as those around them, holding hands under the
mourning trees.

It was then Bea agreed to marry him for she could not turn
the corners ahead on her own.

Chapter Thirteen

McCall was crossing the rehearsal studio when a sudden pain
like a boxer’s jab to the kidneys collapsed him to the floor. His head hit the
concrete and he lost consciousness for several seconds. He came to, bleeding
badly and confused enough to think he had been caught in an explosion. A duty
BBC nurse dressed his wound in the first aid room and said he had symptoms of
pleurisy. She drove him to hospital where he was given intravenous antibiotics
and his chest drained.

‘You should never have started work this soon after
pneumonia.’

Evie rang McCall after calling Bea and hearing he had
ignored all medical advice and returned to London. She was owed a few days
leave and found him in the flat he rented near Shepherd’s Bush Green,
alternately shivering and sweating and still coughing up blood. She surprised
herself by how worried she was.

‘You look dreadful, McCall. I’m taking you back to
Shropshire.’

Evie stayed at Garth for two nights, making sure Bea did not
have to cope alone. For this, Bea was grateful and a warmth developed between
them.

Francis had decamped to the dacha and was sleeping there.
His irrational behaviour and mood swings alarmed Bea more each day. Yet still
she put off making the call she knew to be inevitable. But she stood over
McCall while he rang his programme editor and said the hospital doctors had
ordered him to convalesce for at least two more months.

Bea desperately wanted Francis coaxed back to the house.
McCall, still weak and anaemic, set off after breakfast. A sharp wind cut
through Garth Woods and the yellowing lakes of new daffodils beneath the
beeches and oaks that seemed so constant but would crash to earth in their time
like all else. Francis was huddled by the dacha’s open stove in his overcoat.
He glanced up as McCall entered but showed no sign of recognition.

‘Hello, Francis.’

‘I’m cold.’

‘Let me stoke up the fire, then.’

‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’

‘Of course we have, Francis. I’m Mac... Mac, you remember?’

‘Have you brought any biscuits?’

‘Yes, and I can make us some tea, if you want.’

Francis appeared slightly afraid. He had lost weight, too.
The food cupboard was open and McCall saw mouse droppings by a slab of ginger
cake Bea must have brought. He stacked the wood burner with dry logs and put
extra sugar in Francis’s mug. Francis took it without a word of thanks and
stared into the flames. The Eumig had been set up on the table and several
boxes of film left opened alongside more aerial photographs of German cities he
had helped to destroy.

‘How do you manage to sleep on these chairs, Francis?’

‘Sleep? I can’t sleep any more.’

‘You could if you moved back up to Garth.’

Francis ignored him and went stiffly towards the projector.
He tried to lace in a reel of film but his fingers could not co-ordinate.
McCall helped him.

The box was marked
Hamburg, July 1943 : Onboard camera,
Operation Gomorrah.
The screen remained black for the first few frames then
erupted without warning into a thousand silver star bursts as cascades of high
explosives and incendiaries fell from the aircraft’s bomb bays and erupted far
below.

McCall noticed Francis’s hands tensing and jerking
involuntarily as if he was back in his cockpit again and petrified about being
shot down into a real hell. Fires beyond counting raged out of control. From
the camera position many thousands of feet up, they seemed to spread like
runnels of molten milk, bubbling into a devastating tidal wave of destruction.
This was a biblical revenge, an inferno of awesome intensity, fed by oxygen
sucked from the atmosphere and converted into yet more hurricanes of flame.

And so it went on. In such a burning sea of stones, nothing
could have survived... no house, no person. No hope.

‘People just melted... sank into the tar of the streets
where they lived.’

‘It must have been a nightmare.’

‘I could feel the heat in my aeroplane.’

McCall switched off the Eumig and led Francis back to his
chair by the stove. The once indefatigable Francis, the gallant Boy’s Own hero
of McCall’s childhood, appeared exhausted by remorse. Here was a reckoning from
the other side of history.

‘Try to think of happier times, Francis... all the good
you’ve done in your life.’

‘I adored her, you know.’

‘You mean Bea?’

‘Do you know how beautiful she was?’

‘Of course – I’ve seen the photographs.’

‘She was mine. I’d have given her anything she ever wanted.
Denied her nothing.’

‘She knows you love her, Francis. Why don’t we go and tell
her again?’

Francis’s gaunt, unshaven face shed its weariness. He became
as happy and trusting as a child. In a moment more, he and McCall walked
through Garth Woods, hand in hand, as they had so long ago.

*

They got Francis undressed with a deceitful promise of
chocolate. McCall had never seen him without clothes before, never seen him so
reduced, so vulnerable. The flesh on his flanks and arms was withered and pale,
his genitals shrunk to those of a boy.

Bea managed to slip his pyjamas on and persuade him into
bed. Doctor Preshous arrived and asked him some insultingly simple questions –
where was he, who else was in the room, what date was it? Francis struggled to
answer. To witness his confusion was unbearable.

Bea followed McCall downstairs and they sat in silence
either side of the kitchen table till the doctor joined them.

‘I’ve given him an injection. He needs to sleep.’

‘What do you think is wrong with him?’

‘A sort of dementia, I’m sad to say.’

McCall said Francis had just described some wartime
experiences in great detail so how could he be demented.

‘What happened years ago will be clearer than the events of
this morning.’

Bea said they should have given him a bath.

‘They’ll do that at the hospital, Mrs Wrenn.’

‘Hospital? Why’s he got to go to hospital?’

‘For everyone’s sake, not least yours.’

‘But I’ve managed with him here so far.’

‘The good days are going to get fewer, I’m afraid.’

‘Why? What’s going to happen?’

‘He’ll decline quite rapidly to the point he won’t even know
who you are.’

The doctor left and McCall put his arm around Bea’s
shoulder.

*

Bea wanted McCall to take her into Garth Woods to pick the
daffodils with which she filled the house each early spring. There was comfort
in normality. Neither spoke much. Huge dark clouds threatened a downpour and
the wind carried the mewling cat-cries of buzzards hunting the church field
beyond the trees.

They had gathered armfuls of flowers by the time the storm
struck. They took shelter in the dacha. McCall rekindled the stove with a few
sticks and tidied away Francis’s papers and photographs. Bea made coffee. The
rain drummed against the dacha’s tin roof, beating a retreat from all they
hoped would never end.

‘I can’t put him in a home, Mac.’

‘But he’s going to need proper professional care.’

‘It seems so utterly... disloyal.’

‘You heard what the doctor said.’

‘I’ll have Mrs Craven to help.’

‘She’s not a nurse, Bea, and you’re not as young as you
were.’

‘After all these years... what a dreadful way for everything
to finish.’

Life, as they had always known it, was close to the end.

‘If it’s any comfort, he told me this morning how much he
loved you.’

‘I know he does but it’s like there’s someone else inside
him – some awful stranger.’

‘That’s not the real Francis.’

‘It’s the names he calls me, Mac.’

‘He said you were a spy, didn’t he? Why should he say that?’

‘I’ve no idea. That was his world, not mine.’

‘So it was just his paranoia coming through?’

‘Francis has much to be paranoid about.’

McCall refilled her cup and put the coffee pot back on the
wood burner to keep warm.

‘Tell me about him, Bea... about how you first met.’

She looked through the curtains of rain at the misted
window.

‘It was at a dance... such a hot night, early summer. He was
so handsome... so dashing. But he was an officer and I was just a driver and it
wasn’t the done thing for officers to start affairs with junior ranks. They could
sleep up but not sleep down so the camp commander had him in but Francis just
told him to go to hell because he was going to marry me whatever anyone said.
Francis was like that, very buccaneering... could get away with murder but all
the men loved him and he’d already flown a lot of raids so I suppose a blind
eye was turned to us, especially because my father was an Air Marshal and no
one dared upset him. Anyway, we got married later that same year... 1940. But
they were cruel days, Mac... so many never came back. We lived near the base...
a little cottage we found... and he’d fly off on these night missions and I’d
wait in the garden at dawn and look for him landing because his plane had KMS
on the side which Francis said stood for Kiss Me Sweetheart but I knew if I
didn’t see it, I’d probably be a widow.’

The cloying, honey-butter scent of the daffodils, part
bouquet, part wreath, saturated the air they breathed. The rain did not relent.

‘And the wedding itself... was that a splendid affair?’

‘It was up at the church here. All the village turned out.’

‘What a glamorous couple you must have made.’

‘We did, rather. Haven’t we ever shown you the film of it?’

‘What film? I never knew it’d been filmed.’

‘You know Francis. He filmed anything that moved. He got one
of his crew to do it, not very well as it turned out but we’re all
recognisable.’

‘I must see it. Where will it be?’

‘Somewhere about, I suppose. All his films are in here,
mouldering away.’

It took twenty minutes to locate a Kodak box marked Big Day,
lost behind a row of ring binders. McCall wound it into the Eumig. Bea waited,
suspended between joy and anguish at what she was about to re-live. Then the
sandstone porch of St Mary and All Angels appeared on screen and Bea and
Francis walked into the bright sunshine of a September day long ago.

McCall’s earliest recollections of her were not wrong. She
was truly a radiant princess, casting her cinematic smile at the laughing well
wishers who would throw their confetti for ever more.

Francis looked every inch the sardonic immortal McCall
remembered – the man who had pitted his life against the Nazi hordes and won.
He stood proud in the Number One uniform of a Flight Lieutenant with patch
pockets and two braids on his cuff. They gazed lovingly at each other before
Francis took Bea in his arms, kissed her for the camera.

The shot changed to show Garth Hall’s front lawn set with
trestle tables under the shading trees and laid for a feast of country food not
available on ration coupons. There were bottles of wine from the old judge’s
cellar, chickens and beef and a keg of beer to toast the joyous couple. Bea
passed happily between her guests in a woollen shirt dress, slightly waisted,
with bell sleeves and a corsage of creamy white lilies pinned at the left shoulder.

‘I pressed those flowers later. They must still be in the
attics, I think.’

‘Is that Mrs Bishop waiting on?’

‘Yes... she’d not long married herself.’

Some of the lost faces at the feast danced across the grass
to a wind-up gramophone with a polished brass horn and in her head, Bea could
almost hear Lew Stone’s band playing. The camera position moved again, this
time from the other side of the tables to reveal the old house and the entire
pastoral wedding scene in a last, elegiac composition in the setting sun.

Just before the footage tailed out, one of the airmen –
rather serious-looking and little more than twenty – walked across the picture,
turned and looked into the camera then made towards the open porch door of
Garth Hall. McCall shivered. He knew that face... knew it so well. But why
wouldn’t he? It was almost his own.

*

The rain stopped and McCall took Bea home. Mrs Craven said
Francis had not moved. The doctor rang to say an ambulance would collect
Francis at nine next morning.

Bea looked unsettled by the speed of events. McCall went to
check on Francis. He lay foetally in the bed where he had been born and McCall
feared for the visions tormenting his subconscious. Was he up in his bomber,
sweating with terror or down below in the smouldering wasteland with the corpse
rats or the fattening maggots and putrefying remains of those whose unknown
lives he had blown out? Who wouldn’t lose their mind at such thoughts? McCall
had to get back to Garth Woods.

*

The wind still carried through the trees, water still
polished the smooth black pebbles in Pigs’ Brook and fire still burned in the
dacha’s pot bellied stove.

Yet everything seemed different to McCall. It took only a
minute to re-lace the wedding footage into the Eumig, for it to clack through the
cogs and gates. And there was his father, young and alive and in this place –
Garth Hall. Here was the man who had put McCall into his allotted time and
space yet left little or no evidence linking one to another.

He ran the film again and again. He had to know his father,
to see into that nervous, uncertain face, the close cut of his fair hair, the
uniform that clothed his slight frame, even how he moved in the seven seconds
it took for him to walk from the wedding breakfast to the porch. Seven seconds of
light and shade and shadows on a tiny strip of emulsified film. It was not much
to make up for a lifetime of not knowing.