Piece of Cake (29 page)

They all looked at Patterson, who was picking at a tiny wart that had developed on his left thumb. He stared back, guiltily. “What?” he said.

“Why?” Moran asked Cattermole.

“Because he bleeds so easily,” Cattermole said. “Pip is an easy bleeder, aren't you Pip? Ideal for chopping.”

“Oh, shut up.” Patterson sucked his thumb and wished, as he'd been wishing all day, that his head would stop throbbing. “If I get chopped,” he said sourly, “I'll damn well take you with me.” He knew that didn't make sense, but he didn't care. He'd made his wart bleed. He didn't care about that either.

An hour later, Rex signed something, gave it back to the adjutant, and stood up with relief. At last his desk was bare. “Bumf, bumf, bumf,” he said. “This isn't a war, it's a paperchase. I bet the German Air Force hasn't got to wade through endless bumf.” He strolled to the window and looked down. A mock grave had been dug at the edge of the lawn. Skull, Mother Cox, a sergeant and twenty airmen were down there, getting ready for burial practice. “Always assuming there is a German Air Force,” he said.

“True, sir.” Kellaway was not really listening. He was still checking through the correspondence, reports, forms, memos, returns, summaries. “Have you written to Starr's parents?”

“Yes and no. I've done a draft.” Rex took a sheet of paper from a desk drawer and re-read it. Outside, there came the distant bark of orders followed by the unhurried crunch of boots slow-marching on gravel. “This won't do,” Rex said firmly. “It won't do at all.” He handed the draft to Kellaway. “I can't possibly tell them the truth, but that simply sounds mysterious.”

“Yes. The bit about ‘exceptionally harzardous circumstances.' And yet no mention of the enemy.”

“Makes him sound like a spy.”

There was a long silence while they reviewed the problem.

“His parents are what, again?” Rex asked.

“Minister. The Rev. and Mrs. Starr, somewhere in Dorset.”

“Ah. Yes.”

A volley of blanks was fired, only slightly raggedly.

“Tell you what we used to do in the last show,” Kellaway said. “If a chap played silly-buggers and wrote himself off, his CO used to inform the parents that he'd given his life in the manner his comrades had learned to expect of him.”

“Hmm.” Rex scribbled that down and looked at it.

“If you like, you can always chuck in the old line about ‘conduct
above and beyond the call of duty,'” Kellaway suggested. “I mean, that's true enough.”

Rex nodded and wrote. Sweetly and cleanly, the notes of the Last Post arced across the afternoon like a beautiful, effortless bird, swooping and climbing.

“And it wouldn't be wrong to say he'll be sorely missed,” Kellaway added. “Especially as he hadn't paid his last month's mess bill.”

Rex took the bill and glanced at the bottom figure. “You should have told me,” he said. “I don't like officers getting into debt. It's untidy.”

“Dicky didn't have much choice, I'm afraid. I found his bank statements when I cleared out his room. Overdrawn, poor little blighter. Stiff letter from the bank manager.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence.”

Rex sat down, took a checkbook from his desk, wrote two checks, and gave them to the adjutant.

“That's not absolutely necessary, you know,” Kellaway said. “There's the RAF Benevolent Fund and various other—”

“It's a squadron affair,” Rex said crisply. “Let's keep it in the squadron.”

Flip Moran found Pip Patterson in one of the bathrooms, having a shower. He was standing quite still, propped against the tile wall, his legs braced, his head and shoulders pounded by the spray.

“You're on duty,” Moran said. “Blue Section's at available.”

“Okay.” Patterson didn't move.

Moran spread a towel on a radiator and sat on it. “What was all that about, in the library? If I didn't know you were a hardened, ruthless fighting-man I'd have said you were a bit upset about something.”

Patterson let the streaming water erase all expression from his face.

Moran shifted: the radiator was getting uncomfortable. “That was an awful waste, what happened to Dicky Starr,” he remarked.

Patterson curled his toes.

“Sometimes it's a terrible burden, being a thick Irishman,” said Moran. “The world makes no sense at all. D'you ever find that?”

Patterson held his face to the spray, and flinched as the tiny jets battered him.

Moran got up and turned off the shower. He tossed the warm towel to Patterson. “Come away from there before you're drowned entirely,” he said, and went out.

“Apple,” said Flash Gordon, chewing.

He was sitting in the Ligiers' kitchen, blindfolded with one of Nicole's silk scarves. Grandmother Ligier was dozing by the fire.

“You are sure?” Nicole asked.

“Absolutely.” He swallowed. “I know an apple when I eat one.”

“No you don't,” she said. She pulled off his blindfold and showed him an apple, intact, and a pear with a piece cut from it. “You ate a piece of pear. See?”

“Well I'm damned.” He took the apple and smiled in wonderment. “How the dickens did you do that?”

“Oh, it is simple. Smell is sometimes stronger than taste. I put the apple under your nose and then I put a bit of pear in your mouth. Old trick.”

“That's absolutely amazing.” Gordon stretched his legs and propped his elbow on the table while he sniffed the apple. “D'you know any more like that?”

“No.” She wound the scarf in and out of her fingers. “Now I think I have told you everything I know about the human body.”

“What a pity.” He polished the apple on his sleeve and made it shine a deep, waxy red. “I suppose I ought to be more careful when it comes to lovely ladies and apples,” he said lazily. This was their sixth meeting and he was fairly relaxed. “Didn't some chap get into trouble that way a long time ago?”

She watched him and said nothing. He had such a smooth face it was hard to imagine him shaving. His nose was snub and his lower lip was very full and strong. When he noticed her silence he glanced at her, and he cocked one eyebrow in a curiously individual way, half-challenging, half-uncertain, that she found touching. What he saw when he glanced made him keep on looking. Her eyes were bright and there was something in her expression he had never seen before. Curiosity? Mischief? Impatience? He put down the apple and straightened his tie. “He probably ate a different
kind of apple,” he said. “All a fairy-tale, anyway. Personally I could never understand why—”

“Come with me.” She stood up.

“Where are we going?”

“To the summerhouse in the garden.”

“Oh.” He got his coat. “Won't it be jolly chilly?”

“Yes.” She opened a chest and took out four blankets and a towel. She gave him the blankets. “But not for long.” She picked up a flashlight and a half-full bottle of red wine and went out by the back door.

Flash Gordon hesitated, looking from the open door to the blankets to the apple to the fire alongside which the old lady snoozed. Its flames jumped in the draft, “Crikey,” he said thoughtfully, and went out, shutting the door behind him.

“Well, that was a first-class grade-A disaster,” Fitz Fitzgerald said. He wanted to sound nonchalant or indifferent but he could hear the bitterness grating in his voice.

“No, it wasn't,” Mary Blandin said. “You mustn't exaggerate, my love.” She began poking the fire to make it blaze.

“I seem to have exaggerated
my
love. Or something.” He was slumped in a chair by the dinnertable, which had not yet been cleared. “Bloody stinking hell,” he muttered. He reached for the wine-bottle and filled his glass to the brim.

“Don't be broody.” She sat opposite him and cut herself a slice of cheese. “And don't swig that wine. It's a very good Traminer and not cheap. If you want to get drunk, go and buy a couple of liters of
ordinaire.”

“Thanks for your sympathy,” he mumbled. But he put down his glass.

“Oh, sympathy, sympathy! What good's sympathy?” There was no annoyance in her voice: just a touch of brisk, good-humored impatience. “All it does is feed your self-pity, and since there's no earthly reason for you to feel sorry for yourself I'm not going to encourage anything of that sort. Besides, it doesn't suit you.”

“All right.” Fitz hunched his shoulders and stuck his jaw out. “What d'you want me to do? Tell jokes?”

“Yes, please. If they're really funny.”

She drank a little of his wine while he glowered at the cheese. “Don't know any,” he said.

“Fitz, you're a fraud. You're a failure and a phony.”

“Wait a minute. Just remembered.” He chewed on a knuckle for a moment. “About the bloke who won an elephant in a raffle.”

“Get on with it, then.”

“Well, his friend offered to train it.” Fitz spoke flatly, almost curtly. “He said he could teach it to sit down. This chap said okay, so his friend went over and gave the elephant the most almighty kick in the balls, and sure enough it sat down.”

“Education is a wonderful thing.”

“Yes. Well, the chap didn't think so. He asked his friend if he couldn't teach it something without being cruel. His friend said yes, he could teach it to shake its head. So he went over to the elephant and whispered in its ear: ‘D'you want another kick in the balls?' And the elephant shook its head.” Fitz swung his head slowly, ponderously and gloomily.

Mary laughed. “That's a rotten joke, Fitz.”

“All right, you tell one.”

“Ladies don't tell jokes.”

“Who said you're a lady?” He watched her top up their glass. “Come to that, who said I'm a man?”

She came around the table, stood behind him and put her arms around his neck. “You're not the first, you know,” she said. “It often happens. Just don't worry about it. Nature knows best. It's not automatic. It's not like putting your penny in a slot machine and always getting a bar of chocolate.” Her hands slipped inside his unbuttoned shirt.

“I once lost a penny in a slot machine on Victoria station,” Fitz said, staring into space.

“There you are, then.”

“Perfectly good penny. No chocolate. Bloody swindle.”

She kissed his ear.

“Fruit-and-nut,” he said. “Platform three.”

“Goodness me,” she whispered. “It must have made a very deep impression.” Fitz stood up, shoved the chair aside, and embraced her. A couple of rogue tears leaked from his eyes; he was glad she could not see them. “Talking of making deep impressions,” she said after a moment, and gently rocked her hips.

“I know.” Fitz sighed. “God moves in a mysterious way.”

“True. I can feel him moving.”

Fitz wiped away his tears and glanced at the door leading to the stairs. “Perhaps …” he began. From the street came the familiar sound of a car horn, jaunty and insistent. “Oh, bugger!” he said crossly.

The two men were halfway home before either of them said anything.

“Enjoy yourself tonight?” Flash asked routinely.

“Not bad. You?”

“No complaints.” Flash changed gear, unnecessarily. “Nicole showed me some more experiments.”

“Uh-huh.”

Flash drove in the wrong gear for a time and then changed back to the right one. “She's really hot on biology and anatomy and all that stuff,” he said.

“I'm glad somebody understands it,” Fitz said.

Flash chuckled as if Fitz had made a witty remark. “Amazing creatures, women,” he said. “Full of surprises.”

There was no answer to that. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

Rex had Hornet squadron airborne soon after breakfast next morning. There was a fine, clear sky and he wanted to practice something new for the Armistice Day display, even if the replacement pilot hadn't arrived yet.

“Nothing flashy about this maneuver,” he told the pilots gathered in the crewroom. “It's to be part of a very solemn ceremony, so I want it done in perfect unison, like Trooping the Colour. You'll each find a colored smoke canister fixed to your fuselage, with a switch in your cockpit. Right?” He looked at Micky Marriott, who nodded. “Good. Now, we're going to paint the cross of St. George in the sky. ‘B' flight crosses behind ‘A' flight. Height one thousand. Speed one-fifty. Release smoke for six hundred yards. Must have perfect timing and absolute uniformity. Clean start, clean stop, straight lines, square angles. St. George for England all over the sky. Symbol of victory. Also loyalty. Remember who's going to be down there watching.”

“Who, sir?” Stickwell asked.

“Any other questions?” Rex said.

“A royal personage, you ignorant fart,” Cattermole told Stickwell. “If you ask him nicely he might cure your pox.”

“It's not mine,” Stickwell said. “I'm just looking after it for a friend.”

“Let's go,” Rex said.

He took them up to eight thousand. For the first half-hour they practiced familiar routines: flights in line astern, changing to sections in close vic, then squadron in vic—his favorite ace-of-diamonds pattern—followed by the compact spearhead formation. Finally, on his word of command, the flights detached, peeled off to left and right, and fell steeply.

He saw the horizon swing to the vertical, felt his straps hugging his ribs, glanced at his wingmen, plunging sideways, knifing the sky with their wingtips. The growing rush of air worked on the Hurricane's shape and straightened it easily into a normal nosedive. The horizon wheeled level again. The fields and woods of France lay spread in a thousand dull shades of brown and gray and green. The land looked dead and empty, but as Rex eased back the stick, wintry sunlight flashed and flickered on a ragged network of streams and ditches. For a second the reflections ran like spilled mercury. Then the angle was lost. Rex flattened out and turned toward the airfield.