Some Day I'll Find You (14 page)

‘Blackwell – about bloody time!’ shouted his squadron leader when he spotted James walking across the tarmac. ‘You should have been back hours ago! Where’s
Arnold?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ yelled James over the roar of a dozen Merlin engines. He hesitated. ‘I just got married, sir,’ he shouted. ‘Pilot Officer Arnold was my
best man. We didn’t get the telegrams recalling us until we got back from the wedding. But John should be here by now – he was on his motor bike.’

The commander strode across and shook James by the hand. ‘Congratulations, Blackwell! You picked a hell of a day for it. Is she pretty?’

‘Yes, sir! Very. What’s happening here?’

‘Big flap on. We’re taking off in half an hour. Get your gear straight away. I’ll give everyone the flight plan when we’re in the air but I can tell you now we’re
going across the Channel. All except your bloody best man. Maybe he’s had a puncture. Now get weaving!’

Diana had taken off her wedding dress. She felt strangely numb as she did so, and she hadn’t quite known what to do with it afterwards. In the end she hung it on the back
of her bedroom door, where it sagged forlornly from the hook.

She tried not to start crying again as she unpicked the flowers from her hair. She was determined not to feel sorry for herself, not on her wedding day. When she’d finished, and put her
hair back in an Alice band, she threw on slacks and a cardigan, and wondered what to do next. She had never felt so restless.

‘I can’t settle,’ she said breathlessly when she found her mother, who had gone upstairs to her studio to distract herself with painting. ‘I don’t know what to do
with myself. I feel so lost and peculiar.’

Gwen put her brush down and went across to her daughter. ‘I know exactly how you’re feeling, darling,’ she said, hugging her. ‘It was the same after your father and I got
married – except that at least we had our wedding night before he had to go back to France. If I were you, darling, I’d—’

The phone began to ring downstairs.

‘That might be him!’ said Diana. ‘He must have got back to Upminster hours ago!’ She ran from the room, her father’s voice drifting up from the hall as she
clattered down the stairs.

‘Yes, this is he. Yes. Well, no, we call him John, but his birth name is Robert. Yes, I’ve told you, I’m his father. This is Oliver Arnold speaking. What is this about,
please?’

It obviously wasn’t her brand-new husband on the line, Diana realised. This was some business to do with her brother. Disappointed, she turned to go back upstairs when a sudden note of
concern in her father’s voice made her pause.

‘Yes, that’s correct, Officer; he owns a Triumph two-fifty. He left here on it – oh, three or four hours or so ago. Look, our boy’s not in any kind of trouble, is
he?’

There was silence in the hall as Mr Arnold listened to the reply. Diana saw her father sway a little, then put out his free hand against the wall to steady himself.

‘What? What kind of accident? Has he been hurt?’

A terrible sensation begin to creep over her.

Her father turned slowly around and stared through her. ‘When? When was this? How, exactly?’

Another pause for the answer. Then: ‘Are you telling me that . . . Is my son . . . ?’

‘
Oh-oh-oh-oh-no, Daddy, no! No no no!
’

Now Gwen was coming down the stairs behind her. ‘Dear God, what’s happening? Diana, whatever is the matter with you? What’s all this commotion?’

‘I see – yes, I do quite see. Mr Arnold was speaking again, very quietly. ‘Thank you for telling me. What? Yes, of course, I shall expect them. I’ll meet you there
shortly. Yes. Goodbye.’

With infinite slowness, he replaced the receiver on its cracked cradle, and looked up at his wife and daughter. The two women gripped hands and stood motionless together, choked into silence by
a fearful apprehension.

‘That was Sidcup police station,’ he said at last, his voice thick and slow. ‘There’s been . . . an accident. They’re going to send a car for me. I have to . . . I
have to . . .’ He stepped towards the two women and gave a helpless shrug.

‘I have to identify John. He’s been in a motor bike accident. It happened a couple of hours ago. Some sort of collision with an Army lorry.’

Gwen gave a low, animal moan. ‘Identify? Isn’t that . . . doesn’t that mean . . . ?’

Mr Arnold took a deep, juddering breath. ‘Yes. Our son is dead, my dear. John is dead.’

He sprang forward and caught his wife just in time. A trembling Diana helped him lower Gwen into an awkward, half-sitting position on the polished wooden floor.

The three of them huddled there together for some time.

They spoke not a word, nor made any sound.

And so, presently, Lucy found them.

It was nearly dark when Mr Arnold was delivered back to the Dower House in a police car. A swollen-eyed Lucy let him in. He hugged her, wordlessly, and then walked slowly
through to the drawing room. Gwen and Diana were clasped in each other’s arms on the sofa. They looked at him through reddened, bruised eyes, almost as if he were an enemy.

‘Well?’ Gwen whispered.

‘Yes. It’s John.’ Mr Arnold rubbed his face in his hands. ‘We’d all better have a drink.’

Diana crossed slowly to the sideboard and filled three glasses to the brim with scotch.

‘Listen to me, both of you,’ her father told them heavily after they’d all swallowed a finger of neat whisky. ‘It’s important you both know that John didn’t
suffer. It seems he was overtaking a car when the lorry came out of a side lane. The police say it must have been over in a split second.’

Before he could say any more there was a loud double-knock at the front door.

Mr Arnold threw his head back. ‘Christ. What now?’

He walked back into the hall. The women heard the door open, and a murmur of voices. It went on for some time before there was an exclamation from Mr Arnold. The voices came louder now, from
inside the hall itself.

Instinctively Diana and Gwen stood up.

Mr Arnold came back into the room, closely followed by two men, both in RAF blue. The younger man wore a chaplain’s collar.

Gwen hesitated, before giving a helpless shrug. ‘Oh. It’s kind of you to call on us so soon, but we’re only just . . . our son has only just . . .’

Mr Arnold shook his head. ‘They’re not here about John, darling.’ He faced his daughter. ‘Diana . . .’

She froze.

‘I just don’t know how to tell you this, my dearest child. Come to me.’

‘Tell me.’

He stared at her, and then ran his fingers through his hair, almost violently. ‘Oh God! This is a terrible, terrible day.’

‘
Tell me
.’

He stretched his arms towards her. ‘James has been shot down, Diana. Over France, this afternoon. Two other pilots saw it happen and they say – apparently they say there was no
parachute.’

Diana stared at him, then turned calmly to the two officers.

‘Are you here to tell me my husband is dead?’ she asked, almost conversationally.

The men exchanged glances, before the older one stepped forward. Kind eyes met Diana’s and when he spoke, it was with great gentleness.

‘I’m Captain Blake, Flight Commander Blackwell’s Squadron Intelligence Officer.’

Diana nodded wordlessly.

‘I’m very sorry to tell you it’s as your father said, Mrs Blackwell. Your husband has been shot down, over the Pas de Calais this afternoon. Other British pilots in the
vicinity say that his aircraft exploded when it hit the ground, and it seems he wasn’t . . . in a position to bail out. There was no sign of a parachute, you see.’

Diana stared at him. ‘So he’s dead.’

The officer nodded. ‘Yes, we believe so.’

‘He and my brother.’

The man turned and frowned faintly at his colleague, a prompt to the younger man to speak, but after an awkward silence, the intelligence officer sighed and turned to Oliver and Gwen again.

‘Yes. We learned about your son,’ he nodded sympathetically to Diana, ‘your brother, Mrs Blackwell, shortly before leaving Upminster to drive down here. It’s . . . well,
it’s a very bad business. The whole squadron is extremely cut up about it. Your boy was exceptionally popular, as was Flight Commander Blackwell.’

He hesitated, and then added: ‘As a matter of fact, I might as well tell you that we lost another chap over the Channel this afternoon. That’s three good men in as many hours.
It’s been the squadron’s worst day of the war so far.’

Mr Arnold swallowed and nodded. ‘That must be extremely hard for all of you. I’m very sorry.’

The intelligence officer inclined his head in appreciation. He seemed to have run out of words. After a long, defeated silence, the young chaplain finally cleared his throat.

‘The RAF offers you its sincerest condolences.’

His colleague closed his eyes. The Arnolds stared at the chaplain, before Diana gave a short, brittle laugh.

‘Well, thank you. Yes. Thank you very much indeed.’

For the first time since the men had entered the room, she moved, stepping quickly to the cigarette box. With shaking hands, she extracted one and fumbled to light it.

‘I only married him this morning, did you know that?’ she asked in a strange, high voice. She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Not much of a marriage, was it? Not much of a
marriage at all, I’d say.’

Diana turned to her parents, tears suddenly streaming down her face.

‘What are we going to do now, Mummy and Daddy? Whatever are we going to do?’

Nice, South of France, April 1951

This damned coffee-maker sounds just like a buzz-bomb, Diana thought as she switched on the chrome-plated machine in her gleaming American kitchen. This morning, as the device
bumbled and crackled its way to producing the steaming black coffee that still had the capacity to jolt her senses at the first sip, Diana struggled, as she always did, with the blinds that
screened her from what she was certain would be another dazzling sunrise.

Eventually she found the critical angle where the drawstrings reluctantly engaged the fickle pulleys, and the Venetian blinds smoothly rolled up to reveal a Mediterranean dawn.

Diana blinked as the slanting light fell on her face. This was no English sun; even this early in the year – it was still the first week of April – she could feel the latent strength
beating through the glass. It would be better to drink her coffee outside in the shade, where the early morning breeze still carried something of the cool of the night.

As she stirred preserved cream into her coffee – preserved cream was still virtually unavailable back home – Diana glanced around the kitchen of her new home. Everything sparkled and
shone; everything was twice as big as its equivalent back in England.

Giant fridge encased in shiny chrome. Chromed toaster, which could accommodate six slices of bread; chromed juice-maker which Stella loved playing with, stuffing freshly picked oranges into its
gaping maw and laughing delightedly as surprisingly paltry amounts of liquid dribbled into the steel beaker underneath; brushed-steel coffee-maker, now growling and burping in a sulky undertone
after yielding its first drink of the day; shiny white washing machine with built-in tumble-dryer which Diana had yet to place her faith in (so far, she had hung all the family’s laundry out
to dry from the iron balustrade that ran the length of the sun-terrace at the back of the villa) and, most wondrous of all, the enormous television which sat in its own walnut cabinet set to one
side of the door that led into the vast refrigerated pantry.

The television, like everything else in the villa with a plug attached, was American-made. The previous occupants had shipped everything here to Provence from their house in Cape Cod, and then
back again to Massachusetts when they left – everything but the kitchen appliances and the TV.

‘You might as well keep the goddamned thing,’ the departing tenant had told them with a shrug as he showed them crossly round the villa, all the while incongruously twirling a golf
club in his hands. ‘It’ll cost me more to ship it home again than to buy a new one. Anyway, it’s no goddamned use, no use at all. Back home it’d give you forty channels.
Here I can only get one, and that’s in goddamned French.’

But Diana liked watching French television. It was limited to about three hours each evening. Stiff, formal programmes, most of them – news bulletins, political discussions, dull farming
documentaries – but they helped her steadily improving French. Only the evening before she had watched an interview with the American President, Harry Truman, coming live from a studio in
Paris, and she had correctly interpreted at least two of the questions before the President’s translator did. She had thought the interviewer rather rude and offhand with Truman; you
wouldn’t have thought America had helped liberate France from the Nazis barely seven years earlier.

Now, Diana put her coffee cup on her usual tray, stencilled with abstract designs in the vibrant colours of Provence: blue, to represent the sky, yellow, the sun – and green, for the lush
vegetation that thirstily drank the winter rains and then stood verdant and defiant in the scorching summer heat.

Indeed, summer was almost here. There were little more than ten weeks to the solstice. The strengthening sun was almost as high in the sky at its zenith as it would be on an English
midsummer’s day. Diana slid open the double doors leading on to the south-facing patio and stepped outside.

As she’d hoped, the air remained cool from the night, although the sun, rising above the hills to the east, licked her skin as soon as she left the villa’s shade. She retreated under
the terrace’s white and yellow striped awning. It was going to be another warm day. Away down the long valley that led to Nice, Diana could see the Mediterranean, a hazy bowl of blue flecked
with white; distant fishing boats returning from their night’s work.

She sat in one of the terrace’s rattan chairs and stared out across her little corner of Provence. Even now, six weeks after the three of them had arrived, she could hardly believe she was
actually here, and likely to stay for the coming two, perhaps even three years.