Tears of Autumn, The (19 page)

The rest of the crew had been picked up hours earlier by a Sunderland that they had so dreamed of.

But the air-sea-rescue launch that had also been dispatched to the area decided to do one last box search in the fading light of the day.

One of the look-outs sweeping the horizon with binoculars suddenly stiffened, called the bridge.

‘Something off the starboard side, sir.’

As they approached, it was quite dark and they switched on the searchlight.

‘Looks like two dead Jerries, sir.’

But as they came alongside, the man sitting behind the other, arms wrapped around nursing him, moved one arm to shield his eyes from the harsh light.

A shout went up.

‘One of them is alive, sir.’

Two of the crew went down the scrambling nets and held the dinghy steady as another stepped carefully into it. Suddenly he turned and yelled up at the bridge:

‘Christ, sir, he’s British – looks like the pilot.’

In the small sick bay the orderly diagnosed a broken arm, dehydration and delirium. They wrapped blankets around his blue, shaking body.

‘He keeps on saying sorry, sir.’

The duffel-coated captain frowned. ‘Who to?’

‘The dead Jerry, sir. He went crazy until we brought his body aboard. It’s the U-boat skipper.’

As the needle went in, peace came over Biff at last, the peace of chemical nothingness.

It could not last for ever.

On the bathroom floor Biff made no attempt to struggle. An inner warmth had come over him. He knew, like the old wounded animal he was, that this was the end. Mother nature was about to return him to the dust he’d risen from all those years ago – in another world now long since gone.

And it was time he went, as well.

His mind kept drifting from the present to that other world.

They’d put him up for another gong, and the powers that be had taken their time agonizing about it. In the end it was approved, but before he had been gazetted he made it perfectly plain: he would not present himself for the award, would not accept it and would send it back if they awarded it. He could not live with the idea that he was being fêted for something that had led to the death of his friend.

At one time in the dinghy he’d talked to Konrad for hours, asking why they hadn’t written, and how was Anna? Once, sure that Konrad’s eyelids had moved, he’d grabbed his lapel with his good hand, and had shaken him violently, before collapsing back in tears.

He had been treated in hospital in Stornoway, then flown to the mainland and taken to a lovely country house just outside Aberdeen, which had been requisitioned as a convalescent home. Rosemary had been notified and granted immediate leave to see him.

She’d passed her officer course and had been sent to Norfolk House, St James’s Square, working with the naval section on the plans for the invasion of occupied Europe.

She was in a huge room with maps covering the walls, sometimes attending chief of staff’s conferences in the morning, other times overseeing the sorting of all the postcards of Normandy, maps, Michelin Guides and photographs that the public had been asked to send in under the guise of a general war effort.

Some postcards of beaches began to be pinned to the walls in several rooms. She was living in a nurses’ hostel, travelling on the tube every morning, then walking down the Haymarket with the surging crowds.

In the April of 1944 she moved to Southwark House with the naval unit. They were accommodated in Nissen huts, set in a large area of parkland, but worked in the main house. It was the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force – SHAEF for short, and she saw them all – General Eisenhower (Ike), Montgomery, even on one occasion Churchill.

As the date for the invasion drew nearer they sometimes worked eighteen-hour days, only stopping to don tin hats as the air raids came over thick and fast.

She hadn’t seen Biff since that week they’d enjoyed together. From his letters she knew he was now with Coastal Command. They began tentatively to talk of the future. Although the war was far from over, there were signs at last that it might end one day in the not too distant future.

On the night of 5 June 1944 she and all the others didn’t go to bed; they knew that the order had been given for the assault on Fortress Europe to be launched in the early hours of the new day. They heard the sound of the paratroopers’ planes going over. All the girls felt very emotional at what might happen.

A month later Rosemary and a contingent of WRNS crossed the Channel themselves, the ship’s Tannoy blaring out, over and over again, Bing Crosby singing: ‘
Would you like to swing on a star
’.

She’d transferred on to a landing craft before setting foot in France for the first time since her honeymoon six long years before. As they travelled behind the advancing army, under the
umbrella of SHAEF, troops would wave and wolf whistle and the girls waved back. They had been found quarters in the ruined city of Caen when the next-of-kin message had come through. Biff had been reported missing in action. Rosemary read it again, couldn’t take it in, then felt weak and slumped down into a chair. She was given immediate compassionate leave and flown by Dakota to Northolt. All the way, as far as the eye could see through the little window, the Channel was still full of hundreds of ships. She prayed over and over again for a miracle.

And her prayers were answered.

Good news awaited her.

He’d been found, suffering from exposure and with a
non-life
-threatening wound. She was to go to a transit unit who would issue her a travel warrant for Aberdeen.

She was bursting with happiness as she got off the underground.

He had made a special effort, with the help of the nurses, to look really spruce for her, with a new uniform, a sharp shave, teeth brushed, and a clean sling.

He was in the lounge, gazing down the drive in anticipation of the first sight of her as she got out of her taxi.

A car did turn up the drive – a staff car. A wing commander and an RAF chaplain got out, looking up at the house as they tugged at their uniforms. They looked very serious.

As they made their way to the front door he had a sudden, awful premonition. He’d never had one before.

He heard their hushed voices in the hall, and the sound of the door opening behind him. He stood, utterly still, willing it not to happen, but then a hand touched him gently on the shoulder. He couldn’t turn, his body was frozen.

‘Squadron Leader Banks?’

He didn’t want to say yes. He
didn’t
say yes, but the voice continued anyway.

‘I’m sorry. I have some very bad news. Perhaps you’d like to sit down?’

No, he
didn’t
want to sit down,
didn’t
want to hear as the voice, after a long pause, murmured very quietly: ‘I regret to inform you that your wife, First Officer Rosemary Banks, was killed today by enemy action.…’

At last the voice faltered: ‘A V1.…’

The world stopped then, had no meaning, no time, no existence.

If he had died she perhaps wouldn’t have been at that place at that precise time. He should have died, not her. Was this God’s punishment for killing Konrad?

But he
was
dead of course. Maybe he was breathing still, eating, sitting in the grounds, always watched, but his heart was dead.

Biff turned on his back, knew that the time had come. As the last of the blood coursed through the arteries of his brain, the images became intense, vivid.

He’d returned to the damp musty loneliness of the cottage a couple of months after the war in Europe ended, discharged early on medical grounds.

As soon as he heard that the cottage had not been re-let, he’d wanted to go back there, eventually getting the estate agent on the phone after several hours of trying.

‘Of course,’ said the man, ‘nothing would give us greater pleasure than to see you back with us. By the way, I think the owners would like to sell it. Would you and Mrs Banks be interested?’

Biff said nothing, other than that he’d like it for six months, then perhaps.…

‘And how is Mrs Banks? Is she still in the WRNS?’

Of course, he had to tell him then, heard his voice going mechanically through the routine, and the aftermath of accepting kind condolences. He’d done it so often.

‘Such a tragedy – a lovely lady, lovely.’

He could imagine the man at the other end shaking his head.

As the war was finally over, and crowds were celebrating VJ day, he’d sat in front of the fire – summer or not – with a bottle of whisky, and one of her blouses, pressing his face into it, catching the last vestiges of her scent, and crying, drinking and crying until oblivion mercifully came.

He contemplated suicide. He’d kept a German Luger revolver and a few rounds: a trophy of war – of death. He was drinking and looking at it, loaded and ready on the table beside him, remembering all he could of their short life together, and Sorrento, when he suddenly, thought of Anna. Was she alive? Did Konrad have children? Should he get in touch with her? The Allied Commission or the Red Cross presumably could come up with the answer, and an address.

Then he thought of what he’d say to her: that he had been the one who.…

He shook his head sadly. No, he was alone now, all alone. He’d only stir up trouble and pain for her and for himself.

But he didn’t have the guts even to pull the trigger. It fell from his shaking hands to the stone floor, and fired. The bullet whined as it ricocheted around the room. He stood rock-still, hoping. But it ended up in the oak beam above his head.

He slumped back into the chair, face in his hands, and wept.

The year passed, and another, meaningless, without aim, without feeling.

He’d got a job with a seed merchant of all things, but it suited him to be alone all day in his car as he toured the farms of East Anglia, some around airfields he’d flown from.

Already the control towers were crumbling, the glass panes smashed, the metalwork twisted and rusty, the runways pushing up weeds.

A good thing really, but somehow sad. So many young men in their prime.…

And already the atmosphere of those war days was changing, people were not helping each other out as they once had.

Sometimes by these decaying airfields, as he ate his sandwiches and sipped coffee from his Thermos flask he thought he could hear singing – men’s voices raised in rousing choruses: ‘
Bye bye blackbird, You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean.…’

Sitting there, watching the end of the harvest, with the stubble in the fields, the rooks circling in the trees near a church, and the fading signs of the war that had taken the love of his life, there was only loneliness: the coming autumn of shortening days would only bring more tears.

He knew he couldn’t go on like this. He made his mind up.

Later that day he made enquiries, found he could fly direct to Naples by the new British European Airways. After that it would be by the train again. But the thought came to him that, of course, he needn’t get return fares, he wasn’t going to come back. So he’d treat himself to a taxi all the way to Sorrento.

Thomas Cook made all the arrangements. Biff drew the necessary money from the bank, and counted out on the desk the large white fivers as he paid the bill.

A week later he looked around the cottage for the last time. It looked dead to him now, cold, empty –
dead
. He’d had a good clear-out of their stuff, even finding his letter to her in case of his.…

He’d balled it up and put it on the fire, watching it burn.

He locked the door behind him, and dropped the keys into the estate agent on the way past. The rent was paid up to the end of the following month, but he explained he’d definitely left now, wouldn’t be coming back. They wished him well, assuming he was moving away.

The journey was uneventful, the air hostesses looked after him very well in their smart new uniforms. They landed at a
military airfield near Naples and after a bit of haggling he found a taxi that would take him all the way to Sorrento.

He was saddened to see the bomb damage in Naples, especially near the docks. As they drew nearer to Sorrento he began to get tense, but the place looked the same, albeit more run down, with rubbish blowing in the street; but there was no great damage, it was just emptier and poorer, like everywhere else in the world.

When the taxi turned into the drive of the hotel he braced himself for change. The gardens were overgrown, a jungle.

But there, when it came into view, was the hotel they’d come to for their honeymoon, a little run down, with peeling paint and green mould growing on one wall.

The reception was shabby, the floors scuffed by heavy army boots, and the lovely woodwork of the desk was dull and chipped.

Behind it, a young girl smiled shyly at him.

He’d specifically asked for their room. Following the aged porter he was full of trepidation, praying it would be the same. It was almost ten years to the day.

‘
Signore
.’

The man led the way in. He needn’t have worried. Apart from a few cracks in the walls – probably caused by the bombing, and a general feeling of neglect, it was the same, a faded time capsule that he could wrap around himself.

His heart was heavy. It would do just right. He felt sorry for the hotel and its staff, struggling to get back on its feet after such appalling times, but it was something that he had to do – was going to do this time, where they had been so happy.

When he was alone he unpacked, taking the Luger from its cosy place between his shirts.

Biff went out on to the balcony. One of the Roman busts was missing, but the view was exactly the same, with Vesuvius, smoothly rising above Naples Bay to his right.

The little harbour wasn’t so busy, but in all other respects it
was the same, nothing was different, except that
everything
was different.

He dressed for dinner, but the dining room was only sparsely occupied, and only a few were in black tie. Gone were the richly dressed people, dancing to the orchestras, leaders in white tuxedos.

But to him it
was
a special night, the night he would join her, so he had a bottle of the finest red, a local one, a good one, a good
year
, nineteen thirty-eight.

Afterwards he went out on to the terrace, lit a cigarette. There wasn’t a moon, but the millions of stars were twinkling above a dark, unseen, but lapping ocean; the Milky Way glimmered like a bright band directly over his head.

He only became aware of a figure standing near him as he turned to leave, to go up to his room –
their
room.

The woman was in deep shadow, standing between the light coming from the two open french windows.

She was unmoving, had been for some time.

At last she moved, came out of the shadow.

Still they didn’t speak.

She was as beautiful as ever, but there were many threads of grey running in the dark hair.

And she looked tired, drawn, her eyes seemed bigger with the leanness of her face.

Without speaking they drew nearer, stood for an eternity searching each other’s face.

Slowly they reached out, put their arms around each other, and just held on.

It was Anna.

Biff died, his face set in a smile.