“Please don’t joke,” said Alistair. “Briggs was killed this morning.”
Simonson said nothing.
“It was my fault,” said Alistair. “I had him drive me, and we got lit up. I was taking my painting to the church to give it back.”
“No other cargo?”
“None.”
“No other purpose for the journey?”
“I’m afraid not. I falsified the requisition—said we were taking invasion maps to the outer forts.”
Simonson closed his eyes.
“Lost a Bedford, too. Burned. They’ll bring you my report.”
“What about you?” said Simonson. “Are you all right?”
Alistair stood, balancing with an effort. “Briggs had a wife.’
“Children?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“I shall have to write to her,” said Alistair.
“Do so, and then move on and don’t brood. You must be kind, of course. Write that he was killed by enemy action during a liaison operation.”
“Yes. But I’m telling you the truth, Douglas. As my senior officer.”
“And what would you have me do? Court-martial you?”
“You’ll probably have to, won’t you? When the lieutenant colonel sees my report, I shouldn’t think you’ll have much leeway.”
Simonson stood and paced. “You are a first-class officer and in any other circumstance you would have been back in London long ago, invalided out. You are exhausted and you showed poor judgment, that’s all.”
“It isn’t as if I’ve stolen a tin of margarine. I’ve killed Briggs.”
“The enemy killed him, and you must live with it as you can. If I were you I might weigh it against all the ones I had saved.”
“Oh, but who keeps count?”
“God almighty keeps count, you fool, and when He loses count He checks with me, as your commanding officer.’
Alistair had been flipping the aerogramme over and over in his good hand, absentmindedly, and now he noticed that it was from Hilda. The ghost of his hand moved by instinct to the flap of the envelope and pushed a thumb under it before it realized—with a feeling of absolute surprise that Alistair shared—that it did not exist. He overbalanced, his left arm having compensated for the movement of the phantom right. He fell sideways onto his cot. The letter fluttered to the floor. While Alistair struggled to a sitting position, Simonson retrieved it. “Here,” he said, “let me.”
“Please don’t,” said Alistair. “I’m not in the mood to read it.”
Simonson ignored him and opened it.
“Do you mind?” said Alistair.
“Don’t be so precious! We could use some diversion, don’t you think?”
Dear Alistair, I am sorry to write to you under difficult circumstances.
Oh, thought Alistair: Mary has been killed. His blood began to stop.
I find it my duty to tell you that Mary has been acting outrageously.
Alistair went light with relief.
“Mary is your girl, yes?”
“I’m not sure.”
“No one is ever sure. And who is this Hilda?”
“Her friend. Here—give that back, won’t you?”
Simonson held the letter beyond his reach. “Your Mary seems to have got this Hilda’s back up.”
I will come to the point because it is something you have a right to understand, since I know that Mary has been writing to you.
“But she hasn’t, has she?”
“Not for months.”
“Or so you claim,” said Simonson.
“Just read, will you? Or give me the letter.”
Simonson snatched it away.
I am sorry to say that she has given up her duty on the ambulances and become a slave to morphine. Out of loyalty I would have said this was her business, but now our friendship is finished and I feel a duty to you that I no longer owe to Mary. Please know that I admired you from the moment we held hands.
“You dog!”
“But it isn’t like that,” said Alistair.
“Says you. I think we must let Hilda tell us what it is like.”
The worst of it is that Mary is consorting with Negroes. She spends days at the Lyceum and carries on as if it is the most natural thing. I suppose the morphine is her only counsel in the matter. Of course it is too awful for her parents. Their name suffers—I need not tell you how people talk.
Simonson whistled. “That really is the limit.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Of course it’s not nothing. Damn it, man—you look as if the devil has you by the scrote.”
I wish you to know that I do not hope to reopen anything between us. My circumstances have changed and I would not be an attractive proposition to you in any case. Rather, please know that I choose to close things between us by discharging the duty of honesty that I owe you for the kindness you once showed me.
“How does she sign it?” said Alistair.
“ ‘Sincerely.’ ”
“I see.”
“And of course you are thinking ‘bitterly’, but you will see that she is right, I’m afraid. If half of what she says is true then you are best off without Mary, and this Hilda has done well to warn you.”
“I should like to know Mary’s side of the story.’
‘I shouldn’t be curious. Niggers are niggers, there’s no consortable kind. And morphine—my god. It’s filthy stuff. It’s for doctors and whores.”
Alistair flushed. “Mary taught children who were killed. And there was a friend of mine she was practically engaged to, and he was killed too. One makes allowances.”
“One makes allowances, Alistair, for fatigue and pain and misjudgment. But morphine and blacks? The woman is utterly fallen.”
“Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.”
“Oh do give it up, Alistair. She’s lost.”
“I don’t believe that. Everything can be restored. If one won’t believe that, how does one endure all this?”
“One doesn’t have a choice, which makes the decision easier.”
Alistair sighed. “Anyway, I like her. A medic once told me to find a nice girl and forget the war—and so long as I think of Mary, I can.”
“So you won’t give her up?’
“Not even if I wanted to. Doctor’s orders, you see.”
“ ‘Well, poor Hilda’s letter seems to have backfired, wouldn’t you say?”
“Hilda’s not a bad egg, you know. She is funny, and rather pretty and . . . in another life, a girl like that . . .”
“Yes, but it is rather a desperate letter.”
“It is rather a desperate war.”
Simonson put his arm around Alistair’s shoulders and they looked out at the sea.
“What shall we do about you?” said Simonson.
“There is nothing to do. I’ll accept what punishment the lieutenant colonel thinks fitting. In the meantime I’ll arrange a burial detail for Briggs.”
“Briggs won’t mind if you don’t, you know. That’s what’s so admirable in the dead—they never ask one to do anything they wouldn’t do themselves.”
“Still, I should feel bad if I didn’t organize the service.”
“How would you like to fly to Gibraltar instead, and then take a boat on to England?”
“My number won’t come up for weeks.”
“But there is an evacuation order and then there is a social order. I was at school with half of Med Command. I could have them bump you onto the next flight out.”
“I’m not wild about taking another man’s place.”
“Then you’ll be here forever, because other
men are cheerfully taking yours. Come on, we can have you away before the lieutenant colonel gets to your report. You’d be doing us both a favor—he wouldn’t enjoy disciplining you any more than I would.”
“It would only catch up with me in London.”
“It might not, you know. If this war has taught me anything, it’s that no crack is too small for our procedures to fall through.”
“Listen to us. Can you imagine us thinking such aw thing, a year ago?”
“Survival hadn’t been invented, then. One can hardly blame us for not using something that didn’t exist.”
Alistair smiled. “How long this war has been.”
“I’ll say. One hardly remembers how we lived before. Lightly—not worrying much.”
“Do you suppose we shall ever live that way again?”
“Oh, who knows? Given sufficient champagne and ether.”
“Maybe if we stay drunk to the end of our days, we shan’t remember.”
“That will take systematic drinking. We’ll need to stay drunk in cities, towns and villages. And in the hills and in the fields—How does it go?”
“And on the beaches and on the landing grounds.”
“Yes, exactly. We’ll have to stay drunk in some inaccessible spots.”
“And with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, don’t forget that.”
They leaned shoulders companionably and looked out to sea. Perhaps it was true, thought Alistair, that Septembers would come again. People would love the crisp cool of the mornings, and it would not remind them of the week war was declared. Perhaps there would be such a generation. Blackberries would ripen, carefree hands would pick them, and jam would be poured into pots to cool. And the jam would only taste of jam. People would not save jars of it like holy relics. They would eat it on toast, thinking nothing of it, hardly bothering to look at the label.
Alistair let the idea grow: that when the war’s heat was spent, the last remaining pilots would ditch their last bombs into the sea and land their planes on cratered airfields that would slowly give way to brambles. That pilots would take off their jackets and ties, and pick fruit.
He understood that he was finished with the war. He could not stop seeing the enemy airman, choking on yellow dust. He could not stop smelling Briggs, burning. It was too much. He had given everything that had been asked of him: fighting when fighting could be done, retreating when retreat was wise, and holding fast when it was all that remained. He had not favored himself, or measured his effort, or taken more than his share. He had done his best to help the men, and now all he wanted was to go home and see if he could help Mary. When set against the great corruption of the war, one’s own small rot seemed, if not excusable, then at least unexceptional.
“You know that I joined up voluntarily?” said Alistair.
“Bully for you. So?”
“So, will you think less of me if I leave the same way?”
“I’d be furious if you didn’t.”
Alistair hesitated. “Then I believe I will take up your kind offer.”
“Very sensible. The food on this island really isn’t as advertised.”
Alistair made to shake Simonson’s hand. His right arm surprised him again by not being there, and the lurch almost toppled him. Simonson held him steady.
“I shall pick you up at midnight,” he said. “Do try not to fall off the floor in the meantime.”
—
They left the fort on foot, under extravagant stars. A raid came in after they went, and they made their way southwest while the flashes sent their shadows flickering before them on the road. It was five miles to the airstrip at Luqa, and they said nothing on the way. Though they walked together they were distant. Alistair supposed this was the only possible end for a war: when men and women, who had thronged together to join it, made their way home alone.
On the airstrip the Wellington was already running its engines. An orderly hurried across the field to meet them. Alistair felt sick.
“Well,” said Simonson, “goodbye.”
They shook hands, with the left.
“Goodbye,” said Alistair. “I can’t even begin to—”
“Then don’t. Don’t begin.”
“I shall miss you, Douglas.”
Simonson wiped his eyes. “Yes, well, let’s just hope the enemy does.”
They embraced. The orderly helped Alistair up the steps and into the belly of the aircraft. They put him in the companionway, forward of the rear gunner, on top of the mound of mailbags. They loaned him a sheepskin coat and told him not to go anywhere the airplane wasn’t going. The engine noise swelled, the airframe shuddered over the uneven runway, and Malta dropped away into the night.
Alistair lay back on the sacks. As soon as the aircraft door closed, the war was over. The hot, thyme-scented air of Malta was sealed outside. In here in the cold, with the smell of sacking and oil, London was already close. They would land at Gibraltar, and decant him into a convoy for England. There would be children and women and food, and clothes that weren’t all brown. Alistair slept until fifty miles from Gibraltar, when the pilot put the airplane down on the sea.
Alistair came awake in a frenzy of shouting and spray. The incredible deceleration shunted him and all the mailbags up to the navigator’s position. Water rose through the rips in the canvas skin of the fuselage. They all got out through the astro hatch.
The five of them who had survived the ditching clung to two small rubber rafts. On a warm and glassy sea, they watched as the engine fire that had downed them extinguished itself with a prolonged hissing. A plume of steam rose in the moonlight, and the aircraft sank by the nose. After that it was quiet.
It was a long, chilly predawn, drifting on a flat silver sea beneath a flat silver sky, the weld between the two watertight and seamless. For hours nothing happened and there was nothing to be done. Then, as the sun rose huge and bloody, a breeze got up from the west. The wind blackened the wide red band that the rising sun made on the water.
There was not enough room for them all on the little yellow rafts so they took turns, two men at a time, to have fifteen minutes out of the water. Alistair was given half an hour, his missing arm making it more tiring to tread water.
He got his shoes off and let them sink. It occurred to him that this might be the farthest point offshore at which a British Army officer had ever lost a pair of the standard-issue brogues. They could add it to the crimes on his charge sheet.
By nine the sun began to contribute a little warmth, but the wind was increasing. For the men on the rafts the motion was sickening, and for the men in the water it was hard to hold on. For Alistair, with only one hand, it was a struggle. From time to time he choked on salt water when he couldn’t keep his mouth high enough. The others helped him where they could, but they were tiring too.
In his next turn on one of the rafts, a gust came and he toppled into the water. This time he went several feet under, and if he managed to kick back up it was only because the navigator swam down to help. On the surface he gasped, and only just managed to cling on.
He tried not to imagine the odds now. As his strength failed, little things began to amuse him. He thought of the great chain of consequence that had brought him to here, at the end, bobbing in a vast empty sea with four strangers. After everything, a simple engine fire had brought them down. It had happened with no enemy help. Perhaps there was a tiny victory, in wartime, in not being killed by the war. He laughed, and could not understand why the others looked at him so soberly.
At noon the wind died down and the wave tops sparkled. They all took their clothes off and let them sink. Alistair drifted in and out of sleep. He would come to, again and again, with his arm hooked through the encircling rope of the raft. Each time he wondered where he was. When the sun set, he didn’t notice. He woke up as usual, shivering violently, but t
his time it was dark. Lightning blazed above. Around him the men spoke in soft voices.
“When we get to Brighton Pier I think we should just tie up and have fish and chips, don’t you?”
“A pint of beer with mine.”
“Tom?” said Alistair. “Is that you?”
No one replied. The lightning gave them the coldest eyes, he thought.
Between the peals of thunder he heard voices shouting. He strained to hear. Men were calling his name, but he could not tell what they wanted. He called back but they didn’t hear. Their voices resolved into individual shouts that he recognized. He thought it might be his men, needing orders.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “Just hold on!”
They called louder, and he felt the terror in their voices. He shouted to the men to hold on to the rubber raft with him, if they could, and to pull themselves up out of the sea. He couldn’t see them but he heard their voices, and he comforted them and begged them to pull themselves aboard.
There was no moon and there were no stars. He yelled out that he was sorry, and after shouting for a long time he noticed that Duggan was clinging to the raft beside him. Alistair was glad, since Duggan would help him now. Duggan would help his men too, and Alistair closed his eyes tight and drifted into sleep.
In his sleep a deeper roar sounded beneath the surging of the waves. The roar increased in volume and broke into his dreams until he came awake with Duggan shaking his shoulder. “Come on, Huh . . . Heath, look luh . . . luh . . . lively!”
Alistair looked, through eyes blinded by salt. Searchlights were coming, over the sea. They came from the same place as the roaring. The lights turned the black sea silver. Spray gleamed, visible whenever the little rafts climbed to the top of a wave, then disappearing from sight in the troughs. The roaring sound grew enormous.
His men began calling to him again, and he watched their gray backs plunging all around, and he called out to them as they changed from men to dolphins and back to men again in the shifting beam of the searchlights. Nothing stayed still. The sea heaved, voices yelled all around him, and Alistair felt an immeasurable sadness for his men, to be lost in such a lonely place, so far from the kindness of sight. He murmured the words he had used at so many burial details. Comfort us again now after the time that Thou hast plagued us: and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity. Spray filled his mouth and he choked. He lost his grip on the raft and he was alone in the sea, naked and sinking.