Hornet’s Sting (41 page)

He suspected she was mocking him, and he resented it. “Peculiar way to entertain people,” he said.

“I did it to entertain
myself
, you booby. It's no fun growing up a cripple.”

“Oh.” Cleve-Cutler felt obscurely that he was in the wrong, but he was damned if he would apologise when she was the one who had lied. So he counter-attacked. “Maybe you'd better tell me all your other entertaining fibs,” he said. “Then I'll know where we stand. Let's take little Tommy. Did you really find him on Waterloo station?”

“No. Met him at the tea-dance at Malplackett House. Same as you.”

“And did he really sleep on your couch?”

“Yes. For a couple of nights.”

“And then?”

“Oh, we shared the same bed. And we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in it.” Cleve-Cutler was silent. “Guess what I've found,” she said. “‘Poor Butterfly'. Shall I play it?”

“Why ask me? You'll do what you like anyway.”

“Self-pity?” she said. “I expected better of you, Hugh.” She put on the record.

Poor butterfly ...
'Neath the blossoms waiting,
Poor butterfly . . .
For she loved him so.
The moments pass into hours,
The hours pass into years
,
And as she smiles through her tears
She murmurs low..
.

There was a knock on the door. Cleve-Cutler heaved himself out of the chair and went and opened it. The boot-boy, a skinny fourteen-year-old, stood holding a brass tray on which there was a visiting card. “Waitin' downstairs,” the boy said.

Cleve-Cutler took the card to the middle of the room, where the light was better. “Captain Ralph Lightfoot. Assistant provost-marshal.”

“Sounds vaguely ... religious.”

“Far from it. The A.P.M. is the army's Scotland Yard. Law and order, crime and punishment. I'd better see what he wants.”

He was in his stockinged feet. He slipped his shoes on and knelt to tie the laces, and therefore did not see Dorothy swiftly unstrap her artificial leg. She clipped him on the side of the head: a glancing blow that broke the skin and knocked him to the floor. He felt it as a burst of roaring white heat that receded as everything receded into blackness.

The artificial leg went back on as fast as it came off; she had done it fifty thousand times. The boot-boy watched with his mouth hanging open. The record churned towards its end:

The moon and I know that he'll be faithful,
I know he'll come to me,
By and bye.
But if he don't come back,
Then I'll never sigh or cry.
I just must die ... Poor butterfly
.

She gave the boy a shilling. Two days' wages. That bought his attention. “Tell Taggart he'll be down in ten minutes,” she said. The boy ran. She headed along the corridor.

In fact it was fifteen minutes before Cleve-Cutler lurched downstairs, a wet towel held to his head.

“Don't tell me,” Taggart said. “You slipped in the bath.” This wasn't the first time that loving couples had left bloodstains on his carpet. “Sit here. No brandy. Brandy just makes you throw up.” One stained carpet was enough for one night. “I'll send for a doctor. He slipped in the bath,” Taggart told Lightfoot. “It's an awfully slippery
bath, that one. People are always coming a cropper in it.”

“I expect that's why he was wearing his shoes,” Lightfoot said; but Taggart had gone and Cleve-Cutler wasn't listening.

The doctor came and put two stitches in his head and took a guinea and left.

“My apologies,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Now then . . . fire away. Not too fast.”

“Yes, major. The A.P.M.'s department is carrying out an investigation into a conspiracy to murder a Russian member of your squadron, Duke Nikolai.”

“Too late, old chap. The Huns got Nikolai.”

“Yes, sir. We realise that. But when the duke died, it seems he controlled a large sum of money, perhaps as much as a million dollars. This cannot now be traced.”

“Well, you won't find it here. A
million?
Can't help you.”

Lightfoot asked a few more questions, got nowhere and left. Cleve-Cutler climbed the stairs, both hands gripping the banister, his head nodding to the beat of his headache.

Dorothy was packing.

“Did you hit me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He sat in the armchair, carefully, so as not to knock his head against the back. “I withdraw my offer of marriage,” he said.

“I wasn't going to let you take Tommy away.” She was quite calm. “I don't care what your A.M.P. says or does.”

“A.P.M. Get it right.”

“He's not going to France, ever. I'm sorry I hurt you. Not sorry I hit you, because —”

“Please.” He raised a hand. “Spare me the niceties.”

“Anyway ...” She closed the suitcase. “I only did it to make sure Tommy got a good head-start and they'll never catch him now.”

“Fine. He can run slap into a brick wall for all I care, because the A.P.M. doesn't want him. The A.P.M. isn't looking for him. The A.P.M. came here about something totally different.”

She leaned on the suitcase and looked at him. “That bandage suits you. It makes you look jolly dashing.” It was true: the slant of the bandage matched the surgical twist of his smile. “I can't stay here.”

“Stay or go, it makes no odds to me.” He was feeling very tired.
“Actually, I hope the little bastard does run into a brick wall. Several brick walls ...”

Taggart sent a man up to get her bags.

The memorial service for Lieutenant Savage M.P. was a great success. Cleve-Cutler's bandaged presence was much appreciated. Dorothy was there, beautiful in black. She waited for him outside the Abbey.

“Back to France?”

“Yes. Back to Hammersmith?”

She nodded. She reached up and smoothed his collar in such a way that her fingers stroked his neck.

“Tell me honestly,” he said. “When you said you shared the bed with that boy and ... and so on and so forth, that was just another of your fibs, wasn't it?”

She raised her veil, and stood on the tiptoe of her one good foot to kiss him on the lips: a daring thing for an unmarried woman to do outside the Abbey in broad daylight. “Oh, yes,” she said.

* * *

Every R.F.C. pilot and observer had his private way of coping with the mental stress of killing the enemy, and of living with the violent death of friends. Booze helped; so did witless, rowdy, destructive mess-night parties. The mind had its own way of releasing pressure: nightmares were commonplace. Sergeant Lacey, for all his bland professionalism, was not immune to the death toll. Long ago, he had found a way to deflect the brutal reality and thereby sleep soundly at nights. He assumed that every pilot would soon die. Death was part of his everyday routine.

He asked each new pilot to make a will. “A tedious chore, I agree, sir. But it makes the adjutant happy. A lot of gentlemen regard a will as a talisman, on the grounds that anything the army requires is bound to be superfluous.”

When a pilot died, and his effects were collected for forwarding, Lacey put aside the chequebook. He used it to pay the man's mess bill; this made life tidier all round. After that, he only used it provided he knew there were ample funds in the account. And he made three other rules for himself. A cheque must be for a modest amount. It must predate death by at least a week. And it must benefit,
not himself, but the squadron. This sometimes involved an oblique transaction. By sending a cheque for a mere ten pounds to a Baptist missionary charity, Lacey could clinch an agreement with a warrant officer at Brigade H.Q. which meant that a sergeant cook with prewar experience at the Ritz would be posted to Hornet Squadron. The warrant officer's mother was a Baptist missionary; Lacey knew he would keep to the bargain. The only question was which chequebook to use? April was a grim month; he was spoiled for choice. He chose D. G. T. Gerrish. Lacey found a signature in Gerrish's file and made a dozen copies before he was satisfied. He wrote the cheque and looked up. The adjutant was watching him.

“Everyone is a soldier, Lacey,” Brazier said. “Look at you, fighting your little paper war against the banks.”

“Good lord:
symbolism,”
Lacey said. “We'll make an artist of you yet, sir.”

“The A.P.M. will make mincemeat of you, one day.”

“Surely, when everyone is happy and no-one suffers, there can be no crime.”

“The army doesn't exist to make everyone happy. Quite the reverse,” Brazier said, happily.

When Cleve-Cutler returned to Gazeran, there were many new faces in the mess. He sent for Woolley. “You've had your little moment of glory,” he said, “and very expensive it's been. Now get back to your flight and for Christ's sake try not to lose any more men.” But it took Cleve-Cutler only a day or two to learn that Hornet Squadron's losses were no greater than the rest of the R.F.C. The battle dragged to an end in mud and blood and misery and failure. By the end of the month, 151 of its machines had been destroyed, and many more had crashed as they struggled to get home. In all, the Corps lost 316 pilots or observers, dead or missing. The R.F.C. called it Bloody April.

This was the small change of carnage. The Allied armies' casualty figure was in the region of two hundred thousand dead and wounded. Unlike the R.F.C., the P.B.I. was not fastidious about counting its losses. What difference did 316 men make, one way or another? At any hour on any day of April 1917, a couple of hundred troops might vanish, drenched in the sudden annihilation of artillery fire. What mattered was the outcome. At Arras the Allies took Vimy Ridge and a few dozen gutted villages and no more. Vimy was a victory. The rest was defeat.

And it failed to distract any German forces from the French offensive a few miles to the south. Here, General Nivelle's troops were killed in such vast numbers, with such mechanical efficiency, that their advance wasn't worthy of the name: just six hundred yards on the first day. Nivelle had promised his attack would be
le dernier coup
, and so it was; but not in the way he intended. Nivelle quietly disappeared.

The Illustrated London News
regularly printed maps of the war zones. Maddegan was in the anteroom, looking at a map of the Arras area, when the adjutant came in.

“That tunnel we dug under Arras, Uncle,” Maddegan said. “How long did that take to dig?”

“Eighteen months.”

“Reckon we'll dig another?”

“Unlikely. Pretty boggy ground ahead.”

“Don't fret yourself, Dingbat,” McWatters said. “The British Army is not about to tunnel its way to Berlin.”

“Still, it was a brave venture,” the padre said. “War's a bit like a cricket match, isn't it? You've got to keep changing the bowling if the batsmen get established. Bring on a bit of spin, swap your speed merchants about, toss the ball up occasionally. I've seen many a good bat bowled by a full toss.”

“I had a subaltern in my battalion at Second Ypres,” Brazier said. “Dotty about cricket.”

“Not that I know anything about tunnels,” the padre said. “Just a working chaplain, me.”

“We had some good parties at Pepriac, didn't we?” Maddegan said. “I liked Pepriac.”

“Second Ypres,” the adjutant said. “This chap led his platoon over the top with a cricket bat and a bag full of balls. Out in front, clouting the balls into the German Lines! Cool as you like.”

“It's all in the follow-through.” The padre demonstrated. “Get your follow-through right, and you're halfway home.”

“What was your follow-through like, Uncle?” McWatters said. “At Second Ypres, I mean?” But the adjutant was busy winding up the gramophone. “Blaze Away!” was on the turntable. One of his favourites.

General panic. Conspicuous cracks in ground
.

The R.F.C. had made the aerodrome at Gazeran in the autumn of 1914, when the war was young and the fields were stubble. The first adjutant had a passion for wild flowers. To his eyes, the French field was a drab desert. He sent for seeds and bulbs and plants.

Now, nearly three years later, as the warmth of May soaked into the earth, the fringes of the aerodrome began to show bright blue with English bluebells, and orange with Welsh poppies, and yellow with primrose. There were patches of white narcissus and red anemone. Marsh buttercups were springing up as densely as a crop.

Brazier disapproved. “Makes us look like Kew Gardens, sir.”

“As long as it doesn't interfere with the flying, Uncle, I don't give a damn.”

But something did interfere with the flying: the long grass. After such a wet spring, the sunshine created a lush growth, reaching up to the axles of the Biffs' wheels in places. Add to this a heavy dew, and the field became so slick that a pilot might find himself skidding like a duck landing on a frozen pond.

“Sheep,” Woolley said. “About fifty. And a shepherdess. About nineteen.”

Lacey was sent to search. Next day a very old man, dressed in rusty black, with a crook as tall as an archbishop, drove a flock of sheep into the camp. His left arm had been shot off in the war with Prussia of 1870.

The adjutant saluted him and gave him a tin of tobacco.
“Mangez les fleurs?”
he suggested, pointing out bluebells and poppies.

“Sale Boche,”
the man said, and spat.

“I don't quite see the connection.”

“Sale Boche.”
The man spat.

“He's completely deaf, sir,” Lacey said. “But very sound politically.”

The sheep did a fine job on the grass, clearing first the two main runways and then nibbling their way into the rest of the field; but the shepherd never let them near the flowers.

“A truly sensitive soul,” McWatters said. It was early evening, and the officers were playing croquet on a well-cropped stretch of runway. “But not half as sensitive as me.” McWatters was lining up a shot. “Watch this, Griff. I'm going to smack you into Belgium.” His mallet made a sharp crack. The ball fizzed over the turf and was stopped by the rough.