Jasmine Nights (3 page)

Lucky bastard
.

Selfish bastard. He could at least have answered Jilly’s letter.

Lucky first of all to have been wearing the protective gloves all of them were supposed to put on when they flew, and he so often hadn’t, preferring the feel of the joystick in his fingers. Lucky to have been picked up quickly by an ambulance crew and not burned to a crisp strapped into his cockpit. Luckiest of all to have been treated by Kilverton. Kilverton, who looked, with his stumpy hands and squat body, like a butcher, was a plastic surgeon of genius.

He owed his life to this man. He’d gone to him with his face and hands black and smelling of cooked meat – what they now called airman’s burns, because they were so common. The determined and unsentimental Kilverton, a visiting surgeon, had placed him in a saline bath and later taken him into theatre, where he’d meticulously jigsawed tiny strips of skin taken from Dom’s buttock to the burns on the side of his face. All you could see now was a row of pinpricks about an inch long and two inches above his left ear. His thick black hair had already covered them.

Last week Kilverton had called Dom into his chaotic consulting room and boasted freely about him to two awestruck young doctors.

‘Look at this young man.’ He turned on the Anglepoise lamp on his desk so they could all get a better look at him. Dom felt the gentleness of those fat fingers, the confidence they gave you. One of the other chaps in the ward had said it was like getting ‘a pep pill up your arse’.

‘I defy you to even know he’s been burned – no keloid scars, the skin tone around the eyes is good.’

‘So why was he so lucky?’ one of the doctors asked, his own young skin green with fatigue under the lamp. They’d had five new serious cases in the day before, a bomber crew who’d bought it off the French coast.

‘A combination of factors.’ Kilverton’s eyes swam over his half-glasses. ‘A Mediterranean skin helps – all that olive oil. His mother’s French, his father’s English.’

Dom had smiled. ‘A perfect mongrel.’

‘The rest,’ Kilverton continued, ‘is pure chance. Some men just burn better than others.’

Dom had gone cold at this.

Thompson had died in East Grinstead, after being treated with tannic acid, a form of treatment Kilverton had said was barbaric and had fought to ban. Collins, poor bastard, burned alive in his cockpit on his first training run. He was nineteen years old.

The same flames, the surgeon had continued in his flat, almost expressionless voice, the same exposure to skin-and tissue-destroying heat, and yet some men became monsters, although he did not use that word; he’d said ‘severely disabled’ or some other slightly more tactful thing. Having the right skin was, he said, a freak of nature, like being double-jointed or having a cast-iron stomach.

To illustrate his point, he’d lifted a pot of dusty geraniums from the windowsill.

‘It’s like taking cuttings from this: some thrive, some die, and the bugger of it is we don’t yet know exactly why. As for you . . .’ he looked directly at Dom again, ‘you can go home now. I’ll see you in six weeks’ time.’

Dom had pretended to be both interested and grateful, and of course he was, but sometimes at night he sweated at the thought of this luckiness. Why had he lived and others died? Privately, it obsessed him.

‘Can I fly again?’ It was all he wanted now. ‘Can you sign me off?’

‘I’ll see you in six weeks.’ Kilverton switched off his light. He was shrugging on his ancient mackintosh, standing near the door waiting to leap into another emergency.

‘I want to fly again.’ The obsession had grown and grown during the period of his convalescence.

‘Look, lad.’ Kilverton had glared at him from the door. ‘Your father’s a surgeon, isn’t he? Why not give him and your poor bloody mother a break and let somebody else do the flying for a while? I’ll see you in six weeks’ time.’

‘My hands are strong. I’m fit. Four weeks.’

‘Bloody steamroller.’ Kilverton hadn’t bothered to look up. ‘It’ll be six months if you don’t shut up.’

His mother always did three things at once: right now she was in the kitchen up the flagstone hallway, making bread to go with a special lunch she’d prepared for him. Its warm, yeasty smell filled the room. She was roasting lamb in the Aga. She’d darted into the room to ask if he’d like a whisky and soda before lunch, and now she was standing beside the gramophone wearing what he thought of as her musical face, as she lowered the needle.

Tender and evanescent as bubbles, the notes of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 floated out and his throat contracted. Home again: music, roast lamb, the faint tang of mint from the kitchen, his mother humming and clattering pans. The cedar parquet floors smelling faintly of lavender where he and Freya had been occasionally allowed to ride their tricycles. The rug in front of the fireplace where they sat to dry their hair on Sunday nights.

He stretched his legs out and put his arms behind his head, and looked at the pictures his mother had hung above the fireplace. There was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, a Gwen John self-portrait.

He stood up and stared at them, as if by examining the pictures he could see her more clearly. How cleverly she’d arranged them – not too rigidly formal, but with a plan that pleased the eye.

She did everything well: cooking, dressing, gardening, entertaining and stitching. The sofa he sat on was covered, too covered for real comfort, in her tapestry cushions. He picked one up now, marvelling at the thousands and thousands of tiny, painstaking stitches that had measured out her afternoons, pinning unicorns and stilled butterflies to her canvas.

While the Mozart swept majestically on, he heard the faint pinpricks of a spring shower against the window. His mother had once dreamed of being a professional musician; as a child, Dom had loved lying in his bed with Liszt’s Polonaises drifting up to his room like smoke, or the brisk rat-tat-tat of her little hands swashbuckling through her own rendition of the Ninth. But now her piano sat like some grand but disregarded relative in the corner of the room, almost entirely covered by family photographs. The gorgeous Steinway that had once been her life, that had almost bankrupted her father.

Dom’s own father had put an end to it. Not intentionally, maybe. Two months after he’d married his clever young bride, he’d developed tinnitus and couldn’t stand, so he said, any extra noises in his head. And then the children – Freya first, and two years later Dom – her husband’s determined move up the career ladder, and lastly, in the cold winter of 1929, she’d developed chilblains and stopped for good. No more Saint-Saëns, or Scott Joplin to make guests laugh; no more duets even, for she had taught Dom as a little boy, and told him he would be very good if he stuck at it. What had once been a source of delight became a source of shame, a character flaw. Even as a child he was aware how it clouded her eyes when people turned to her and said: ‘Didn’t you once play the piano rather well?’

Dom examined silver-framed Freya, on the front of the piano. Freya – of the laughing eyes and the same thick black hair – was in the WAAF now, in London, working at Fighter Command, loving her life ‘whizzing things around on maps’, as she put it.

There he was, a ghost from another life, striking a jokey pose in a swimsuit on the beach at Salcombe. His cousins Jack and Peter, both in the army now, had their arms around him. They’d swum that night, and cooked sausages on the beach, and stayed out until the moon was a toenail in the sky. The beach was now littered with old bits of scrap metal, barbed wire and sandbags, the rusted hulks of guns. In another photo, his mother’s favourite, he sat on the wing of the little Tiger Moth he’d learned to fly in, self-conscious in his first pilot’s uniform, almost too young to shave.

The year he and Jacko had started to fly had been full of thousands of excitements: first set of flying clothes; Threadnall, their first instructor, roaring abuse: ‘Don’t pull back the control column like a barmaid pulling a pint, lad’; first solo flight; even the drama of writing your first will out when you were twenty-one years old. There was nothing the earth could offer him as exciting as this.

That first flight was when he’d cut the apron strings, and all the other ropes of convention and duty that bound him here, and thought to himself,
Free at last
, shockingly and shamefully free as he soared above the earth, terrified and elated, over churches and towns, schools and fields.
Free at last!

As the music dropped slowly like beads of light in the room, bringing him to the edge of tears, he thought about Saba Tarcan again: her daft little hat, the curve of her belly in the red satin dress, her husky voice.

He did not believe in love at first sight. Not ever, not now. At Cambridge, where he’d broken more than his fair share of hearts and where, even at this distance, he now thought of himself as being a tiresome little shit, he’d had a whole spiel that he could produce about what a ridiculous concept it was. His reaction to Saba Tarcan felt more complex – he’d admired the way she’d carried herself in that noisy ward, neither apologising, nor simpering, nor asking for their approval. He remembered every detail: the fighter boys lying in a row, stripped of their toys and their dignity, some tricked up like elephants with their skin grafts, and the girl with only her songs, taking them beyond the world where you could define or set limits on things, or be in simple human terms a winner or a loser. What power that was.

‘I’ve brought you some cheese straws.’ His mother appeared with a tray. ‘I saved up our cheese ration for them.’

‘Misou, sit.’ He patted the sofa beside him. ‘Let’s have a drink.’

She poured herself a small Dubonnet and soda, her lunchtime tipple, a beer for him.

‘Well, how nice this is.’ She crossed her impeccable legs at the ankle. ‘Oh golly! Look at that.’ A small piece of thread that had come loose on one of her cushions. She snapped it off between her small teeth.

‘Misou, stop fussing and drink up. I think you and I should get roaring drunk together one night.’

She laughed politely; it would take her a while to thaw out. Him too – he felt brittle, dreamlike again.

‘Have another.’ She passed him the cheese straws. ‘But don’t spoil your appetite. Sorry.’ The plate bumped his hand. ‘Did that hurt?’

‘No.’ He took two cheese straws quickly. ‘Nothing hurts now. These are delicious.’

She filled the small silence that followed by saying: ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, do you have any pills you should be taking, any special med—’

‘Mother,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m all right now. It wasn’t an illness. I’m as fit as a fiddle – in fact, I’d like to go for a spin on Pa’s motorbike after lunch.’

‘I don’t think he’d mind – that sounds fun. He doesn’t use it now.’ He felt her flinch, but he would have to start breaking her in gently. ‘It’s in the stable. There should be enough petrol,’ she added bravely.

‘For a short spin, anyway.’

‘So nothing hurts now?’

‘No.’ It was no good, he simply couldn’t talk about it to her – not now, maybe never – this wrecking ball in the middle of his life that had come within a hair’s breadth of taking pretty much everything: his youth, his friends, his career, his face.

‘Well, all I can say,’ she shot a darting look in his direction, ‘is that you look marvellous, darling.’

Which didn’t sit well with him either. His mother had always cared too much about how people looked. The reproach in her voice when she pointed out a nose that was too long or somebody who had a big stomach seemed to indicate that its owner was either careless or stupid. or both. Some of the boys in the ward had been so badly burned they were scarcely recognisable, but they were still human beings underneath it.

‘Do I?’ Impossible to keep the note of bitterness out of his voice. ‘Well, all’s well that ends well.’

And now he had hurt her and felt sorry. She’d moved to the other end of the sofa, he felt her bunched up and ready to fly.

‘That music was wonderful,’ he said. ‘Thank you for putting it on. All we heard in hospital was a crackly wireless and a few concerts.’

‘Any good?’

‘Not bad, one or two of them.’
A singer?
He imagined her saying it, and then, with her sharp professional face on,
Was she any good?

‘I was thinking in hospital,’ he said, ‘that I’d like to play the piano again.’

‘Are you sure?’ She looked at him suspiciously, as if he might be mocking her.

‘Yes.’

She took his hand in hers. ‘Do you remember last time?’ She was looking pleased. ‘Such sweet little hands.’ She waggled her own elegant fingers in a flash of diamonds. ‘Like chipolatas. First Chopsticks,’ she mimed his agricultural delivery, ‘then Chopin. You know, you could have been very, very good,’ she said, ‘if you’d stuck at it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. It was an old argument between them. ‘I did Walter Gieseking a great good turn when I gave up.’

‘And what about you nearly amputating these
sweet little hands
?’ he teased. They’d had a corker of a row one day, when he’d been racing through ‘Für Elise’ as loudly as he could, loving the racket he was making. She’d ticked him off for not playing with more light and shade, and he’d roared: ‘I’M A LOUD-PLAYING BOY AND I LIKE THINGS FAST.’ And she – oh, how quick and ferocious her temper was in those days – had brought the lid down so sharply she’d missed his fingers by a whisper and blackened the edge of the nail on his little finger.

She covered her face with her hands. ‘Why was I so angry?’

Because, he wanted to say, it mattered to you; because some things affected you beyond reason.

‘I don’t know,’ he said gently, seeing her furious face again, under the lamplight, stabbing at her tapestry.

‘Listen, you loud-talking boy,’ she said. She stood up and walked towards the kitchen. ‘Lunch is ready. Let’s eat.’

‘Yes, Mis, let’s eat.’ It seemed the safest thing to do.

When they faced each other over the kitchen table, there didn’t seem quite enough of them to fill the room, but at least she hadn’t asked him yet about Annabel, a relief, for she would be upset – she’d approved of Annabel’s clothes, her thinness, her clever parents – and then she’d be fiercely indignant at anyone foolish enough to reject her son. He’d rehearsed a light-hearted account of the episode, in truth, he was almost relieved now that Annabel had gone: one less person to worry about when he flew again.