Lost in the Flames (25 page)

‘No, Rose.’

‘Yes, Jacob. Why not? We didn’t know. If we’d known, it would never have been.’

‘No, Rose. You can’t. It’s better this way.’

‘Then why did you come?’

‘I had to see you. I held out as long as I could. A whole year. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you inconvenience. I should never have come.’

‘No, Jacob. Don’t think that. Please don’t think that.’

When he left she watched him walk across the gravel towards the car where Norman stood, leaning now against the passenger door, waiting for the boy. He put his arm on Jacob’s shoulder and Rose saw him saying something, then looking towards her as he held the door open and he helped Jacob in as the rain started up again. She closed the door and leant against the wall and heard the tyres on the wet gravel as the car pulled away down the drive. She placed her hands upon her belly, held them against the bump, the growth, the growing little piece of Ralph inside of her. Her back slid down the wall and she slumped on the floor and pulled her knees up into her chest and she felt her body
lift and fall as she wept but there was no one there to hold her.

Rose hacked furiously at the mulberry bush with her clippers. She had found another empty bottle hidden away beneath its branches and the bush was paying for it now. Ralph would be home soon, and then she would give him what for. Or perhaps she would ignore it as she usually did, for what good was intervention when things were so wrong? No, she would leave things undecided until he walked through the door, would let her mood decide, her heart would tell her what to do, the usual way. She stopped her hacking and picked at the place where the thorns had got her the previous day, picked off the scab. Then she looked at her watch. He would have landed by now, tucking his usual purchases – a bottle of whisky, a bottle of gin, and two hundred cigarettes – into his suitcase and catching a taxi from the usual place, the driver pointing the bonnet towards the Surrey countryside.

Ralph had been with the airline for two years now and Rose knew he was valued for his calm authority in difficult flying conditions and regularly reproached for his love of a drink or two. His bosses had warned him the previous year that the latter must be curtailed. She had found their letter, hidden away in his desk, and he sought help at a clinic with some success, but the reprieve could only be temporary and when he was off duty for a few days she knew he would be back at the cabinet and half-empty bottles would find their way into the unlikeliest of places, under the bushes by the patio, hung overboard from one of the old punts on the lake by a long length of fishing line so that it drifted concealed in the water – chilled and ready to serve – or behind a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare on the top shelf in his father’s old study.

Rose heard Ralph’s taxi approaching now along the avenue of trees and then the twist of his key in the heavy oak door. From where she stood out of sight in the kitchen she could smell the lilies he had sent her the previous day, the usual peace-offering ahead of his return, their perfumed pink fronds bowed over the side-table on which they sat in their vase in the light airy hall. Two or three flies buzzed about in the sunlight that was streaming in through the door at the end. Off to one side was the oak-panelled study lined with books. On the other lay
the sitting room, with a leather armchair each side of the fire where they sat on winter evenings when he wasn’t flying. His frequent trips did not bother her now, she had been used to far worse in the war, and she had recently read that commercial aviation was even safer than travelling by car. It was the motorbikes that most unnerved her now, even if when she was younger she had liked to ride at speed, sitting behind him with her arms round his chest and the wind in her hair as they flew along country roads together. In the year after the war, he had made frequent trips to see her, his behaviour somehow dutiful, harbouring an obligation the reason for which she could not quite perceive, and she had sensed in him something lost and alone, something that reminded her of Jacob – perhaps it was the way he spoke about what they had done in the war, the language the men shared, the kites and the prangs and the wizard shows, and that look in their eyes sometimes, that faraway look. This comfortable familiarity hung its sticky web around her and though she pushed the spider away it was inevitable, the first fleeting kiss, then the longing – for Jacob or something that somehow resembled him – and the guilty relief when she heard the engine returning again the following week, revving up the engine of her heart, stoking it with fuel, low-grade fuel but fuel all the same, and she ignored the disapproving looks of Alfred and Elizabeth from across the street and Vera’s pointed questions, and Norman’s absolute refusal to see her, to let her set foot near Elm Tree Farm. And when she came down to talk to Vera one day, Norman answered the door and spat out the words, ‘So soon? How can you forget Jacob so soon?’ and he slammed the door shut in her face.

‘I haven’t forgotten him,’ she said when Vera came to see her later. ‘That’s just the point, I can’t forget him, I have to fill the void and Ralph is the closest I’ll ever get to being with Jacob again.’

Now Rose heard Ralph pushing the door open, then the sound of him placing his case on the floor in the hall where he always left it, his footsteps past the lilies, and then he was in the room and Rose was there, in a worn-out summer dress and a hat and a bunch of fresh-cut flowers in her hands, held in front of her like a wedding posy or a wreath.

She was still young until you got up close and saw the lines that life had left upon her face, the Ganges-delta of creases around each eye, a little map of sadnesses etched out by the erosive power of tears.

‘Hello darling,’ she said lightly. ‘How was your trip?’

‘Average,’ he said. ‘A bit of light turbulence over the Alps, nothing more than that. Oh, and the route took us over the Ruhr, all lit up like a Christmas tree. And bloody Perkins was asking about the war again, how could we have done it, all those women and children down below.’

‘Ignore him, dear. He’s just an air steward. He should stick to serving Martinis.’

‘That’s exactly what I told him. Anyway, darling, we should be getting ready, we’ve got this do tonight. I told the taxi to come back at six. We need to be there for seven.’

Ralph made himself a long drink and Rose heard him opening the door onto the patio overlooking the lake as she went upstairs. She sat on the bed and took the small picture frame from the shelf and looked at the photo, the slightly blurred black and white image of Jacob in his uniform sometime in 1944, the year they had married. She touched the glass with a fingertip and held it there for a second as she always did and wondered now what might have been, if only she had known. Then she put the photo back on the shelf and slipped out of her dress.

Ralph heard the rush of the shower and he went back into the kitchen and made himself another drink, slightly stronger this time, and he sat down again in the late afternoon sun. He wondered what the evening would bring, good memories and bad he supposed, perhaps a few faces he knew, morphed by years that had sprung upon them suddenly. He had been in touch off and on with one or two members of his last crew and he had always said he intended to make it along to another of these squadron reunions one day. He heard the shower go off and he drained his glass and went upstairs to prepare for the night ahead.

The reunion dinner started slowly, a room of squadron men with their wives, distanced from the events of five years before by more than time. The world had changed and they lived cut off now from those with whom they had shared the fuselages of bellowing planes. But as the drinks were served and the food followed up behind, they found themselves sucked back into the experiences they had shared, if not with the particular men they were talking to now, then with others just like them, and the memories flooded back and the controversies were aired, the moral arguments about the bombing and the way the country and its leaders had rejected these men, turned against what they had
done in their name, and a sense of injustice filled the room alongside the companionship.

Then someone stood to make a speech and a ripple of laughter floated across the room at a wry observation that he made and Rose saw Ralph looking at her, but she was lost in her thoughts, only half listening, and she already knew all the arguments anyway. They made no difference to her now, they could not bring Jacob back whole, could not put him back together again the way that he had been. And when she pictured the men of Bomber Command it was not Ralph she saw, but Jacob, her Jacob – Jacob as she most liked to remember him, in that damned uniform of his, leaving her at the gate of the airfield as he went to join the others in his billet, turning away from her in a sense forever that time while Rose went to pack her things in their regular upstairs room at the pub, a wife packing herself away to become a WAAF again; and Jacob as he was on their wedding day in 1944, his face lit up by the prospect of extended leave punctuating the period between his first and second tours; and that day on the farm with the kite in the wind, laughing together as they tugged it this way and that in a piece of sky that was blue above their heads; and skimming stones when he was a boy and she was almost a woman, down at Pool Meadow where lost coots called to each other across the lake in the dusk; and that first time, not long after he was born, a dim and distant memory, a little bundle of wrinkled flesh in a cot in the top room behind the Victorian glass of the window at the gable end above the pigs and the orchard. And what a thing that little bundle of flesh had become, what meaning he had given her, then and now, a strange haunting constance that had been with her always, even when he had been away in Canada and who-knows-where over Germany – especially when he was who-knows-where over Germany – and after he had gone he was still there too, he was with her this evening, really with her, even more than the flesh and blood that was sitting physically beside her now, this flesh-and-blood Ralph who she had once admired and been fond of but who could never be that other thing that Jacob had been, perhaps still could be again, that magical other thing that could not be explained or understood and had no need to be. She noticed Ralph turn and smile at her again and she smiled back as she always did and he turned away and nodded as the man making the speech listed the erosive effects of the bombing on German resolve and her capacity for the continuance
of war. Rose looked around the room at the men, several tables of them, most now slipping towards lives of comfort, a milestone most of them could never have expected to see, a milestone Jacob had been denied and Ralph had for some reason been destined to achieve, and she wondered again, why him, why had it been him who escaped from the plane, not Jacob, even though Jacob had been in the nose, the bomb-aimer, nearest the escape hatch, and Ralph had been at the wheel. The persistent thought came to her again, that Jacob had been cheated out of it, cheated out of it somehow by Ralph, and she herself had been cheated too, cheated out of a life with Jacob by the man who sat beside her now. But she pushed the thought back into the black box in which she kept it, that dark little place that she did not want to see, that place where the truth had been recorded – she preferred the truth now in dormant form. And she reminded herself that it was of course for all of them that she had at first lobbied and written and chivvied, to her MP and the Prime Minister, and anyone who might listen, that it was on behalf of them all that she so hoped there would one day be recognition, the recognition they had been denied, recognition and forgiveness, though forgiveness was not the right word, and not just for Jacob. Yes, not just for Jacob, for all of them, even if above all for him, for all of them, even for Ralph. Even? Where had that word come from? He wasn’t so bad, she thought, she shouldn’t be so harsh – she had admired him, was fond of him once. That must mean something. She repeated it to herself again – she was fond of him, admired him, used to anyway. But then the dark little box of truth creaked its lid open again and something uncomfortable began to slip out and so she slammed the lid shut and lit another cigarette and sucked the smoke down and poured herself another full glass of wine and took a long swig and then took Ralph’s hand in hers.

She zoned in again now to a speech that was winding down towards its conclusion, recounting the importance of the bombers in clearing the way for the land forces after the invasion of France, and Rose found herself looking around the room again, commenting to herself inwardly now on the wives who accompanied their men this evening, the lucky ones, those who had clung on to their men beyond the limits of the war or had met them in the post-war years, and she saw their broad smiles and their happy sparkling eyes and enthusiastic applause and her own clapping slowed and then stopped, like the slow
winding down of the propeller of an engine that has run out of petrol and died.

‘My heart is my engine,’ she had told Jacob. ‘And love is my fuel …’ But when had the fuel run out? When had it gone? That first time, when his plane was lost and the days went by, one more dawn, one more dusk, no news, just three letters, FTR, failed to return? Or was it the telegram, the uncertain one, the presumption of loss, lost over enemy territory, no word to be given to the press? Or the later telegram, the confirmation, premature though it now proved. Or that knock on the door at the house by the lake in Surrey the other day, Jacob there again on her doorstep. What was left of him.

Ralph was quiet in the taxi on the way home from the dinner and Rose took his hand in hers again.

‘Who was that chap you were talking to at the end of the dinner?’ she asked.

‘Bill something-or-other. Bomb-aimer.’

He slurred his speech slightly. He had drunk more than he should again, she thought. So had she.

‘A bomb-aimer? Like Jacob …’ Rose said.

She regretted the comment as soon as she said it, but Ralph ignored it or pretended to.