Lost in the Flames (26 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We were working out which raids we’d both been on. Quite a few towards the end of the war, it seems – he started his tour in January ’45 and was tour-expired by early April. That was a pretty intensive period of punishment we were dishing out then.’

They sat in silence as the taxi accelerated along the outer lane. She guessed Ralph was thinking about Jacob too now, but he shifted the subject when he spoke. She squeezed his hand, a reflex. It was warm, hers was cold. It had always been that way, this difference between them. The taxi sped along in the orange glow of the streetlights.

‘Do you think we did wrong back then?’ he asked suddenly. ‘It does bother me sometimes.’

‘No, I’m sure you didn’t do wrong,’ she said. What was he suggesting? How could Jacob have done anything wrong?

‘It was a pretty awful thing, though.’

‘Plenty of awful things happened back then. You had a job to do and you did it, that’s all.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said.

The taxi pulled up the drive and along the avenue of chestnut trees and Rose walked up the steps as Ralph paid the driver. They went into the kitchen and Rose put the kettle on the hob.

‘I think I need another drink,’ said Ralph. ‘Would you like one?’

‘Maybe a small brandy,’ she said, knowing she shouldn’t.

He poured the brandy from the decanter on the chiffonier and passed it to Rose and then took a tall glass for himself and shovelled in some ice and filled in the gaps with whisky. They went out onto the patio and sat in a pair of chairs beneath the wisteria. Ralph stretched out his legs and drained his glass, then got up to make himself another and she watched through the gap in the curtains as he filled the tumbler and tipped the liquid down his throat, then filled up the glass again. He came and sat next to her again and lit a cigarette. She noticed the glowing ash quiver in his trembling hand. He saw her looking.

‘Chilly isn’t it?’ he said, grinning in that way that always annoyed her now.

She had become accustomed to the tell-tale signs that the war brought on when it intruded again on his thoughts. It was normally only the alcohol that invited it in. After a heavy night she would find specks around the house where he had sat with a cigarette, unseeing eyes retracing long-lost events, his hands twitching the ash unseen to the floor, the empty bottle tossed into a hedge afterwards to be found the next day by the gardener.

Rose recognised the signs now.

‘So did you enjoy the evening?’ he asked at last.

‘It was the same as last time, wasn’t it? The same arguments, the same controversies. You get tired of hearing the same thing after a while. But it’s so unfair, how people speak so badly of you all these days, like you were criminals or something, like you should feel guilty for what you did.’

‘It’s hard to face the truth sometimes, isn’t it?’ he mused, after a moment’s pause.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Nothing really.’

‘Look Ralph, let’s not talk about the war now,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about what we’re doing tomorrow.’

‘No, no, let’s talk about the war some more,’ he said. ‘Tonight of all nights I think perhaps we should.’

‘Come on Ralph, darling, let’s just …’

‘No, let’s not just … when you said in the taxi, you said we had a job to do and we did it …’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I’m not sure that’s correct, strictly speaking. In my case, I mean.’

‘What on earth are you on about? You flew far more ops than most.’

‘Yes, but the others …’

‘It wasn’t your job to die, Ralph.’

‘But Rose, there’s something I’ve never told you.’

‘Well maybe it’s best you don’t tell me now, then. You’re far too drunk and so am I.’

‘No, really Rose …’

‘Ralph, you’re drunk, leave it to the morning.’

‘No, Rose, no, I can’t leave it till the morning. The morning might never come.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, dear, it’s nearly morning now.’

But he did not laugh in response as she had hoped he might.

‘Listen to me Rose,’ he said, leaning across towards her so that his face was close to hers and she could smell the deadening breath of spirits as he spoke. ‘That night over Dortmund, what really happened Rose, I wasn’t flying the plane, you know that don’t you? I wasn’t the pilot then.’

‘What do you mean you weren’t flying the plane? Who was?’

‘Jacob was.’

‘Why on earth was that?’

‘I wasn’t well, hadn’t been for a long time. My nerves were shot, you see. It was the flak and the fighters, Rose, they got to me in the end. I flew the plane out but I didn’t always fly it back, not after the first twenty ops or so. Once we’d bombed, the thought of the fighters on the way home, sometimes I just couldn’t cope. So Jacob helped me out.’

‘Jacob flew the plane?’

‘He never told you? He said he wouldn’t. A family secret, he called it. What’s in the family stays in the family, he said.’

‘No, he never told me. Not then, not since.’

‘Not since? What do you mean, not since?’

‘Oh my God …’

She looked at him, horrified at what she had said.

‘What, Rose? What?’

‘He’s come back, Ralph. He’s come back at last, he’s come back from the war.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘He survived, Ralph. Oh, he isn’t the same at all, but he’s back all right. They sent him home in ’49, what was left of him. He’s burned Ralph, burned away, inside and out. But he’s still Jacob. He’s still my Jacob.’

‘Good lord,’ said Ralph. His voice came clear and flat and low, barely a whisper now, and he bowed his head and waited for her to put an arm around him and stroke his hair like she used to do and tell him it did not matter now, too many years had passed and life moves on, but she sat still and quiet and when he looked up he saw tears in her eyes and her tears overflowed and rolled down her face and she stood up and went into the kitchen and took a napkin from a drawer and dabbed at her eyes. When she looked up, Ralph was in the doorway.

‘Tell me all this doesn’t matter now, Rose. Tell me, please.’

‘Ralph, I’m sorry …’

‘Please, Rose.’

‘Ralph, I’m so sorry, I can’t.’

‘He always meant far more to you, didn’t he?’

She shook her head.

‘Didn’t he?’

‘I was meant to be with him, that’s all,’ she sobbed. ‘And I was cheated out of it.’

He approached her and attempted to place an arm around her shoulder. She looked up at him, her Ganges-delta eyes now flooded with tears and clogged with the black silt of mascara. She eased his arm away and spoke in a raised whisper, as if her mouth were ashamed of the words that it uttered.

‘How the hell did you have the gall not to tell me about this before, about Jacob flying the Lanc? Isn’t it the skipper who stays with the bloody plane?’

‘Rose, that’s not fair.’

‘Do you think I could have married you if I’d known?’

He stared at her blankly.

‘Well, do you?’ she cried, and she hurried away up the stairs and
Ralph heard the bedroom door as it closed.

He went out onto the patio and walked across the lawn to the place by the alders where the punts lay tied up and he slipped the chains out of the mooring and stepped aboard and pushed himself out into the middle of the lake. He felt for the length of fishing line and pulled it up to see what was on the end. Gin, half a bottle, the label had come off in the water but he knew the shape. He unscrewed the cap and held up the bottle and tipped a long stream in the approximate direction of his mouth and felt it splash upon his face and into his eyes. He cursed the wasted liquid and held the empty bottle over the side of the punt and pushed it under the surface, letting the air bubble up out of it until the cold water had filled the empty vessel and he let it go and the bottle fell away to the silted-up bed at the bottom of the lake. He lay back on the punt’s cold hard boards and watched the clouds scud across the moon and saw the vapour trails of departed planes high above, dispersing now in parallel lines, floating apart up there, never again to meet, a strip of silent sky always between them now.

The first time Jacob and Rose met after that was for tea. Rose drove up to Chipping Norton when Ralph was away overnight with BOAC, somewhere down in Italy. Then out into the Cotswolds with Jacob on the bike that Norman had given him, Jacob revving the engine hard as they tore along the lanes, Rose clutching her arms around him, burying her face in his back, breathing him in, a happiness in her lungs, clearing out the smoke. They stopped at Chipping Campden, left the bike by the medieval market and found a tea room. Tentative and whispering they sat, Jacob and his girl, aware of the gaze of the others, their eyes burning in on him, Jacob dipping his head as he stirred his tea and Rose glaring back at them when she knew he could not see, wanting to say something, to put them right, but not wanting to cause a scene, fearing embarrassment, for him more than for her. And Jacob not caring, just glad to be there, with her, with Rose, the reason he had got through his war, his Rose again now for an hour or a day, husband and wife again, pretending to be, as if they had never been stolen away. And then out again to the bike with a bellyful of scones and Rose with her face buried again in the folds of his jacket as the wind ripped at her hair and the
wasps flailed by and flecked her, and her arms again around his chest, a thing that she thought could never be again, and he could not see her now, could not see her tears.

After that she came whenever she could, and she was thrilled at Ralph’s promotion to long-haul flights.

‘That’s wonderful, darling! I’m so proud of you.’

Wonderful to be gone for three days, into the car and up into Oxfordshire and down to Elm Tree Farm where Jacob stayed when she was there, and in the top room they lay together in the still of the night and when she woke she found him in the chair by the window, looking out over the fields where Norman walked among his cows, Norman thinking as he walked, thinking of Jacob and Rose and how a wrong can sometimes be a right.

‘These are for you, son,’ said Norman one day after Rose had gone. Jacob took the cage. The birds sat together. One looked at him, rolled an eye, cooed.

‘Just like Eric and Penelope,’ Jacob said.

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Where did you get them?’

‘Where I get everything. From the wood.’

‘Thought so. Thank you, Norman, they’re marvellous.’

Jacob took the birds up to Mill View Cottage and put them in the out-house’s empty cage and closed the door. Upstairs in his room he took out the box of eggs he had taken when he was a boy, when Norman showed him where to go to find the best ones, clambering up the trees together, Norman gripping a branch beneath him, waiting to catch him should he fall, and Jacob peering into the nest, taking one egg, leaving the others, and Jacob’s smile when he saw the thing, the specks and freckles, like the specks and freckles that the summer sun lifted up on Rose’s face, and he would take it and pass it to Norman, and they would walk home together discussing the best way of putting a hole in each side and blowing out the thing that was in it.

Jacob divided his days now between Mill View Cottage and Elm Tree Farm. He kept his gun at the farm, the gun that Norman had given him.

‘I’ve bagged many a brace with this,’ Norman said. ‘Had it for years. It’ll do you well.’

And Jacob used it in the woods at dusk, navigating the paths that Norman had shown him in his youth, the roosting points and the low boughs with the fat silhouettes dark against the trees, the searchlight beam of Jacob’s torch and him peering down the sight in the dark, the flash of the gun and a flying thing falling now, tipping away down, a burning bird, and the rummage in the nettles, their sting on his skin not bothering him now, nothing there to feel it, and Norman down the hill in the farm washing off the smell of muck and hearing the gun and little nervous ripples slipping across the water of the bath, Norman’s physical response to his wondering if he had done right to give him the gun, might Jacob have used it on himself this time, blowing away the face he had been left with? But no, he concluded, as long as there was Rose there was hope, and he must find a way to persuade the boy that he and Rose must be together again. Then the sound of knocking on the door as Norman was dressing, and Vera in the hall, letting him in, Jacob’s voice full of the wood and what it gave him now, life again, breathing it in, and the birds on the table and Vera cutting out their guts and their feathers plucked out, loading up the kitchen table with their beauty, Jacob and Norman swigging as they plucked and Vera bustling around above. Then the birds going in the oven and Jacob thinking, dwelling on it, watching the roasting birds, roasting golden brown until their skin cracked and spat with fat the way skin does in a burning plane. The way it does in a burning building too, he knew that too. The doctor had told him so, what it was like beneath the bombs, in the firestorm, Hamburg 1943.

It went on this way for months, stretching into a year, then two. Always the same toxic mix of happiness and grief, a love hauled back from the edge of death, kept alive on life support, suffering, better perhaps to let it die.

‘I’d still come back to you, Jacob,’ she said. ‘Even now.’

‘With the little one and everything?’

‘Yes, everything.’

‘But you can’t.’

‘I would, for you I would.’

‘It’s impossible, Rose. It’s a dream, let it go.’

And then that last time, in 1952, at the house in Surrey, Ralph away again, Jacob turning up on his bike, the kid left with a baby-sitter for the afternoon, Rose and Jacob out on the lake in the punt, heads thrown back and staring at the sky. Like they did when they made love, when they were young.

‘Jacob,’ she said at last, as the swallows dipped and turned above the lake. ‘Jacob, you’re going to have to take me back. Take me back or you won’t be able to see me again …’

‘Don’t do that to me, Rose. Please don’t do that. Let us carry on like this. It does no harm, Ralph needn’t know. And it’s not as if I’m a threat to him.’