Piece of Cake (2 page)

“Do stop worrying, Mother,” said Cattermole. “Have you noticed, Pip …” He yawned, and closed his eyes. “… noticed that Mother always starts worrying when it's too late to do anything?”

Nobody answered. After a while a bird started to sing in a nearby tree. Stickwell swore at it and it stopped.

“I'm in enough trouble with the Ram as it is, that's all,” Cox said. He had a long nose, slightly crooked where he had broken it by running into a gatepost at the age of six, and this made his face look even longer and narrower than it was. “He really hates me. You should have heard him go on about it. He went on and on and on.”

“Quite right,” said Cattermole. “It wasn't your Hurricane. It belonged to the British taxpayer. You ought to be more careful with other people's property. You behaved abominably.”

“I got the lights confused, that's all. I thought green meant up
and red meant down. Next thing I knew the prop was chucking out great lumps of grass and the Ram was giving me hell.”

Stickwell groaned, and rolled onto his side. “Think yourself lucky,” he said. “Chap I knew did what you did, only he cartwheeled the whole bloody kite, ass over tit, right down the runway.”

“It's those damn indicator lights,” Cox said. “I expect he got confused.”

“He certainly looked confused,” Stickwell said. “His kneecaps were all mixed up with his shoulder blades.”

Cattermole made himself comfortable against the tree-stump. He had a tall, beefy body topped with a surprisingly small and delicate head; he looked like an idealized Grecian prizefighter, which was totally misleading: he was strong but he was lazy. “Anyway, the Ram's in London,” he said. “Won't be back till lunch.”

Mother Cox prowled around, kicking at dandelion heads which stood white in the darkness. The seedballs shattered and vanished immediately in the still air. “We really ought to start walking, you know,” he said.

“Where did you get that damn silly golliwog, Moggy?” asked Stickwell.

“Chap gave it me at the party.”

“Jolly decent of him.”

“Yes, that's what I thought. Mind you, I had to fight him for it.”

“That wasn't very nice.”

“Exactly what I told him, Sticky. He wouldn't let go of it. ‘Look, old chap,' I said to him, ‘this golliwog's no damn use to you any more,' I said, ‘one of its arms has come off,' I said. Which it had. Then he said something rather unkind so I punched him in the eye and after that he gave me the whole golliwog, arm and all, without a word.”

“Really? Not a word?”

“Not one sodding syllable, Sticky.”

“Well, it's the thought that counts, I suppose … Hello, here comes a bus.”

Mother Cox looked around eagerly. It was not a bus but a tractor, bellowing and backfiring as the driver gunned the engine. It slowed as it neared them and Pip Patterson shouted from the
driver's seat: “Jump up! Can't stop! Jump up!” He was towing a farm-wagon. They scrambled aboard it and Patterson accelerated with a suddenness that jolted them off their feet. Stickwell, sprawling in a scattering of straw, saw a light waving in the roadway. Someone was chasing them. In the distance he saw a house, its upper windows lit; as he watched, more lights came on. The man with the flashlight kept chasing until they reached a downward slope and the tractor outpaced him.

Its passengers clung to the sides of the wagon as Patterson, with no headlights to guide him and with the rush of air making him blink and squint, charged down the gradient. The tractor tires bounced on bumps and spat up a thin spray of gravel. Moggy Cattermole tried lying on his front, but the bouncing hurt too much; so he lay on his back, which hurt even more; so he got to his feet just as the wagon hit a pothole and knocked him down. “Holy hell!” he shouted. Sparks were streaming out of the exhaust.

At the foot of the hill the road funneled into a narrow bridge over a river. Patterson caught a glimpse of shining water, scarred by the panicking flight of duck. He tightened his grip on the thin wheel and aimed for the center. As the walls closed in he shut his eyes. The tractor rushed across, its trailer savagely whacking the stone buttresses and leaving a trail of ragged splinters.

When the rumbling ceased, Patterson looked again. They were dashing past a sleeping pub; in the past few minutes the sky had lightened and he read the sign:
The Carpenter's Arms.
A crossroads lay ahead, but he couldn't read the signpost and he had to guess, so he guessed they should turn left and at the last instant changed his mind and turned right, winding the wheel as if the tractor were a boat and feeling it lean all its weight onto one side like a boat. Shouts came from behind, desperate enough to penetrate the din, and he glanced back to see the wagon skidding, its tail drifting wide as the wheels lost their grip. A screech of metallic pain came from the towbar. The wagon strained to escape, failed, got dragged back into line. The shouts were audible as curses. Patterson waved, and settled down to master the controls.

He barreled across the countryside for a further ten miles while the dawn gradually bleached out the night and at last the sun nudged over the horizon. They might have traveled all the way to the airfield like this if Patterson, getting too cocky, hadn't attempted
a flashy gear change while going up a steep hill. He missed the gear and had to come to a halt. He found the gear and tried to restart but released too much power. The tractor leaped forward and snapped the towbar. The wagon rolled downhill for ten yards and gently wedged itself in a hedge.

Patterson switched off the engine, set the brake and climbed down.

“You're a maniac, Pip,” said Moggy Cattermole. He sat on the trailer, brushing straw and bits of dried dung from his clothes. His hands were filthy and his forehead was bruised. Mother Cox wore a mustache of dried blood. Sticky Stickwell had rolled in an agricultural chemical of sulfurous yellow. “You're a raving maniac,” Cattermole accused. “Why did you have to drive like that?”

“Someone was chasing us. Had to get away. After that I couldn't seem to get the speed down.”

“Whose is this stuff, anyway?” Cox asked.

Patterson strolled to the tail of the wagon. “Harold Hawthorn, it says here. Nutmeg Farm, High Dunning. Why?”

“Well, we pinched it from him, didn't we? I mean,
you
pinched it.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the bloke who was chasing us pinched it from Harold Hawthorn.”

“Bloody farmers,” Stickwell said. “You can't trust them an inch.”

“Where the hell did you find it, Pip?” Cattermole asked.

“In a farmyard. Inside a barn, actually.”

“There you are, then,” Stickwell said. “Obviously a dump for hot tractors. Bloke chasing us was some sort of agricultural fence. No wonder he didn't want us to get away. We know his guilty secret.”

“Oh, balls,” said Mother Cox.

“How did you start it?” Cattermole asked.

“The key was in the ignition,” Patterson said. “I just swung the handle and off she went, first time.”

“This must have been their getaway tractor,” Stickwell said, brushing yellow powder out of his hair.

“With a great big farm-wagon hitched on behind?” Cox said.

“For the rest of the gang, Mother,” Cattermole explained
patiently. “We've stumbled on a very big organization. We shall probably get a medal for this.”

“We'll get a colossal bollocking from the Ram if he ever hears about it,” said Cox.

“The Ram's in London,” Stickwell said. “God's in his heaven and I'm damn hungry. There's nothing like a good healthy spew in the fresh country air to give a chap an appetite.”

Patterson climbed back onto the tractor. “Home for breakfast, chaps!” he said. But this time the tractor refused to start. They took turns winding the starting-handle; nothing came out of the engine but soft grunts and feeble puffs of black smoke. “Buggeration,” Patterson said.

“Come on, let's walk,” Mother Cox urged. He was growing more and more nervous as the sun rose.

They set off. Stickwell and Cattermole began a serious conversation about the significance of becoming twenty-one; the day before had been Pip Patterson's twenty-first birthday. “It's a definite milestone,” Stickwell said. “Right to vote, for a start. And you can get married. Take out hire-purchase debts. Go bankrupt. Get a mortgage.”

“Who cares about all that junk?” said Moggy Cattermole, who was only twenty. “I'm not interested in any of it. Are you, Pip?”

“Not much.” Patterson was beginning to worry about the broken tractor and its battered trailer.

“The big danger, as I see it, is women,” said Stickwell. “Once they know you're twenty-one and therefore legally available, they'll do absolutely anything to get your bags off.” Patterson looked interested. “Pure and innocent they may appear,” Stickwell warned, “but you can't trust 'em in a dark corner on a hot night. That's my experience.”

“You don't say?” Patterson was intrigued.

“My father once told me that all women are natural predators,” Cattermole remarked. “He said they'd strip you naked and suck your blood and then send you the bill.”

“There you are, then,” Stickwell said.

“Mind you, he had five sisters and three daughters. And two wives.”

“Outnumbered from the bally start, poor devil,” Stickwell said.

“What d'you mean, Sticky: they'll do anything to get a chap's bags off?” Patterson asked.

“I think we're going the wrong way,” Cox said. Patterson looked at him with dislike. “Well, it's no good us walking
away
from Kingsmere, is it?” Cox demanded. “I think we ought to find someone and ask.”

They stopped walking.

“What a bore you are, Mother,” Cattermole said. “I certainly shan't invite you to
my
twenty-first party.”

Heavy trampling sounds came from the other side of a hedge, and two large horses looked at them. “Hello!” Stickwell exclaimed. One of the horses blew smoke through its nostrils.

“I think they're trying to tell us something,” Patterson said.

Hector Ramsay couldn't wait. He had never had the gift of patience.

When he was a boy his restlessness had been quite endearing, sometimes; at boarding school, or at home in Hampshire, during the school holidays, young Hector had always been the leader of the gang, not interested in explaining or persuading but so brimful of energetic ideas that he usually got his own way by sheer thrustfulness. Or, looking at it another way, obstinacy.

As a young man he went on attacking life with a sledgehammer, as if it were some gigantic clam to be forced open. This was less attractive than his boyish gusto; it showed a relentless determination to succeed that most people found praiseworthy at first, a bit grim after a while, and frankly bloody tedious before long. If it was theoretically admirable for a seventeen-year-old to know so precisely what he wanted—he wanted to be the youngest-ever wing commander in RAF Fighter Command—in practice Hector Ramsay's single-minded ambition was a bore. Even his father (by then retired from the Royal Navy) found him wearing, and his mother had long ago given him up, ever since the time he refused to attend his eldest brother's wedding because it clashed with Open Day at the local RAF station. There had been the most enormous family bust-up over that. In the end Hector had gone with them to the church, slouching and silently contemptuous of the whole silly ritual; but he walked out halfway through the ceremony. He got into one of the hired cars and had himself driven to the airfield,
where he spent the rest of the day happily climbing in and out of cockpits. There was an even louder family bust-up when he got home, although his mother admitted to herself that she was wasting her breath.

Hector knew what he wanted, and he couldn't wait to get it. She sometimes wondered why he was so impatient. Because he was the youngest son? Because both his brothers had already done well in the Navy? Was that why Hector chose the RAF? Was he self-centered because he wanted to be a fighter pilot, or did he want to be a fighter pilot because that satisfied his self-centered nature? It depressed her that he was so intensely narrow, and sometimes she even wondered about his brain. His had been a difficult birth, late and awkward and full of pain. Hector hadn't seemed to want to come into the world at all, he'd been dragged into it; and ever since he discovered what it was like, all his energies had been spent on getting far away from it. In a fighter plane. Alone.

So everyone was relieved when Hector Ramsay won a scholarship to the RAF College at Cranwell. He did well, got his commission, got his wings, got his posting to a fighter squadron. The family relaxed and began to treat him like a normal human being. There was even a spell when it almost looked as if Hector might get engaged.

He was flying Gloster Gauntlets—fixed-undercarriage biplanes with twin machine-guns, pure
Dawn Patrol
stuff—from an airfield in Cambridgeshire. She was Australian, a diplomat's daughter, studying at one of the art schools on the fringe of the University. Her name was Kit and she had a freckled candor—together with legs like a dancer's and breasts like grapefruit—that surprised and captivated him. She took him to bed (in her rented cottage at Grantchester) on his third visit, and that experience made him eager to return. What on earth did she see in him? Well, he wasn't bad-looking, he had a kind of unblinking concentration that amused her, and he was in a different class from those flannelled undergraduates, all books and bats and bicycles, who jostled for her attention: at least Hector Ramsay
did
something; sometimes she could even smell the engine-oil on him when he came straight from flying. But what attracted her most was his enormous
need.
Here was a man so isolated that he could not reach out. Kit gave him her love, or so she believed, as an act of lifesaving. He was irresistible. For a
few weeks they were like a nut and a bolt: gratifying when together, useless when apart. It wasn't even necessary for them to say very much; they knew what they thought and they knew what they wanted. Once, when they were getting into bed, she paused and sat back on her heels and said, “Presumably you're in love.” Hector crouched with his chin on his knees and hugged his bare legs, while he thought about it. “Presumably,” he said. They looked at each other. He was thinking:
Am I? How do I know? How can I tell?
She saw the act of thought crease his forehead like wind ruffling water, and she laughed. He raised his eyebrows. “Tell you later,” she said. But she never did.