The Other Side of Love (39 page)

She spent all of her time with Peter. He drank steadily. He did not make love to her. On the third evening he obtained tickets for No Time for Comedy. He laughed loudly at Rex Harrison and pretty young Lilli Palmer, and during the intermission gulped down four glasses of a raw biting sherry, the only drink available. When they emerged from the theatre, a narrow crescent moon rode high above them.

“What a divine night,”

Araminta said, hugging him.

“Look at that moon! The one good thing the blackout’s done is give us back our night sky.”

“Let’s feel our way to Rupert’s in Shaftesbury Avenue. Share a bottle of champagne.”

“No champers,”

Araminta said firmly.

“We’re going to your room, and I don’t care if the entire staff and every guest at the Savoy sees me.”

“Darling, what’s the difference?”

‘Another problem between us.”

‘One minor lapse does not constitute a problem.”

‘In the great scheme of our dark globe, possibly not.”

They were side by side on the single bed. Her hip nudged

“his gently.

“Oh, Peter, you silly mutt. D’you think I don’t know you’ve had a ghastly time?”

“

“I myself have often babbled doubtless of the foolish past: babble, babble: our old England may go down in babble at last.”

“

“Right ho. At Eton you had to memorize reams of Tennyson.”

He ran his hand down her side, his fingers tracing the perfect curve of her buttocks.

“What a waste, what a reprehensible waste.”

He switched on the bedside lamp.

“Well, better get you home.”

She did not move. One full glowing breast showed above the sheet; the light caught disarranged strands of her thick brilliant hair.

“Why are you being so tiresome? I’m sleeping here tonight.”

248

I

‘What about your father?”

“He thinks I’m going back to Basil Street.”

Peter’s eyes appeared sunken in purple greasepaint.

“Haven’t we just conclusively proved there’s no point to you staying?”

“Stop arguing, darling. You’re not getting rid of me.”

She reached for the light, pulling the little chain.

He put his arms loosely around her.

IV

Awakening in the darkness without any sense of disorientation, she knew immediately that she was in Peter’s hotel room. She reached out her hand, encountering cold rumpled sheets. Turning, she saw the tiny orange circle of a cigarette and a dark shadow. He had opened the blackout curtain and was gazing out at the Thames.

“What’re you doing over there?”

she murmured drowsily.

He returned to sit on the other bed.

“Remembering why I learned to fly,”

he said.

“Somebody put salt on your tail?”

Not responding to her joke, he said:

“The stories of those Great War dogfights over France always seemed the epitome of chivalry. What a silly little chump I was. There’s the smell of burning meat, skin that peels off, a dying friend screeching over your radio.”

His voice wavered, then he said:

“Well, chivalry wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, either. Sweltering in a tin can, vital pieces being lopped off with broadswords.”

“If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad,”

she said.

Kneeling in the darkness between the beds, she took his cigarette to stub out in the ashtray. She pressedŤs cold thighs apart. She had never sunk to practising oral eroticrem, but this was her love, her poor pushed-to-the-edge love. He had drunk himself sodden and found every excuse to put off making love to her because he’d anticipated failure. Another failure would shatter him. Her kissing and light caresses soon made him huge. His hands pulled her hair, gripping her to his groin; and to maintain her balance she clasped his thighs: the tendons were like taut wires. Then, surprisingly, her pulses began to beat violently and her skin heated. Although she did not reach that unattainable orgasm, when she heard his triumphant shout a serene and unselfish kind of joy spread through her. She had succeeded in giving her beleaguered darling what he needed.

ror a long time, neither of them moved: he remained bent over her with his lips pressing against her thick hair; she rested her cheek on the inside of his wet thigh.

Later that night, he was able to make love to her in the conventional way.

249

V

“Will you be stationed in England?”

she asked.

He had been in London six days, and they were in the flat, sitting decorously apart because Mrs Hawkins the charlady was ironing in the kitchen. This was the first time Araminta had permitted herself to question Peter about the future. Pure superstition. In wartime everyone succumbs to some form of superstition, and she nursed a primitive fear that broaching the subject of Peter’s future would hurl him back to combat. (In much the same spirit she had stayed clear of the little lover’s jokes that in the past had sprinkled her conversations lest such quips mark an end to their swift, erratically successful intercourse.) But she could no longer bear her ignorance.

He stared at the vase crowded with daffodils he’d brought her.

“I’d rather hoped so,”

he said.

“Then, you won’t be?”

“There’s talk Rommel’s planning a major offensive.”

She made an inarticulate sound. If Rommel and his Afrika Korps were on the attack, Peter’s wing would remain on Malta or, worse yet, be posted to Libya.

“My parents are coming down to London,”

he said.

She swallowed sharply.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

He looked at his hands. The well-shaped nails were bitten to the quick.

“Mother’s letter said they wanted to spend the day.”

“Alone with you?”

“Alone.”

“They want to talk about your brother.”

His eyelid fluttered.

“Possibly.”

“It must be a very difficult time for them.”

“Tomorrow’, Peter said,

“is the last day of my leave.”

She rose from the chair, her face wild.

“But … I assumed you had a fortnight.”

“I report at six the day after tomorrow.”

Her stomach lurched sickeningly, and she felt sudden tears prickling. She knew in all decency she ought to urge him to spend a day with his bereaved parents. Instead she found herself saying in a rough tone:

“I can’t help it if I’m greedy. Have lunch with them, darling. The rest of the time belongs to me.”

250

i

Spume gusted out of the darkness against the prow of the Burnsville. Wyatt, using his sleeve to dash the salt water from his eyes, continued to peer ahead. He saw nothing but the faintest hint of luminosity that shone from microscopic sea-creatures embedded within cresting waves. Clouds covered the June night. The French shoreline was blacked out as were the nine small British boats chugging along parallel with the ship. Silence was being Aintained, and the rumble of the choppy sea was loud in his ears - thm and the uneven vibration of the old destroyer’s engine. The Burnswlle, obsolete long before she ploughed across the Atlantic as part of America’s Lend-Lease programme, had been chosen for this commando operation because of her unseaworthiness.

“Well, Kingsmith, what do you make of the operation so far?”

whispered a voice burred with Scotland.

“Can’t tell yet. Have to wait until Edward R. Murrow gives out the scoop.”

It wasn’t much of a wisecrack, but stifled laughter came from the nearby darkness.

“Edward R. Murrow - that’s a bloody good one, Yank.”

Wyatt felt slightly less seasick.

Since they had left Portsmouth he’d been making a supreme ertort not to vomit; to his mind, seasickness would expose his rising barometer of fear. But of course he had only himself to blame that ne was on a commando mission. British and Canadian commando

251

units were trained to swoop across the Channel with a dual intent: to inflict strategic damage and to test the coastal defences. Wyatt had suggested that the American forces needed first-hand information for the future invasion, volunteering his own services. So here he was, scheduled to take part as an observer in the Sixth British Commando Unit’s surprise attack on the huge dry dock that the Germans had constructed just south of Dieppe. At times he felt as if this were all happening in a movie and he could no more be harmed than if he were sitting in a Fox theatre. Then the terror phase would sweep over him and he would recall that commandos with their shoe-polished faces deserved their status as heroes. Casualties on these raids were horrendous.

The boat lurched again, and another burst of icy spray blew spume at him. Unusually cold for June, Kathe, he thought, then wondered why he should be mentally addressing anyone in Nazi Germany.

Sshthwump!

All hell’s about to break loose, he thought, grateful that he was thinking lucidly, without panic.

Wyatt was one of the handful aboard aware that the mission’s true weapon was the Burnsville herself. Hidden above her fuelcompartment were tons of high explosive with delayed-action fuses.

The shore erupted with red tracer shells and glittering orange arcs. Shells resonated noisily, slamming against the Burnsville?, armoured hull.

The deck jerked and shuddered, rearing up.

“Here we go!”

shouted a boyish voice near Wyatt.

“We’ve broken through Jerry’s antitorpedo net!”

Wounded skittered like toys. Wyatt grabbed the rail, reaching out to prevent a shrieking sailor with a chest injury frcjm sliding overboard. The sloping deck was lit by a weird red, pink arfd yellow glare. One of the small boats was ablaze.

Soon, with another thudding dislocation, the Burnsville as planned

- smashed into the dry-dock gate. It seemed like pandemonium with garbled shouts rising above the roaring and popping sounds. Yet there was an order of sorts. British sailors were returning the fire of the German soldiers who kneeled on the dock aiming rifles. Other British seamen hastily shifted the wounded. Commandos were leaping ashore. Stukas already howled down, strafing. Bullets thwacked on the deck.

Wyatt’s assignment was to remain aboard to watch the time-bombs being set. He considered himself an agnostic, yet he was muttering a prayer to the Episcopal Christ of his childhood as he struggled along the slanting companionways to the fuelcompartments. He would have offered up a Hebrew prayer to his father’s God, if he’d known the language. All possible invocations were required.

252

One mistake in setting the charges or one lucky German bullet and they’d never find the pieces of anyone aboard the Burnsville.

II

The two hours in the dry dock jumped without regard to the normal passage of time. Minutes raced as Wyatt watched the intricacies of setting delicate mechanisms, slowed when he heard the shriek of a Stuka.

At 0200, departure-time, Wyatt, bulky in his life-jacket, was slithering down a rope. His gloves had gone overboard when he helped with the wounded, his palms were coated with some kind of acid from the engine room. The rough wet manila hemp abraded his palms yet there was no pain whatsoever. The icy salt water stung pleasantly like aftershave. Striking out in his powerful Australian crawl, he headed for the nearest small boat. Shrapnel and bullets splashed into the dark sea around him.

He heard a feeble cry.

Veering through oil globules towards the sound, he reached a barely conscious commando floating in a Mae West. As he paddled with his burden towards the boat, he heard others shouting for help. Fixing the locations in his mind, he dragged the now unconscious man to waiting hands. He had rescued two others a badly burned petty officer and a bald demolition man with blood streaming down his forehead and was about to set out to where he’d marked another cry from mutilated humanity when a loud precise British voice called from the deck above him.

“You down there! Get the hell aboard! And that’s an order.”

On deck a drenched commando slappfc him on the shoulder.

“If all Yanks are like you, ruddy

“Itler’s goose is cooked.”

He was handed rum-laced tea. As the mug slithered to the deck, breaking, Wyatt saw that his palms were raw meat.

Of the three hundred men who had set out on the raid, half were killed and another thirty taken prisoner.

Predictably, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry immediately brayed the successful repulse of the

“British invasion’. The following afternoon, German and collaborationist French journalists were escorted through the destroyer. A smartly uniformed German naval press attache explained that this old scow was proof that the enfeebled British navy had no teeth left. He was winding up his speech when the delayed-action fuses detonated the hidden explosives. The obsolete destroyer shuddered and arched. With a thunderous roar it came apart. Bodies and debris flew upwards like so many smashed toys. The Burnsville had ripped in half. The

253

blazing bow swept far inside the dry dock. The smoking, burning stern firmly blocked the entry.

The vast German dry-dock facility was demolished beyond all repair.

IV

“What makes you so very cheerful?”

Araminta said.