The glamour was fading fast. Outside the light was going; the sun was setting behind trees in a clear sky. A W.A.A.F. mess waitress came in and put on the lights and began to draw the black-out. Marshall lit a cigarette and looked around.
He saw Pilot Officer Forbes sitting pretending to read the Illustrated London News and staring at the coal-scuttle. Pilot Officer Forbes had been sitting and pretending to read things for three days now, since Stuttgart. They all knew what was wrong with him; it was Bobbie Fraser. But what could anybody do?
Marshall hesitated, and then crossed over to him. “I caught a bloody nice fish to-day,” he said gently. All the conceit had gone out of his voice. “Like to come and have a look at it? It’s in the dining-room.”
Forbes said without moving: “I don’t think so.”
Marshall said in a low tone: “Come on, old boy. Snap out of it.”
Forbes raised his head. “If you don’t muck off and let me alone,” he said, “I’ll kick your bloody face in.”
Marshall moved away towards the table with the periodicals upon it. Section Officer Robertson looked up from Punch as he passed her. He looked like a little boy, she thought, disappointed because nobody would play with him. It was too bad.
She got up from her chair. “I’ll come and see your fish,” she said, “if I may. Where did you say it was?”
Chapter Two
Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,
And take the harmless folly of the time!
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
And, as a vapour or a drop of rain,
Once lost, can ne’er be found again,
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night.
Then, while times serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying.
ROBERT HERRICK, 1648
Marshall turned to her in pleased surprise. “Would you really like to see it?”
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“Will you listen if I tell you how I caught it?”
“Not for very long. But I’d quite to like to see it.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got it in the dining-room.”
It was the first time that he had spoken to Section Officer Robertson. She had been with the Wing for about a month, but the W.A.A.F. officers kept themselves very much to themselves. They used the ante-room and lunched with the officers, but they had their own sitting-room in their own quarters to relax in. In the mess and in the ante-room they were carefully correct, and brightly cheerful, and rather inhuman; when they wanted to read the Picturegoer or mend their underwear they went to their own place to do it. It was suggested to them when they took commissions that good W.A.A.F. officers did not contract personal relationships with young men on their own station. As candidates for commissions they were serious about their work and desperately keen about the honour of the Service, and so some of them didn’t.
Marshall took the girl through into the deserted dining-room. The fish lay recumbent on its dish, its sombre colours dulled. Death had not improved it; it leered at them with sordid cruelty, and it was smelling rather strong.
Section Officer Robertson said brightly: “I say, what a lovely one! How much does it weigh?”
“Eleven and a quarter pounds.”
“Did you have an awful job landing it?”
“Not bad. I had it on a wire trace; I was spinning for it.”
“In this river here?”
He nodded. “Up at Coldstone Mill.”
“Oh, I know that,” she said. “A great tall building in the fields.”
“That’s the place,” he said. “I got it in the pool below the mill.”
“It must have been lovely out there this afternoon,” she said. “It’s been such a heavenly day.”
Recollection came to him suddenly: the black-haired girl in the grey jersey. “I saw a lot of W.A.A.F.s this morning out in the field doing physical jerks,” he said. “I saw them from my window as I was getting up. Was that you drilling them?”
She nodded. “I took them out because it was so lovely. Were you just getting up then?”
He said indignantly: “I didn’t get to bed till three!”
She laughed. “Sorry.” She turned back to the fish.
“It really is a beauty.” That, after all, was what she had come to say.
She had overdone it. Marshall looked at it with clearer eyes. “I don’t know that I quite agree,” he said. “I think it looks ugly as sin, and it’s starting to ponk a bit. Be better with a lemon in its mouth.”
She laughed again, relaxed. “Well—yes. We’d better open a window if you’re going to leave it here. What are you going to do with it?”
“Have it for lunch to-morrow. Mollie, in the kitchen, said she’d stuff it for me. Would you like a bit?”
“I’d love it. I’ve never eaten pike.”
“All right—I’ll tell them.” He hesitated. “I say, what’s your name? Who shall I say, to give it to?”
“Robertson,” she said. “I do signals.”
“Mine’s Marshall,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I know—R for Robert.”
“That’s right,” he said. “R for Robert.”
She turned away. “I’ve got to go now. You must have had an awful lot of fun this afternoon.”
“Well, yes,” he said. “I did.”
She looked up at him quickly, about to say something; then she checked herself. She turned towards the door. “I’ve got to go now,” she said politely. “Thank you ever so much for showing it to me.”
“Not a bit,” said Marshall. “I’ll tell you when I catch the next one and you can come and see that.”
She laughed self-consciously, and went.
Marshall went back into the ante-room, lit a cigarette, picked up a copy of The Aeroplane, and sank down into a chair before the fire. He was pleasantly tired, and utterly content. He had had a lovely day in the sunshine in the middle of the winter, he had caught the biggest fish he had ever caught in his life and landed it without a net or gaff, and a young woman that he had never spoken to before had been nice to him. She had black hair that she wore in coils above her ears; she had a very clear complexion with slight colour, and a nose that turned up a bit. Section Officer Robertson. He wondered what her Christian name was.
He opened The Aeroplane, and there was a full description of the new Messerschmidt 210, with a double-page skeleton drawing. He was still poring over it twenty minutes later when Pat Johnson came in and looked over his shoulder.
“Bloody interesting, that,” said Mr. Johnson. “See the barbettes?”
Marshall looked up. “Do any good?” He restrained himself from blurting out his own news.
“Ninety-three.” Bogey was seventy-two. “I fluffed the twelfth and lost a ball, and then I couldn’t do a thing.”
“Marvellous afternoon.”
“And how. You do any good?”
“I caught the biggest fish in the river.”
“Better not let Ma Stevens see it, if you want to get it cooked.”
Marshall threw down his paper. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. When I catch fish, I catch fish.”
Flight Lieutenant Johnson looked at him doubtfully. “No, really—did you get one?”
Marshall heaved himself up from his chair. “Come and see.”
He led the way through into the dining-room and snapped on the lights. “God!” said Mr. Johnson. “What an awful-looking thing.”
“What d’you mean? That’s a bloody fine fish. It’s eleven and a quarter pounds.”
“Maybe. It looks like something out of the main sewer.”
Marshall glanced at the clock; it was five minutes past six. “I was going to buy you a noggin,” he said, with dignity
. “Now I shall buy myself two.”
Johnson said: “Has anybody else seen it?”
“Only one of the Section Officers.”
“Which one?”
“The new one, with black hair.”
“The one that runs the signallers?”
“That’s the one.”
“She came and had a look at it?”
“That’s right. I said she could have a bit of it for lunch to-morrow.”
“You did?” Mr. Johnson considered for a minute. The dead fish leered at them from the plate. “You offered her a bit of that?”
“I did. And what’s more, old boy, she said she’d like to have it.”
Johnson looked at the fish again. “Must be in love with you.”
Section Officer Robertson walked down the road to the small house that was the W.A.A.F. officers’ quarters. She went into the little sitting-room. Mrs. Stevens was at the writing-table, finishing a letter. The Section Officer said: “I’ve just seen the most enormous fish.”
The Flight Officer said: “Fish? What fish—where?”
“It was a pike—about that long.” She measured with her hands. “One of the pilots had it on a dish in the dining-room.”
“Peter Marshall? A Flight Lieutenant? He was going fishing this afternoon.”
The girl nodded. “That’s the one.” So his name was Peter. “He said he was going to have it for lunch to-morrow.”
“Oh, he did, did he? Well, I did say that he could if he caught a big fish that would feed several people.”
“It’ll do that all right,” said Miss Robertson. “Probably make us all sick.”
The older woman turned back to the table to address her letter; the girl took her novel from the mantelpiece and sat down to read for an hour before supper. She lit a cigarette, opened the book where the turned wrapper marked the place, and began to read. The book failed to hold her. She sat there smoking by the fire, turning a page from time to time, reading without taking in the meaning of the words.
She disliked being at Hartley. She had held a commission for about a year after a period in the ranks; that year had been spent at a training station in the north of England. She was a north country girl from Thirsk in Yorkshire, country-bred among the moors and streams of the North Riding. She did not like it when she was transferred to Bomber Command and sent down to the south, to Oxfordshire, far from her home. She liked it less when she had been at Hartley for a week. In two raids during that week the Wing lost four machines. She was on duty for one of those raids. She attended at the briefing of the crews, handing the C.O. lists of frequencies and D.F. stations and identification signals for him to read out to them. She was on duty all the night. From midnight onwards she was in and out of the control office till dawn, trying to locate the missing two machines. When she walked back to her quarters in the grey morning it was with the knowledge that two young officers that she had messed with would not return. She was tired and cold and numb as she walked through the station to her quarters; in her bed she wept for a long while in her fatigue and misery before sleep claimed her. Next day she was pale-faced, and very quiet.
In Training Command the casualties had been very few; here they happened necessarily again and again. They did not permanently depress her because she was young; they were, rather, recurrent bouts of a sharp misery that she associated inevitably with Oxfordshire and Hartley aerodrome. Moreover, she had come alone to Hartley; for the first week or two she knew nobody and made no friends. She longed for the cheerful atmosphere of her last station, instead of the grey unhappiness of this operational place.
She sat looking, unseeing, at her book. It had been amazing to hear that young man admit that he had enjoyed his day. And what was more, he obviously had. She had been about to take him up, and ask how anyone could have fun in such an awful hole as Hartley, but she had checked herself. One didn’t say that sort of thing.
Peter Marshall. He looked as if he enjoyed doing things. He said he had been spinning for the pike. After Turin in the black night he must have had a very happy day, and, queerly, she was happy that he had.
She stirred herself to fix attention on her book, and presently she was reading it in earnest.
Marshall and Johnson dined together in the mess, and afterwards walked down with Humphries to the “Black Horse”. It was a fine, windy, starry night and rather cold; they walked quickly through the black lanes, arching a tracery of fine bare branches overhead. In the dark night from time to time they heard the noise of aircraft in the distance; they speculated upon whether an operation was in progress and, if so, who was doing it. They talked shop and only shop all the way down to the “Horse”.
In the saloon-bar there were lights and cheerful talk, and shove-halfpenny, and a table of bar billiards ticking away the sixpences. The room was full of smoke and noise. Most of the men were air crews from the station; there were one or two W.A.A.F.s with them sitting in corners rather diffidently in so masculine a place, and one or two civilians from the district. After an hour or so Marshall found himself telling one of these civilians about his pike.
“Eleven pounds?” the man said. He was a delicate-looking chap about thirty years of age, dressed in a golf coat and grey trousers. “That’s a good weight. Not many pike that weight in the Fittel.” His words were like music to the pilot. “A chap at Uffington got one last year that weighed fifteen and a half pounds—that’s the biggest that there’s been in recent years.”
“Have a beer,” said Marshall. And when he had provided it, he said: “You’ve lived here a long time, I suppose?”
The other laughed. “Eighteen months,” he said. “I come from London. I’m in the motor trade—Great Portland Street. Now I’m in tractors. I run the service depot up the road. Now and again I flog a second-hand Morris, but it’s mostly tractors.”
Marshall said: “A bit quiet after London?”
“God, no. I love it down here.”
“I should have thought it would have bored you stiff.”
The man said: “Well, you might think so. But—what I mean is, up in London you arse around and go to the local and meet the boys and perhaps take in a flick, and then when you go to bed you find you’ve spent a quid and wonder where in hell it went and what you got for it. Down here there’s always something to do.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Well—shooting, for example. I know most of the farmers because I keep the tractors turning over for them, don’t you see? And any time I want to take a gun and shoot a rabbit or a pigeon, they like to have me do it round the farm, see? And it’s all in the day’s work, because you see the tractor at the same time and have a chat with the driver and show him how to change the oil in the back axle, and then you go on and take a pot at a hare or anything that’s going, see? I got a hare last Thursday—no, Friday.”
The pilot said: “Do you know the people out at Coldstone Mill?”
“Up the river—where you caught the pike? It’s on Jack Barton’s land. I don’t know the people in the mill, but I know Jack Barton.”
“Would he let me have a go at the pigeons in the trees below the mill?”
“Sure he would. I sold him an eight-horse-power Ford last June.”
“If you know him, would you like to ask him for me? Or give me a chit to him?”
The man said: “Give me twopence for the call, and I’ll give him a tinkle in the morning.”
“That’s awfully good of you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Marshall. What’s yours?”
“Ellison. If I don’t see you to-morrow night, I’ll leave word with Nellie there, behind the bar.”
They lit cigarettes. Eillison exhaled a long grey cloud. “There’s always something to do here. We had a fox shoot last month, all through the woods. They can’t keep them down, now that the hunt’s packed up.”
“Are there many foxes here?”
“The woods are stiff with them.” The tractor salesman leane
d forward impressively. “I tell you, I could guarantee to take you and show you a fox and a badger both within a quarter of an hour.”
The pilot, fifty miles from London, stared at him incredulously. “You couldn’t!”
“I could.” Neither of them was drunk or anywhere near it, but their inhibitions were relaxed by beer. “I’d take you and show you a fox and a badger both within a quarter of an hour.”
“Where?”
“Never you mind.”
“But wild?”
“Sure—out in the woods. A wild fox and a wild badger, both within a quarter of an hour.”
“Bet you couldn’t.”
“Bet you ten bob I could. What about it?”
“It’s a bet. What do we have to do?”
“Let’s get this straight,” said Mr. Ellison. “If I show you a wild fox and a wild badger both within a quarter of an hour, you give me ten bob. And if I don’t, I give you ten bob.”
“That’s right,” said Marshall. “What do we do?”
“Christ,” said Mr. Ellison, “the missus won’t half tear me to bits. We meet in Hartley market-place, by the cross, at four o’clock in the morning.”
“Christmas!” said the pilot. “All right. But it’s pitch dark till seven.”
“That’s right—that’s what we want. Come on your bike. If either doesn’t turn up, he loses the ten bob.”
They discussed the detail of their plan and drank another beer or two; then it was closing time, and the “Black Horse” vomited its occupants out into the dim, moonlit street. Marshall walked back to the station with his companions and went up to bed. Lying in bed before sleep, he thought that he had had a splendid day. He had got up in the middle of the morning, and it had been fine and bright and sunny. He had gone fishing with his new rod. He had caught one of the biggest fish in the river and landed it without either net or gaff. He had showed it to a girl, quite a pretty girl, and she had been nice to him about it. He was well on the way to a day’s pigeon-shooting, and he had contracted to be shown a wild fox and a wild badger both within a quarter of an hour. A splendid day.