The Good Pilot, Peter Woodhouse

  Tommy started at the village school. Now that he was out of the house for the entire morning, Val looked for a job. A new medical practice had opened up in the town a few miles away and they needed a receptionist. Val applied and was appointed. She enjoyed the responsibility and the variety that the work provided, and it meant, too, that she met people.

  Annie asked her if she would remarry, and she shook her head. “Not for a long time,” she said.

  “I can understand that,” said Annie. “But the heart gets better, you know. Give it the chance, and it’ll get better.”

  Val laughed. “Who’ll want me? A man doesn’t like to take on a woman with another man’s child. Men steer clear of that sort of thing.”

  Annie disagreed. “Any man who gets you will be very fortunate,” she said.

  Then Willy proposed. Archie had unwittingly put the idea in his head. He had disclosed that he would be moving to a stockman’s cottage that had been lying empty on the farm, and Willy could have the main farmhouse, if he wished; he was used to it now and it was easy to run the farm from there.

  Willy said to Val, “Archie’s given me the house. He says I can live there by myself.”

  “That’s kind of him, Willy,” said Val. “And you’re good to him – anybody can see that.”

  Willy brushed the compliment aside. “It’s a big place,” he said. ‘Too big for one person.”

  “Then get somebody to share it with you,” said Val. “There’s that tractor man down at Dunbar’s place who’s looking for somewhere. He might—”

  Willy did not let her finish. “Or you,” he said.

  Val stared at him. “Me? But I live with Auntie – here – at the post office.”

  Willy reached out to take her hand. His skin felt rough. Val laughed nervously. “I could come to visit you,” she said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Willy. “You and I . . . well, we could get fixed up together.”

  She caught her breath. “I don’t think so, Willy. It’s very kind of you, of course, but . . .”

  “Because I love you,” said Willy. “I’ve always loved you – right from the beginning.”

  He spoke with such disarming frankness that her heart gave a leap. “That’s kind. Thank you, Willy.”

  “No, I mean it.” He paused, looking askance at her. “You don’t think I’m stupid, do you?”

  She assured him that she did not.

  “Because all I want to do is to look after you,” he said. “And Tommy.”

  She knew that what he said was true: that was what he wanted. And then she thought about her own feelings, and how she was sure that she would never stop loving Mike, and that if she were to accept Willy’s proposal she could still do that; she had always thought it possible to love more than one person at the same time, and there were, after all, different types of love, as people learned in wartime, when, in the knowledge of the fragility of any human plans, they made do, took what they could get, learned to patch things together. She was tired. If she married Willy she would have a place to live and there would be somebody who loved Tommy to look after both of them. The world was an uncertain place, full of disappointment. She wanted to protect Tommy from that, whatever should happen to her. “If I marry you,” she said to Willy, “will you let me . . .” She hesitated, searching for the right way of expressing what she had in mind. “Will you let me decide what to do?” No, that was not quite right. “You see,” she went on, “I want to play my full part . . .”

  He smiled. “But of course you can do that. I don’t mind.”

  Annie received the news in silence. Then, trying hard to conceal her surprise, she said, “It’ll be good for Tommy.”

  “Yes,” said Val. “It will.”

  Annie gave her a searching look. “Is that why you’re doing it?”

  Val bit her lip. “He’s a good man.”

  “I know that,” said Annie. “But . . .”

  “There are different ways of being happy,” said Val.

  Annie nodded. “You’re a good girl, Val Eliot,” she said.

  Val was embarrassed by the compliment. But there was something else. “And Archie has told him that he can take over the farm,” she said. “He’ll let to him for a very small rent, and then he says he’ll come into it eventually – when Archie goes.”

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “That’s a generous gift.”

  “Archie has no family.”

  “No,” said Annie. “Nor does he. But now he does, you see.”

  ❖ 27 ❖

  In 1951, Ilse received an invitation to a wedding in a village in Oxfordshire. One of the British majors, the one who had taught Ubi English, had left the army and taken a job as a teacher in a boys’ boarding school. He was marrying the daughter of the local doctor and had sent an invitation to Ilse, with whom he had maintained a correspondence since leaving Germany. Ubi had also been invited, but was unable to make the journey as somebody had to stay behind to look after the hotel. He was uncomfortable, too, about going to England. “They might not want to see us . . . just yet,” he said.

  Ilse laughed at him. “But they’ve invited us,” she pointed out.

  “I don’t mean them – the major. I don’t mean him. I mean people in general. What if we turned a corner, and there was Winston Churchill?”

  This brought more laughter. “Mr Churchill would be very polite. I’m sure he would say guten Tag.”

  It was not a journey undertaken lightly. In Germany things were returning to normal, step by cautious step; in England the Festival of Britain, an ambitious official effort to persuade people to address the future with optimism, was under way, but people still felt bruised by years of privation. Travel was still a luxury for both nations.

  Ilse bought a new dress for the wedding and made the journey by train to Calais, where she boarded the ferry to Dover. The following day she arrived at her small hotel in the village where the wedding was due to take place. At the wedding, although the major and his bride were polite and welcoming, the other guests seemed stand-offish. She sensed that she was being pointed out as the German guest – the subject of whispers and sideways glances.

  She had a day in hand after the wedding before she had to get back to Dover for her return ferry. She had with her the diary in which she had written Val’s address, and she asked the woman who kept the hotel whether it would be possible to get there and back in a day. She and Val had exchanged letters since that first letter of sympathy, writing to one another every two or three months, as pen friends. Val had said that if Ilse ever came to England she should come to see her, and Ilse had reciprocated. Neither had imagined that either would ever take up the invitation, but now Ilse found herself feeling a certain curiosity about her unmet friend.

  The hotel-keeper told her that it would not be a complicated trip. There was a bus that stopped at the edge of the village; this would take her all the way to a town near Val’s village. She could go from there by taxi.

  She sent a telegram to warn Val of her arrival, not knowing whether it would reach her in time. She arrived at the post office, to which she had addressed her letters to Val. Annie greeted her warmly; the telegram had been received a few hours earlier. “I know all about you,” she said. “I’ll telephone Val and tell her you’re here.”

  Val collected her in the farm van and took her back to meet Willy and Tommy. The two women’s conversation was stilted at first, but after a while it became more relaxed.

  “Our husbands had a very good friendship,” said Ilse.

  Val sighed. ‘War is unnatural – friendship isn’t.”

  “Yes,” said Ilse. “We women know that.”

  Val thought: we had to fight, though, and it was because of you. But she stopped herself, because she knew that forgiveness demanded that such thoughts be put to one side.

  Ilse caught her bus back to her hotel late that afternoon. She felt herself becoming emotional when she said goodbye to Val and to Tommy.

  “Y
ou will continue to write, won’t you?” she asked Val as they stood at the bus stop.

  “Of course,” promised Val. “It will be much easier now that you have seen the farm and we’ve met. Much easier.”

  The bus took Ilse off, its tired engine spluttering as it drew away from the stop. She waved to Val and Tommy through the window beside her seat. The window was dirty, and somebody had traced a message on its surface: Harry loves Geraldine: true. She raised a finger and wrote underneath it, I have a true friend. It was an odd, childish thing to do. Harry, who had written the other message, was probably sixteen or seventeen – unless, of course, it was Geraldine who had written those words, in the hope that what she said was true was really the truth.

  Everything changed. A great wave of prosperity washed over Germany as the pinched, hungry years of the fifties gave way to a decade of plenty. In Britain, crisis followed crisis, as the world folded in over a country that was exhausted to its very bones. The youthful vanquished rebuilt and prospered; the aged victors looked on in puzzlement as their lucrative empire crumbled. Ilse sold the inn to a wealthy businessman who wanted it for a brother-in-law who had managed to escape from the East. Ubi moved the Motodrom to a site in the countryside. There was a house attached to the field in which the Motodrom now stood, and that became their home. A young mechanic, an enthusiastic motorcyclist, was taken on as the principal rider, and he brought with him a friend who joined him on the wall. A new road had been built nearby, an arterial highway that brought a stream of visitors to the attraction.

  Ubi said to Ilse, “Did you ever imagine this? Ever?”

  They were sitting outside the Motodrom; inside, the roar of motorcycles and the rattle of the wooden planks that made up the wall reached a climax. The cheers of the crowd became raucous applause.

  “They’re enjoying it,” said Ilse. And then, “I would never have believed we would be doing this. Running a Motodrom?”

  “Yes. And everything else. The war. Klaus. Us.” He smiled at her and touched her hand gently. “Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they’re often pleasantly surprised.”

  Ubi occasionally rode the Motodrom himself, but he knew that Ilse did not like it, and he was careful in the routines he performed. The two young men had no such scruples and shot up and down, their paths intersecting with a bravado that made the spectators gasp with pleasure.

  ‘If you kill yourselves,” Ilse warned them, “you’ll have only yourselves to blame.”

  “No we won’t,” said the younger of the two. “We won’t be around to blame anybody.”

  “Don’t tempt providence,” Ilse retorted.

  Ubi taught Ilse how to ride a motorcycle – not on the Motodrom, but sedately on the roads. She enjoyed this, and he bought her a modest machine of her own. He acquired for himself a large Ducati, painted red, and with gleaming chrome. They rode away together at weekends, leaving Klaus with Ilse’s aunt and putting the young men in charge of the Motodrom. They rode down to Munich and to Regensburg. They joined a motorcycle club; Ubi became president while Ilse was elected treasurer. Klaus watched. He said, “I’m going to get a motorcycle too one day.”

  “One day,” said Ubi, non-committally.

  A month later, Ilse wrote to Val: How do you stop a boy doing dangerous things? One of the young men who works on our Motodrom has somehow got hold of a miniature motorcycle and I caught him putting Klaus on it.

  You can’t stop them, came the reply. Boys do foolish things. It’s what they do.

  Things went well for Val and Willy too. They had moved from the post office to live on the farm, and Willy had helped Archie get the stockman’s cottage into order. They had installed a bath and a new range in the farmhouse kitchen, and she had sewn new curtains from material that Annie had obtained from somewhere. Annie was always getting hold of material, somehow or other – it had become a bit of a family joke. On good days, Archie would come up from his cottage and sit with her in the kitchen – where it was warmest – to look out on the fields that he could no longer work in, because of his arthritis. He knew every inch of the land, she thought, every inch. He would have cared for it, year after year, and his father would have done exactly the same, without complaint, without questioning their destiny to nurture this little bit of England for their lifetime, and then hand it over to the next generation to do the same.

  Tommy would not do that, though, and they would have to find somebody else to run the farm in due course. Val knew, even when he was still a small boy, that he would do something different; that he would be an engineer. He was fascinated by machinery and how things worked. When he was seven, she bought him a book called The Boy’s Book of How Everything Works, which contained cutaway illustrations of the insides of ships and locomotives and even planes. It was all laid out there, in coloured diagrams, and he had pored over these, often with Willy, discussing the mechanisms that made these things work. Willy was learning every bit as much as Tommy was, she felt; she overheard a conversation about jet propulsion.

  “Where does the air go, Tommy?”

  Tommy had taken Willy’s finger and moved it to a place on the drawing. “It goes in there. You see? There. And then it gets heated up and it comes out there with a whoosh.”

  “Which makes the plane go forward?”

  “Yes, Willy. Forward, you see.”

  She smiled at the memory. It did not matter to Tommy that Willy was slow to take new things in; the boy seemed to take that in his stride, and even took pleasure in explaining something that Willy was not immediately grasping. And later, when Tommy was old enough to understand, she explained to him about how Willy had agreed to look after them and how he worked hard to make up for the fact that they had lost his real father.

  “He flew an aeroplane,” she said. “Your first dad. He was a pilot.”

  “In the war?”

  “Yes, in the war, as I’ve told you, lots of times – remember?”

  “He was American?’

  She nodded. “Yes, he was American, Tommy. He came from a place called Muncie, Indiana. He used to tell me about it.”

  “But you never went there?”

  She took a moment to answer. That was an unfulfilled promise in a way – to Mike. Perhaps she would honour it some day, and she would take Tommy and show him the place where his father came from. “No, I didn’t go there myself. But maybe one day you and I . . .”

  “Yes. Yes. Please.”

  “We’ll try.”

  She took a deep breath. She could so easily cry, but children became very anxious if an adult cried without reason – or without a reason they could comprehend. “There’s another thing about your first dad – he was a very brave man. Some day you’ll understand just how brave he was, but for now just believe me – he was a brave man.”

  He was watching her.

  “And here’s yet another thing,” she said. “We had a dog, you know. We had a dog with a funny name.”

  “How funny?”

  “He was called Peter Woodhouse. And you know what? He sometimes went off with your dad in his plane. He was what they call a mascot.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s an animal that people sometimes have to keep them company – they sometimes think that a mascot brings good luck.” She paused. “Which I think might just be true.”

  He looked unconvinced. “How can an animal bring you good luck?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t quite know. But they do, I think. They can help when you’re in danger. That’s what those pilots thought.”

  “My dad thought that?”

  “I think he probably did.”

  The boy looked thoughtful. “Do animals go to heaven when they die? Like people?”

  One could answer from one’s head, she thought, or from one’s heart.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. She touched him lightly on his head; on the sandy-coloured hair that came from his father. “But perhaps . . . just perhaps, they do. Perhaps d
ogs, for instance, go to a special heaven for dogs.”

  “With lots of bones for them to chew?”

  She laughed. “Yes, with lots of bones, and plenty of smells. Dogs would love that, don’t you think? Plenty of smells for them to sniff at.”

  “And rabbits to chase?’

  “Yes, lots of rabbits. The rabbits that had been bad on earth, maybe – they’d be sent to dog heaven, which wouldn’t be so much fun for them. The good rabbits would go to a place where they chased the dogs.”

  “Was Peter Woodhouse a good dog?”

  “A very good dog.”

  “So he’ll be in dog heaven?”

  She smiled. “Yes, I expect he will be. Doing his job – which is to watch over us, I think. You and me. He’ll be watching.”

  FIVE

  AFTERWARDS

  ❖ 28 ❖

  In June 1981, in the southern German city of Regensburg, a meeting took place in the office of a quietly spoken lawyer. The lawyer, Franz Huber, was careful, almost fussy, in his manner; this suited his practice, which was mostly concerned with domestic affairs – family property, wills, and the like – and with the day-to-day issues of small businesses. He had a talent for persuading clients to adopt what he described as the “wise and cautious solution” to the complexities of their affairs. He was fond of saying “Nobody has ever regretted erring on the side of caution” – an observation that, under any scrutiny, would soon be shown to be false, but Herr Huber had little interest in missed opportunities.

  “Frau Dietrich,” he said, tapping his pencil discreetly on the edge of his desk. “This English lady? May I ask: have you known her for a long time?”

  On the other side of his desk, Ilse tried to conceal her irritation. She had never liked Herr Huber, even if Ubi had thought highly of him. They had had few professional dealings – there was not much call for that – but Ubi knew him from the swimming club they had both been members of, and had mentioned him from time to time. She knew that Ubi had placed his affairs in Herr Huber’s hands, and she knew that this would mean she would have to deal with him in due course.