Charlotte Gray

  It took all Gregory’s willpower not to telephone.

  Luckily, the prospect of a change of job occupied his mind for much of the day; it was liberating, if not quite reviving. He would need to retrain to fly bigger planes, some of which required plain muscular strength: the fabled lightness of touch, sometimes having only to stretch your toes inside your boots to feel the tail twitch . . . that wouldn’t work. Gregory was happy to leave it all behind and start again. There was something comic about the handling of big planes and something pedestrian about flying with a navigator, but he felt the change was timely, almost decorous.

  It was still difficult not to telephone this woman. It had been hard enough not to invite her to go with him when he left Ralph’s flat. He had been led to expect that the invitation emanated from his friend Michael Waterslow. He kept expecting Michael to appear and felt deceived when it became apparent that this Ralph and the drunk, Miles, were the only other men. They produced some food at about ten o’clock, then Ralph played the guitar. They had made a sort of bolognaise out of tinned meat and spongy carrots to go with some spaghetti the girl with the dark hair had found in Ralph’s cupboard. It was repulsive, but by that time Gregory, who had been instructed to bring whisky but found himself the only person drinking it, was too drunk to care.

  And the girl, the woman, Charlotte. She had an astonishing nervous intensity. They talked for three hours on the sofa, at the end of which he felt as though he had been subjected to a violent electrical charge. Her force seemed to him magnificent, particularly as it was filtered by such a diffident manner. A roué’s reflex in him swiftly calculated factors of propriety and emotion, passion and control, and what the amorous consequences might be; but, intrigued though he was by the idea, he was more charmed by a solemn sweetness in her. She did believe in things, and said so, then seemed to find her superior education mocking her desire for earnestness. She did laugh too, sometimes at the traps she inadvertently set for herself and sometimes at the things he told her.

  He found himself becoming confidential. He was able to check this tendency, though only with difficulty; and when he heard himself talking to her in intimate terms about his childhood in India he thought he had better leave.

  There was an awkward exchange on the landing outside the flat. In the light of the shadeless stairwell bulb he could see the even brown colour of her eyes as she determinedly held his gaze.

  ‘I have enjoyed talking to you. I have to go back to the squadron tomorrow. I’ll . . . Perhaps we’ll meet again at Michael’s or . . .’

  He had not meant to get in touch again.

  Charlotte was sitting on the sofa of the sitting room, her shoes off, her arms round her thighs, her chin on her shiny knees. The flame was flickering up the cracked filaments of the fire, turning them from white to blue to glowing orange. She was staring at the colours, trying to feel some warmth through her feet. Fires always reduced her to the condition of childhood. It was five o’clock and she was back from school; she was allowed to set a match to half a dozen corners of the newspaper and watch it curl into the spliced kindling. The draught of the nursery fireplace sucked the flame up into the pyramid of coal, where it smoked and faltered, momentarily defeated. Before this there was a time when the flames were making bridges from one part to another and Charlotte, like other schoolgirls, saw the different fires within the fire, the struggles, extinctions, gathering blazes, as emblems of her life. Then her mother arrived with a teapot and put it on the table behind her; the catching coal was starting to give a uniform red glow. Charlotte turned away.

  The gas fire in the flat had raised a patch of pink in her cheek. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her high forehead. She was confused.

  The telephone rang. Dick Cannerley wondered if she’d care to join him for dinner one evening this week. To decline the invitation Charlotte would have to claim to be busy every night, so she decided to make a strategic concession. It was better to accept straight away than to be bullied into it: if she went once, she needn’t go again.

  Charlotte replaced the receiver and went back to the sofa. She was already doubting the wisdom of her acceptance. On the other hand, what did she have to lose?

  There was a pattern in her thinking which had become irksomely familiar to her over the years. She felt herself now entering this sequence, which began with a sense of powerlessness, then gathered into a positive despair from which she could not be roused for days and sometimes weeks.

  She stood up and went to her bedroom. She must do something to save herself.

  6

  ONE OF THE hardest drinkers in Gregory’s squadron was a man called Leslie Brind. The high point of his evening came when he reached up to the beam in the lounge bar of the Rose and Crown and took down the glass yard. Walter, the beaming barman, was happy to fill it with the ale of his choice and watched admiringly as Brind lifted it to his lips. Since he liked as many people as possible to place bets on his ability to drain it, he usually waited till just before closing time to perform this feat. By this stage he would have been drinking steadily for three or four hours, yet the sudden ‘boost-override’, as he called it, after an emergency function on the Hurricane, had no apparent effect on his behaviour: he simply became a little more bonhomous as he collected his winnings.

  His income from drinking was not, however, enough to balance his expenditure on drinking, and he was forced to sell his little open-top car to pay off some of his more persistent creditors. The buyer was Borowski, who paid only a few pounds for it on the grounds that, as he pointed out to Brind, it did not actually go. To a man of Borowski’s mechanical ability, however, this was no more than a challenge: after two weekends under the bonnet he coaxed out signs of life. He enlisted the help of his fitter to cut down and weld a part from another car when the manufacturer could not supply the spare he needed. On the third weekend he arrived outside the cottage in which Gregory was billeted.

  ‘We’re going for a spin,’ he said, as Gregory’s head appeared from an upstairs window.

  ‘For God’s sake, Borowski, I didn’t get to bed till six.’

  Borowski merely hooted the horn until Gregory’s unshaven figure appeared from the cottage, pulling a scarf round his open neck and kicking his feet down into flying boots as he crossed the gravel.

  ‘Hmm. That fuel smells suspiciously high octane to me,’ he said as he climbed in.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let Landon get down-wind of it.’

  ‘I thought we might go up to town,’ said Borowski.

  ‘It’s far too bloody cold for that. Haven’t you got a hood?’

  ‘Poor old Greg. Always the bad circulation problem.’

  ‘Always.’

  Borowski put the car into gear, revved up and dropped the clutch, so that a hail of gravel pattered into the leaded lights of a downstairs window of the cottage.

  After half an hour, Gregory persuaded Borowski to pull in at a pub off the Hog’s Back. They were the first customers of the morning, and a thin fire in the grate had not begun to warm the empty bar. They sat on either side of the mantelpiece, holding whisky and ginger ale in chilly hands.

  ‘I don’t know why you want to give up fighters,’ said Borowski.

  ‘It isn’t really the planes themselves, it’s this work over France that sounds interesting. It’s different. They’re forming a little group of pilots to be attached permanently. Sometimes you have to drop people and stores, sometimes you just have to fly over and make a noise.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘So the Germans think that explosions were caused by bombs, not by saboteurs on the ground. Then they don’t take out reprisals on the local population. It’s a question of split-second timing.’

  Borowski looked unconvinced. ‘Why don’t they just get the bomber boys to do it?’

  ‘If something actually needs to be bombed, they do. But I can learn that, too.’

  ‘But to begin with you’re jus
t transport. Oh dear.’ Borowski smiled. ‘What a fate for a Spitfire man.’

  ‘That was a long time ago. It was a different world. Anyway, I might move on to Lysanders later. You have to land in a field by the light of a drunk French peasant’s torch. It’s not that easy.’

  ‘Why should they want to retrain you?’

  ‘Because I’ve made Landon’s life so difficult. And you know what they’re like. They’ll let you do anything if you just keep on at them long enough. In the meantime I’ve got to learn French.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case of accidents. I’m supposed to be able to get out of France on my own and find my way home. They’re going to give me some sort of exam before they’ll let me go. I’ve got to have conversation lessons from some old dame they’ve put me on to.’

  Borowski was laughing. ‘It doesn’t sound like you at all, Greg. Who is this French mistress?’

  ‘French mistress, Borowski. In English we say French mistress. A French mistress is something else.’

  Daisy Forester returned later than usual from work and sprinted upstairs to the flat, calling out her greetings as she turned the key. She was due to meet a new admirer later that evening and wanted to hear any news from her flat-mates first. Her expression of innocent enthusiasm faltered when she heard no answering voice and saw no light on in the sitting room.

  She went and knocked on Charlotte’s door at the end of the hall. Charlotte’s voice softly and reluctantly answered, and Daisy turned the handle.

  ‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’

  ‘No. I just thought I’d have an early night.’

  Daisy sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Have you got a cold? You look a bit bleary-eyed.’

  Charlotte breathed in tightly. Her situation had seemed to require something drastic and she had decided to take Daisy into her confidence; but she had forgotten what Daisy was like – she could not possibly confide in this woman.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Daisy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pilot. Oh God, I knew it. It’s all my fault.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh God, Charlotte, I’m sorry. I should never have interfered.’

  ‘Daisy, will you please tell me what on earth you’re talking about.’

  ‘No, I won’t. You must tell me first.’ Daisy stood up and walked over to a little boarded-up fireplace where she rested her elbow on the mantelpiece. ‘You have to trust people, Charlotte. Come on.’

  Charlotte had to grind the words out through her learned discretion. ‘I think . . . I think I’ve gone a bit mad.’

  Daisy silently raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve developed this feeling for . . .’ Charlotte nodded, ‘this man, Peter Gregory. And it’s quite absurd. It’s quite out of proportion.’

  Daisy’s sympathetic manner could not conceal the light of intrigue in her eyes. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I feel completely out of control.’

  Daisy smiled. ‘I could tell from the moment I saw you swooning on the dance floor.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I don’t swoon.’

  ‘Believe me, darling. You closed your eyes as though—’

  ‘I was trying to keep the smoke out.’

  Daisy laughed, and Charlotte felt a small, unwilling smile.

  ‘That’s why I rang up and asked Ralph if he could get hold of him through Michael Waterslow. I could see you weren’t going to do anything. Don’t look so shocked. They were quite happy to play along.’

  ‘It’s awful, Daisy. I don’t understand how I can feel like this. It’s not reasonable, it’s like an illness. No sane human being should feel like this, so soon, before anything has happened – if ever.’ There were tears along the rims of her eyes.

  Daisy walked back across the room and sat down on the bed again. ‘What we have to do now is decide on our plan of action. We just have to lay out all the alternatives and examine them. When I was at Oxford there was a girl in my college who fell in love with one of the dons. We used to spend hours plotting how she could seduce him. Is something the matter?’

  ‘No, no. I just didn’t realise you’d been to Oxford.’

  ‘Try not to look so amazed, Charlotte. It’s not polite.’

  ‘What did you read?’

  ‘Greats. Anyway, we got her sorted out in the end. She used to call me Aunt Daisy afterwards. I really hated that.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘It’s not relevant to your case. Tell me, have you had boyfriends before?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had what I suppose you’d call admirers.’

  ‘But have you had a really big, passionate affair?’

  Charlotte felt Daisy’s question masked a more intimate curiosity. She was evasive. ‘Never a great love, perhaps.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m prying. I just need to know what makes you tick.’

  ‘You’re sounding like a psychiatrist.’

  ‘What do you know about psychiatry?’

  ‘My father worked as a psychiatrist for a long time. That’s all.’

  ‘Shall I be honest with you, Charlotte?’

  ‘Yes.’ Charlotte did not sound enthusiastic.

  ‘I think you might do better to have a few little flings rather than jump straight in at the deep end. I like your Mr Gregory, but I wouldn’t trust him. Actually I find him a bit frightening.’ She looked at Charlotte’s doubtful face, the eyes clouded. ‘Though I suppose that’s the part you’ve fallen for.’

  Charlotte sighed. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that at all – the way you describe, the practical details and so on. I just felt impelled to him. I felt it would be a betrayal of something if I didn’t go to him. It was like a call that it would be wrong to ignore. It feels very deep inside me.’

  ‘Well, you jolly well ought to think about the practical details, I assure you. You don’t want to feel “impelled” to someone who isn’t there or who’s got half a dozen other girlfriends.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you. I think I’d play the field, go out with lots of different men and see if he came after me. Then I’d play it jolly carefully. Don’t look at me like that, Charlotte. You make me feel the most awful tart. You don’t have to sleep with all of them.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do, but that’s my choice. You can have fun just going out with them and maybe just a kiss at the end of the evening.’

  Charlotte didn’t look convinced.

  They went round the problem two or three more times, but no new vantage point was gained. By the time Daisy left Charlotte’s room she had agreed, against her better judgement, to help Charlotte make contact again with Gregory.

  Cannerley took her to the Ritz.

  ‘I hope you don’t think it’s too corny,’ he said, his hand lightly on the small of her back as they stepped into the bar. ‘It’s about the only place I know where you can still be sure of a reasonable choice on the menu.’

  Without consulting Charlotte, he ordered champagne. Their table was at the side and gave a good view across the room, which had a foreign, elderly air. Grey-haired men were accompanied by young women; the waiters spoke accented English. There was an unreal, and in Charlotte’s eyes, slightly sinister feeling to the place. She wondered where the people ordering trays loaded with drinks had made their money; to be in this golden mockery of the Belle Epoque while from Chelsea to Poplar the streets were darkened seemed either defiant or dishonest. Perhaps it was always so with big hotels; perhaps the Ritz’s ornate Parisian sister had equally camouflaged the indiscretions of Swann or the Baron de Charlus.

  In the dining room Cannerley ordered knowingly from the Bordeaux section of the wine list and settled his attention on Charlotte. She wore a dark emerald brooch at the collar of her blouse and a jacket with green velvet cuffs. She was not intimidated by his show of confidence with the waiters or by his descriptions of the muscular qualities of the wines of St Julie
n.

  ‘How’s your doctor? Are you happy with him? Not much of a challenge for a girl like you, surely?’ Cannerley gave her a conspiratorial smile. He was a good-looking man, Charlotte thought, with his clear skin and wide-apart blue eyes, and his fair hair that occasionally disrupted his neatness by flopping on to his forehead. She found him completely unattractive. ‘Shouldn’t you be putting that fluent French to more use?’

  ‘I don’t know quite what as.’

  ‘There’s always a need for bilingual people, interpreters and so on. Your gift is a rare one.’

  ‘So is yours presumably.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Cannerley smiled. ‘I do use mine, as I think I may have mentioned on the train. France and the French colonies are part of my brief. I know there are other organisations which urgently need French speakers. You’re concerned about what’s happening over there, aren’t you?’

  Charlotte looked up from her plate. They were both eating jugged hare and carrots; the menu had not been as full as Cannerley had imagined. ‘Yes, of course I am. I almost feel as strongly about France as about Britain. The thought of Nazi uniforms in French streets and villages makes me feel quite ill.’

  ‘Quite a lot of English people are working there. They drop them in by parachute.’

  Charlotte laughed. ‘Is that what you’re suggesting I should do?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Cannerley smiled and leaned forward. ‘I don’t think those pretty ankles are quite sturdy enough for that sort of thing.’

  Charlotte said nothing.

  Cannerley sat back again. ‘All right. It’s none of my business. In any case, we hardly ever speak to other organisations. If ever you did think you’d like a change of job, though, I could probably put you in touch with someone.’

  Charlotte nodded. She found the idea of herself as some sort of secret agent both alarming and ridiculous. She was not sure of the extent to which Cannerley was playing with her merely to amuse himself: perhaps he found some erotic charge in portraying himself as a dispenser of dangerous assignments to young women; perhaps he thought it would make him seem glamorous.