Sentimental Journey Read online

  “THERE’S A LULL IN MY LIFE”

  Skip buttoned his coat as he left the New Public Offices, and walked down to Whitehall, past the pillboxes and sandbags along the entrances, then ran up the stone steps into War Offices. The halls were dismal and stuffy; they smelled like ancient wood paneling and cigarette smoke older than the Great War. The heels of his shoes clicked briskly on the marble floor and echoed back as he went along the hallway, where war posters lined the paint-chipped walls.

  Keep A Pig. Start A Pig Club.

  ‘We could do with thousands like you.’ Join the Women’s Land Army.

  ‘Arf A Mo!’ National Service Needs You.

  Be Like Dad. Keep Mum!

  He pressed the lift button and waited till it came to a stop. A woman ran to make it on. Skip removed his hat and tucked it under one arm as the lift went up. She stood beside him, kept glancing at him while the lift clattered upward. He hadn’t bothered to look at her face when she got on. Her perfume smelled like incense. He hated incense.

  The lift stopped on the top floor. He took his hat out from under his arm and held the door for her.

  “Thank you.” She was a Yank.

  He said nothing.

  She took a few steps, stopped, and glanced back at him.

  For a single heartbeat of a second he saw Greer in her expression; then the image faded and he was looking at a tall stranger with blonde hair. He spun on his heel and walked quickly away, settling his hat on his head.

  A few seconds later he stood in the doorway of his uncle’s office.

  Eleanore’s husband was leaning against his desk, his back to the room, as he looked out the long window behind his desk.

  “I say there. It’s good to see they’re not working you too hard.”

  “George.” His uncle turned and straightened. “I didn’t think you’d be here for another half hour or so. By God, it’s good to see you.” He stepped around the desk and crossed the room, hand extended. “Come in. Come in.”

  “Uncle Gerald.” Skip clasped his hand while his uncle slapped him on the shoulder.

  Gerald pulled him towards a winged chair, one of two. “Sit, my boy.”

  Skip sat, tossed his cap on the desk, crossed his ankle on one knee and leaned back in the chair as his uncle sat down.

  “Tell me. How’s your mother?”

  “Giving Aunt Eleanore fits. Your wife is a saint.”

  “I thank God that I found that woman twenty-five years ago. Snatched her right out from under Bennington’s nose, you know. At a point-to-point . . . I think it was at Crawley’s place in Dorset. Yes, that was it.” He laughed and shook his head. “Twenty-five years. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve spent twenty of them right here in this office.” He looked up. “How is the old girl? Haven’t been home in weeks.”

  “She looks well. She told me Helen has been driving some of those Yank advisors.”

  “The girl was driving Major General Bradley—some crony of Eisenhower’s—until last week when the general went back to Washington. She’s been transferred to a civilian VIP from the States, but there was some kind of delay, so she’s free all this week. I asked her to meet us for dinner. Didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “No. Of course not. The last time I saw Helen—” He stopped because in his mind he saw her dressed in black, as the rest of them had been. His cousin had the same hair color as Greer. He remembered glancing up at the grave site, seeing only her hat and veil and her light hair. For just one moment, he had thought the coffin in front of him was, in truth, only a bad dream.

  His uncle’s hand squeezed his shoulder.

  He hadn’t realised Gerald had stood and come over to him. His throat grew tight. He started to sweat—that same clammy feeling he’d get whenever he awoke from a nightmare. When he was overly tired, he would dream the same thing: him in his plane, spinning to his death, round and round . . . the world out of control, the absurdity that all he could do in his last moment on earth was sweat.

  Your last instant of life condensed down to nothing but a few drops of wasted moisture.

  “George?”

  “Don’t mind me.” Skip swiped the sweat from his hairline and shook his head, looked down a bit. The RAF emblem on his cap stared back at him. “I was thinking about something.”

  Gerald kept his hand on his shoulder. “She was a lovely young woman, George. We all miss her. This war is a nasty thing.”

  “Yes. Nasty.”

  “How are you getting on?”

  “Well enough. The Luftwaffe’s been going at us a bit more lately.”

  “You don’t have to go on every mission.”

  “No, that’s true. I always have the option of being paraded before the public for the sake of the war effort. ‘Look here, chaps! A real live hero!’ Did you know, Uncle, they give me a new blue uniform every time they send me out? Want me to look crisp as bacon when I stand up there encouraging the people of London to buy war stamps.” His tone was so bitter he could taste the words on his tongue.

  “The country needs heroes.” Gerald walked back around the desk and faced him, still standing. “We need men like you because the people need to know that we’re not taking this horrid hammering from those Huns lying down.”

  Skip slouched back in the chair and stared down at nothing. He didn’t want to be needed. He didn’t want to be a walking, breathing poster for his countrymen. Someone might as well stamp the war slogan “Seeing It Through” on his forehead. He drove a hand through his damp hair again. “I know. I understand morale. I have to for the sake of the men who fly with me every mission. But I despise feeling as if the public owns a piece of me.”

  “When you choose the Royal Air Force for a career, everyone owns a piece of you.”

  Skip knew that. He was wearing a government-issued uniform, shirt, trousers, belt, jacket, medals, emblems, cap, shoes; even his bloody underwear was given to him by the government. “True.” He looked up at his uncle. “But I don’t have to like it.”

  “Are you sorry you joined the Air Force?”

  “I love to fly.”

  “Do you want to transfer out? You did some test piloting before all hell broke loose. With your record you can take your pick of positions.”

  “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “Perhaps you’re tired of the No. 77.”

  Skip could hear a woman laughing in the outer office. He turned and looked at the closed door. She sounded like Greer.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Skip turned back. “Sorry. It was nothing important. I suppose it’s merely the new reporters that bother me. I don’t like their prying questions.”

  “We have the same problem around here. Walk out the door and they’re dogging your every step.” Gerald relaxed back in his chair. “So tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  “I was at Keighley until two days ago. I’d borrowed another chap’s automobile, and the bloody thing broke down outside of Kettering. Some kind of rubber hose problem, so any kind of repair was out of the question. Took me forever to get to the nearest train station. I had to wait for the one-forty. By the time I got back to the base, I’d missed the afternoon briefing. Nothing much to do but read the reports that came in while I was gone. Most of the men were at the local pub, so I grabbed a cheese sandwich, went over the leave roster, and turned in early. Nothing different, really.”

  “Sounds as if you have established a routine.”

  He nodded. “I have.”

  His uncle leaned forward and rested his arms on the desktop. “You need to let go, George.”

  “Of my routine?”

  “Don’t dance around me, my boy. You know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean to sound like a Dutch uncle—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Your father’s gone. Your mother has her own troubles. Someone has to talk to you. You’ve separated yourself from almost everyone and everything. Have you been out to dinner? Dancing? Gone to the cinema?”
/>   His tight-lipped silence was enough of an answer.

  “You need a girl.”

  “Despite what the government believes, we human beings are not interchangeable. You can’t replace people the way you replace parts on those broken Spits. Crash and smash and put them together and you have another.”

  “No, of course it is not the same thing. But I’ll tell you this, you’re trying awfully bloody hard to prove to everyone around you that you don’t need anything or anyone. That in itself shouts out to the world that you haven’t let Greer go. Let her go, George. You must let her go.”

  He waited a long time before he spoke and when he did, he looked directly at his uncle. “Can you tell me how exactly I’m supposed to do that? Tell me how to let go of her and I will. You think I want to see her in every woman’s face? I can barely look at women. What no one seems to remember is that I have lived more years of my lifetime with Greer than without her.”

  “I understand it must be difficult for you, but—”

  “It’s not difficult. It’s bloody impossible.” He stood and braced his hands on the desk, gripping the carving on its edge until he could feel it press into his palms. “Does a man lose his leg and ever really forget what it was like to walk on two feet? How do you make a piece of yourself suddenly go away?”

  “You move on. You let go because it doesn’t do any good not to.”

  He closed his eyes. “I can’t.”

  “You can. You have to.”

  Skip began to pace.

  “Tell me this. What advice would you give one of your men if he were in your situation?”

  He stopped in front of the desk again and faced his uncle. “I would tell him if he needed to talk he could come to me.”

  “I believe I told you the same a year ago.”

  Skip was silent as a stone.

  “So let’s say he didn’t come to you, then what?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t make that kind of decision without thinking it through and judging the man himself.”

  “Could you remove how you personally feel from that decision and do what was best for the man?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not arrogant enough to think I know what would be good for him.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be an officer if you haven’t learned to take your own experience and use it to make yourself and your men better soldiers.”

  That cut to the quick. Sliced right through his pride as a soldier. A damned good one, too. “You’re saying I’m a bad officer.”

  “You are risking the lives of your men.”

  “We risk our lives from the moment we lift off the ground. We’re pilots in the RAF. You find one of them who doesn’t carry the same feeling of fatalism.”

  “When a man keeps everything troublesome inside of him like you are, George, it’s difficult to think on your feet.”

  “I would never willingly risk their lives. You should know that.”

  “I do, but you cannot keep holing yourself up in your quarters, never going out on the town. You’ve seen it in your men. You said so yourself. Your men were at the local pub, and I wager they’re in town as often as they can get away from the field. Soldiers blow off steam. They must after so much time spent in the air. But you, you’re a kettle ready to blow. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. You might not want to hear it, but you can’t continue this way.”

  “I take leave.”

  “One in five months?”

  “Two, and just who have you been talking to?”

  “Henderson, and a few others.”

  “They had no right to come to you and tell you anything about me.”

  “They didn’t come to me. I went to them.”

  “You went to them?” Skip frowned. “Why?”

  “For the very reason I called you here.” He leaned back and looked at him directly, his hand rubbing his whiskered jaw.

  “I thought you called me here for dinner. Now I see. You must do the dirty deed,” he said sharply. “You called me here to tell me I’m relieved of my command. What is it? You all feel sorry for the man who lost his wife. ‘The sod loved her so much he won’t forget her. So sad, really. Must be mad. Can’t let the chap jeopardize his men, now can we?’ So the kind uncle breaks the news to the poor fellow?”

  “No. This is nothing of the sort. Your superior officers and your men have the most remarkable respect for you. They claim there is no one they would rather fly with. Those men have nothing but the best to say, George.”

  He didn’t understand. “Then why did you call me here?”

  Gerald steepled his hands, resting his chin on them for a brief pause.

  Skip wondered what decision his uncle was making and whether he had dismally failed some important test.

  “I brought you here to show you this.” He picked up a folder, reached across the desk, and handed it to him.

  Skip leaned forward and flipped it open.

  Inside were aerial reconnaissance photographs. Written at the top of the first group of photos was “Bruneval,” on the coast of France. The series of shots showed German radar defenses. The second, also titled “Bruneval,” showed only the remains of destroyed radar towers and bunkers.

  The next group was identified as “Fish Oil Factories—Vagsoy,” an island off the Norwegian coast. The German-occupied herring and cod oil factories produced glycerin, which was extremely valuable for its use in the manufacture of explosives. The after photos showed the burning factories and the storage tanks destroyed, with spilled fish oil sending clouds of dark smoke toward the camera.

  “This damage wasn’t from aerial bombing.”

  Gerald shook his head. “No. It wasn’t. It’s from Mountbatten’s Combined Operations—special forces units comprised of men from the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Commando units.”

  “I don’t want to fly photo-recon.”

  “I’m not asking you to. We’re short of pilots.”

  “For parachutists?”

  “No. For butcher-and-bolt raids. It’s hazardous duty and long hours.”

  Skip laughed. “Worse than the Battle of Britain?”

  “I supposed I deserved that.”

  “I want the job.”

  “You’ll have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

  “You just finished pointing out to me that I had no life. I’d say that should work in my favor.”

  “Not really, but we’ll talk about that in a moment. I need to make you aware of the risks.”

  “I don’t care what the risks are. Every time I take off, I’m at risk. Hell, you can be walking down the street and be at risk. I still want it.”

  “You’ll be giving up your squadron, and won’t billet with a unit. You’ll be given an allowance and be responsible for your own food and lodging, that is, if you’re accepted.”

  “If I’m accepted?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is conditional? On what?”

  “You’ll need my signature of approval. And, George, I feel rather strongly that this duty takes a certain type of soldier—a man who plays as hard as he fights.”

  “I want the position.”

  “Fine.” His uncle leaned back in his chair. “Then I have a proposition for you.”

  “HE WEARS A PAIR OF SILVER WINGS”

  “Watch your step, Helen.” Skip pulled his cousin away from some building debris scattered in the dark street. “And for godsakes, keep the light aimed at the ground. Every time you say something, you wave the blasted torch all over the place.”

  “Well, someone has to say something. You’ve hardly said a thing since we left Father.”

  “I’m quiet because I’m trying to decide if this was a conspiracy.” “What? Are you so terribly caught up in yourself that you think everyone is sneaking around behind your back?”

  “If not, then you had perfectly rotten timing, Helen.” “Well . . . not that I need to justify anything, but I had already made plans to go out when Fath
er asked me to join you for dinner. I’d be some kind of fool to pass up a free meal at the Embassy Club. My flatmate and I had a small gathering last weekend and completely depleted both our ration booklets. I’ve have been living on jam and toast for a week.” “Not very sensible a move. Was it worth it?”

  “Yes, and I’ve never been sensible. Why should I start now?” She looked up at him. “Regarding dinner, I didn’t see you backing away from that huge steak, or the wine, or the cognac.”

  “Military food has about as much flavor as the stove they cook it on. You’re never quite certain what it is they’re dishing out. Every bloody damned meal looks the same. It doesn’t matter what they call it. I seldom bother to read the menu board. Unless they’re serving fish and chips, which they haven’t yet figured a way to make into a dashed mess, at least not yet.”

  “Well, it would have been quite rude of me to stand up and leave without inviting you along.”

  “I would have been happier.”

  “Happy? You? Ha! You’ve been in the doldrums for so long your manner is nothing but morose. You seldom laugh and never smile. And how was I to know that Father is in the process of coercing you off your golden pedestal?”

  “You have a smart mouth, Miss Clever.”

  “Yes . . . I do, don’t I?”

  “You needn’t sound so pleased. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

  “I know. However, you can’t be held responsible for your lack of insight into what makes a woman interesting. What could you know? You’ve been out of society for too long. Socially you should be in shambles, but amazingly your absence seems to have added to your heroic mystique.”

  He groaned.

  “Tonight will be such fun, Skip. And your conversation and social graces are most likely getting quite rusted, hanging about with no one but mechanics and flyers. Don’t look daggers at me like that or sink into one of your sulks.”

  “How can you tell how I’m looking at you? It’s dark.”

  “Well, I could do this.” She shone the light in his face.

  “Damn and blast it, Helen.” He batted it away. “Give me that before you blind me.” He reached for the torchlight, but she tucked it close to her and danced away a few steps.