Читать книгу Death and the Butterfly - Colin Hester - Страница 15

Six

“Then why’d he say so?” she asked, gripping the edge of the swimming pool and pushing herself up and out of the water. As she did, the pool water slipped down her body like a negligée.

Sideways she sat on the pool’s edge, her slender legs, from mid-calves downward, immersed. The swimming baths—the pool—were crowded as a holiday camp and as noisy. Here in the deep end there were twin five-meter diving platforms and a low springboard which tongued out above the water. Above them, the high windows all around the walls steamed. Close by on the deck Phillip lay on his side, on a towel, his chest and legs quite white, his maroon bathing trunks quite dry.

“Because that’s his line,” he told her.

“His line?” she asked, imprisoning a stray strand of her hair back under her bathing cap.

“Yes. How he picks up girls,” Phillip said.

“How would lying to them that they’re cross-eyed let him—” Came then a shriek! as someone in the pool raised a great showering splash that in an arc raked and hailed down on the two of them and she ducked and winced and instantly Phillip recoiled and rolled away from its icy sparks and scrambled to his feet.

She looked around at the perpetrator. “Stuart!” she exclaimed.

It was the boy from her class. “Sorry, Susan,” he said, “sorry! It was an accident, honest.” He was treading water and doing so inefficiently, his neck arched back so that he barely kept it above water. He sniffed.

“Stuart,” she said, “you are so—so unironic.”

“I know,” he said. “Is that your boyfriend, then?” he asked, his arms and legs pedaling away in the water.

“My brother,” she answered.

Phillip approached the pool’s edge, bending swift and lean to scoop up his towel.

“The one who’s scared of water?” Stuart asked.

“Stuart!” Susan shouted.

“It’s all right, love,” Phillip said.

“Well, you did tell us in class,” Stuart blundered on.

“One more,” Susan warned him, “and I’m in the water and wringing your miserable neck.”

Stuart poked his tongue out at her.

“Now you’ve copped it,” she said.

“Don’t, love,” Phillip said. He yoked his towel around his neck and tugged her arm. “Here,” he said, “I’ve something to show you.”

She peeled her bathing cap from her head and tossed out her hair. “Oh, all right,” she said, and she and Phillip wove hopscotching through the bodies lying on towels that littered the pool’s deck.

“DO THEY ALL FANCY YOU?” Phillip asked her outside by the motorcycle. Though there were clouds, they were high and intermittent, and the sun shone warmly on them. He handed her the leather helmet and goggles she was to wear and he unfastened and peeled back the black canvas tonneau of the sidecar. Streaming past in the road was a steady river of traffic and once they’d both threaded their heads into the helmets and donned the channel-swimmer-like goggles, Phillip mounted the Ariel, and she slid snuggly into the sidecar and did so as effortlessly as if descending a playground slide.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To see my battlefield,” he answered.

The Ariel started on first kick, loud and rabbling, and Phillip pushed it off by its handgrips and danced the big machine into the traffic. Susan adjusted her goggles on the bridge of her nose then said above the engine’s roar:

“And you can tell Roger that even my goggles are cross-eyed.”

FROM NORTH CHEAM THEY RAN the Ariel due east across the north lip of the City, and once beyond central London they curved south, catching up with the Thames near the East End docks. Then, running parallel to the great river’s voltas, they headed east through Rainham and Erith and Grays. The Thames here was as wide as a sea—indeed, it had miles earlier become tidal—and past the town of Grays, Phillip shouted, “Hungry?” and she answered, “Yes, famished,” and he carried on through Coryton and South Benfleet and she shouted at him, “Phillip, I thought we were stopping!” and he shouted back, “We are! We are!” but he didn’t stop, didn’t stop until, with the engine beneath them pawing at the air, he double-clutched and machine-gun downshifted and into the lovely village of Canvey they did sweep.

It was not quite three o’clock and though the shops were closed he found a caffey—as the English pronounced and spelled “café” in doughboy French—and pulled up in front.

The street was quiet. There were shops on one side, and on the other was the sea wall and then the beveled slope of the white sand that rippled down to the edge of the river. Disentangling themselves from the Ariel’s viscera they stood on the sidewalk and peeled back their headgear and with deep breaths they smelled the warm yet somehow always cold air of the sea—that lonely almost leathery fragrance—and Phillip pulled open the caffey door. As he did so a small bell tingled above them and they entered.

There were three wooden tables without tablecloths, the wooden chairs around each of the tables tipped forward so that the chairs leaned on their front legs against the tables’ edges. A Camp’s Coffee advert hung on one sidewall and beside it was the menu chalkboard. On the caffey’s other side was a serving counter and behind it, his back to them, a man in an apron was employing a washcloth to brush the crumbs from the preparation countertop into his cupped other hand.

“We’re closed,” the man said without turning.

“Oh,” Phillip said to the man, “sorry,” then to Susan, “Sorry, love.” Phillip pulled open the door—the bell tingling again—and they reentered the sunshine and sea air.

“Well?” Phillip asked. He pushed the fingernails of both hands through his thick black hair and frowned, his dark brows almost touching above his handsome nose. Behind them the door shut; then they heard the bell ring, and puzzled at this reversal of order the two of them turned.

The shopkeep’s apron was white and stained around the midsection. He had thin gray hair combed across the top of his head, and still holding the washcloth he gestured at Phillip and said, “Sorry. Didn’t see you were in the service.”

“That’s all right,” Phillip said, “it’s just a uniform. Doesn’t give us carte blanche to be a bother.”

“Oh, you’re not, young man, you’re not. Please,” he said, “come in, come in.”

Susan told the man:

“We were just looking for a cup of tea and a sandwich. I’m sure we can wait till we get back.”

The caffey owner looked at her for a long moment then at Phillip. “You’ve a right catch there, young officer.”

“She’s—”

The man held up a hand of discretion. “Tell you what, it’s lovely and all, the day is. I’ll fetch out a pair of chairs and set them on the sidewalk, Parisian-like, and I’ll make you both a quick cup of and see if there’s a cucumber sandwich or two.”

“Really?” Phillip asked.

The man nodded, and in an instant he was back at the door with the two chairs. She and Phillip were smiling and Phillip held open the door as the man waggled the chairs past and stood them up so they faced the street. “You’ll have to balance your cup and saucers on your legs, mind you,” he said, “so careful you don’t scald yourselves.”

“Yes,” they said, “thanks.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Lucky there’s no licensing laws for caffeys. Marmite?” he asked them.

They looked at each other.

“On your sandwiches,” the man explained.

“Yes,” Phillip said eagerly, “if you’ve some.”

“I’ve still the jar I had before the war,” the man told them.

And on the sidewalk by the quiet street in this ever so quiet Saturday village they sat side by side on the wooden caffey chairs, sat in the sun, watching the Thames shoulder its way into the channel while the man inside prepared their tea and sandwiches.

“What did you mean,” she asked her brother, “by his line?”

“Whose?”

“Roger’s!”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

He looked at her. “Well, it’s his method.”

“Thought it was his line?”

“His way. His theory: belittle them in public, girls that is, then be nice to them in private.”

She didn’t say anything. And because the day was so clear they could see across the undulating swell of the channel to France’s coast, a thin raft of a horizon but visible.

“And does it work?” she asked her brother. “His method.”

“He thinks so.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“And the other?”

“Nial?”

“Does he use the same method?”

“Roger says Nial doesn’t need to.”

“Because he’s so pretty?”

“Likely, though you’d never get Roger to admit to that part of it.”

They were quiet. After a bit, Susan nodded towards the channel. “And this is your battlefield?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

A breeze picked up and it blew her hair slightly across her face and she cleared it away with a hand.

“Phillip,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry I told class about your . . . you know—”

“Water thing?”

“Yes.”

He placed his hand on hers and kissed her quickly on the cheek. “That’s all right,” he said, “really. It’s like telling them my—my shoe size. It doesn’t matter.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “That’s why I love the Sunderlands. You get shot out of the sky, you’ve still got a boat between you and the water.”

The caffey door opened with a tingling and the owner came out carrying a low wooden stool. On its flat top was a color print of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin (C.R. in his Wellingtons), the print faded yet still recognizable, and the owner set it at their feet. “It was our Albert’s,” he said. “For your pot ’n cups. I couldn’t stand the thought of one of our young fliers being scalded by me tea. Perhaps put out of action.”

“I haven’t seen any action, yet,” Phillip said, “but the stool is marvelous.”

“’Scuse my effrontery, Miss,” the owner said, “but our Albert used it in the loo.”

“Oh,” Susan said, glancing at Phillip.

“As a step-up. When he was a little ’un.”

“Yes,” she said.

The owner straightened and turned to take in the day and the sea. He took a moment, looking. “There’s clouds,” he said, “coming from Calais. Dark ones, too.”

“They won’t reach us here, luckily,” Phillip said. “The wind’s from the west. It’ll blow them back into Germany where they belong.”

“Let’s pray,” the owner said, going back inside.

Phillip studied the clouds above the far coast of France, frowning.

“What is it?” she asked.

A bell tingled and they looked round, but the shop door hadn’t opened; rather, in the street a young boy her age coasted by on his bicycle. The boy waved at her and rang his bell again. Then again. Then it was quiet and they could almost hear the smell of the sea with its waves whispering across the sand of the shore. And too they could hear a soft and gentle hum, like bees at their gathering labor of buttercups.

“Phillip?” she said again but he didn’t respond. He still watched the horizon, the clouds. Another bell tingled and this time the caffey door did open and they looked around and the owner emerged carrying a black lacquered tray. He stood before them and stooped slightly. “Here,” he said. “Will you do the honors, young miss?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes,” and from the tray she hoisted first the cozied teapot and placed it on the Pooh stool then the two cups tilted one inside the other and both on the doubled-up saucers. She separated and arranged the cups and saucers then found room for the cucumber sandwiches. The crusts had been trimmed off.

“Ta,” the owner said. He straightened and looked out across the water. The hum was louder now. “Dark as Marmite is that rain cloud,” he said.

“It’s not a rain cloud,” Phillip said, his voice containing equal measures of matter-of-fact and sheer disbelief.

“No?” the owner asked. He stared at the cloud, then said, “No, no it’s not.”

It had taken minutes to become visible, then minutes to cast its noise of passage—its horrendous hum—but it surely seemed to the three of them there on the sidewalk with their pot of tea and Marmite sandwiches to take no longer than a heartbeat to swoop across the channel like an enormous lid of darkness, a wide and droning iron roof of war.

“Good Christ!” said Phillip.

Neither Phillip nor she nor the owner moved. The word “awe” has as its root the Icelandic word “agi,” meaning the terror one experiences when one looks directly into the face of God. And it was indeed that awe, that terror that was on their faces as getting louder and louder the Heinkels and Dorniers and Messerschmitts and Fokkers roared towards and above them, the thousand-plane flotilla—a thousand planes!—forming in the sky a deafening and dark horde, a dark and relentless canopy of precision and death.

Their force was such that their passing overhead blew Phillip’s RAF cap off and he snatched at it and Susan put her young hand atop her head as her own hair swirled in a tangle of silken wire and eyes raised she watched as if transfigured, her mouth open.

“They’re following the Thames!” the owner shouted.

“To London!” Phillip cried. “They’re following it straight to bloody London!”

THE SOUND OF THE BOMBS dropping (she and Phillip could not but hear that sound even above the Ariel’s engine as they ran it west in their maniacal race back to the City), that sound was dull and muted and terrifying, like the thump of bodies being thrown endlessly one after another onto a charnel cart. Ahead of them on the horizon the sky filled with smoke, black pillars of it twisting up into the sky in desperation and there were sudden flames cast up in splashes of lurid red gore that settled like mirages and there was that forever dull and lifeless pounding, that pounding.

And the soft punching-bag sound of the City’s few anti-aircraft guns and the Ariel’s engine switching as Phillip geared up and down and sped back up and did so over and over again, but loudest of all, their thoughts, their thoughts.