Читать книгу The Sixth of June - Lionel Shapiro - Страница 5

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IN ENGLAND it was coming up to nine o’clock in the evening.

The sky over Lincolnshire had been overcast all day, and now dusk brought with it a gentle rain that whispered softly as it fell on the eaves and gardens of the village of Burlingham. Along High Street, which stretched a quarter of a mile between the railway station and the common, blackout curtains had already been drawn. The only light to be seen was a tiny red glow which marked the entrance to the village pub, The Stag at Bay, and even this minuscule break in the blackout pattern, although permitted by the authorities, disturbed the elderly residents of Burlingham because German planes lately had been prowling the skies in the vicinity of the R.A.F. Bomber Command station at Belnorton, four miles to the east.

Burlingham’s middle class, in large part retired merchants who had fled the bustle of Lincoln, population: 70,000, lived in houses which ringed the common. These were mostly two-story dwellings, low, wide, stolid, and so encrusted with pampered plant life that one might suspect they were never built by man but grew naturally out of the soil of England. Unlike the homes on High Street which were identified by number, these on the common bore only a charming and usually illogical name plate. “The Cottage” was in fact the finest and largest house in the village, and “Hillview” and “The Moors” had no visible connection with hill or moor.

On this evening, as the day’s last light glistened feebly on the wet fields, an ungainly, mud-spattered military vehicle called a 1500-weight rolled into Burlingham, traversed the deserted length of High Street, circled the common, and came to a halt in front of a house, half hidden by trees and wrinkled with ivy, which bore the name plate “Darjeeling.”

Captain the Hon. John Wynter sprang from the vehicle.

“I’ll be about half an hour, Bailey,” he called back to the driver. “I’ll try to arrange tea for you.”

“Thank you, sir,” the driver said.

The captain pushed open the gate of “Darjeeling,” passed along a path rimmed with rosebushes and violas, and pulled at a bell beside the blacked-out door.

He had a slim figure, even wearing the coarse cloth of British battle dress, and he appeared taller than his five feet, nine inches. His blond hair bulged thickly from under the headband of a green beret, and his eyes, pale blue and inordinately mild, looked out rather sadly from a face that was tanned and weather-beaten. His features seemed a bit too finely shaped, the nose too thin and the mouth too sensitive, for the rough masculinity associated with his shoulder patches which bore the legend Commando. He looked younger than his twenty-seven years.

He pulled off his beret as the door was opened by a tiny, dark-skinned woman with hair of pure white. She wore a severe black dress, and from her left shoulder flowed a section of bright maroon cloth which gave the impression of a sari.

“Good evening, Mala.”

“Captain Wynter! Do come in out of the rain.”

John hesitated. “I’m afraid it’s a rather impolite hour, but I couldn’t get through on the phone——”

“I am sure you will be welcome. Do come in.” Like all Indians who speak English well, she articulated her words with quiet authority which was altogether pleasant. She closed the door behind him and pushed aside the blackout curtain which cut off the vestibule. “The brigadier is always pleased to see you,” she said with a faintly proprietary air, “to say nothing of Miss Valerie.”

“Oh good. Then she’s here too.”

The tiny woman led the way through an entrance hall to a living room which was neatly but inexpensively furnished. She said, “I daren’t disturb the brigadier while he’s listening to the news——” She smiled obliquely. “But I’m sure Miss Valerie won’t mind.”

Her guile was lost on John. He nodded solemnly and said, “Mmmm, I hope not.” He added hastily, “By the way, we’ve done about two hundred miles today and my driver is out there. I—I wonder——”

“I’ll see to it, Captain. Tea?”

“That would be splendid.”

She left, and a few moments later Valerie Russell came into the room.

“What a wonderful surprise, John,” she exclaimed. She came across to where he stood and extended both her hands. He took them in his hands, and his face was so modestly happy it was almost sad.

He said, “It’s good to see you, Val, but I think I should explain. We left Inveraray this morning and when the colonel gave me permission to break out of convoy at Doncaster, I tried to get you on the phone but the trunks into this area seem all tied up, and—well——”

“Bother the trunks,” she said lightly. “It couldn’t matter less. It was grand of you to come.” She gave his hands an extra little squeeze and went to a sideboard for a sherry decanter and glasses. “You look absolutely fit. Commando training must suit you.” She placed the sherry and glasses on a serving table. “Now do sit down and tell me all your news.”

He didn’t sit down, nor did he speak at once. His pale blue eyes studied her as she concentrated on pouring two glasses of sherry.

She was the loveliest girl he had ever known; indeed, the loveliest he had ever seen. Middling tall, she possessed both suppleness and carriage in unusual harmony. Her light brown hair, which contained a slight tint of red, swept back severely from her forehead and was gathered up in a tight bun at the back. John felt this was just as it should be. When she allowed her hair to fall into its natural waves, as she had on one occasion early in their acquaintance, she was too strikingly beautiful for his taste. This hairdo, to his way of thinking, was just right. It was severe enough to lend a classic line to her features, and it rather offset her lips, which were generous with a most un-English fullness, and her deep, darkly brown eyes which were foreign to her pink and white complexion. It was as if the place of her birth, which was Darjeeling in India, had invested her with something of its agelessness. At twenty-two her face possessed a maturity and strength of one who has lived a long time and has witnessed much.

The gray cardigan and tweed skirt she wore on this evening failed to make her look typically English. She defied classification, John thought.

She handed him a glass of sherry. “You must excuse Father for a few minutes. He still marks up his war maps, the poor dear, according to the BBC reports.”

“How is he, Val? Really.”

“He seems improved—at least physically. Even the scars are healing over. The trouble is, the stronger he gets the deeper he falls into his peculiar bitterness. I don’t know——” She looked into her sherry glass. “They’ve really retired him, haven’t they?”

John said, “He’s still on the sick list—officially, that is. But—well, things have changed. War isn’t the same and Britain isn’t the same.” He looked up and smiled sadly.

She said, “You mean old Indian army officers are no longer in style.”

“More or less. Pity. He’s a wonderfully brave soldier.”

They fell into silence. Then Valerie said brightly, “Do forgive me, John, nattering about Father. Are you happy with the Commandos—you certainly look as if you are—and how did you ever manage to break off convoy at Doncaster?”

He didn’t want to look at her when he told her the news. His eyes fixed on a brigade pennant framed over the fireplace.

“It was a sort of embarkation privilege. You see, Val, I’m off.”

“John! On operations? So quickly?”

He nodded. “It’s really grand news.”

She said slowly, “But it isn’t true! The division hasn’t been training more than a month or two.”

“Oh, the division isn’t going. Just a reinforced company, sort of small Commando. That’s what makes it so splendid. They picked my company, Val.”

Valerie stood. She took a step toward the slim young man, then walked slowly away toward the fireplace.

“Yes, it is splendid.” She smiled briefly. “I suppose you can’t tell me where or when.”

“Wish I knew,” he said cheerfully. “We rendezvous at Aldershot tomorrow afternoon and—well, I suppose it’s safe enough to tell you, Val—we proceed to a southeasterly port for embarkation. You know what that means.”

“Then it isn’t a coastal raid.”

“I’m sure of that. It’s overseas operations.”

“The Middle East?”

“Good guess, I imagine. We won’t know till we break open our orders a hundred miles, or some such figure, out to sea.”

John brought his head up and allowed himself to look squarely and unashamedly at Valerie. She came across the room and sat on the arm of his chair.

She said, “How long can you spend with us?”

“I should be off in ten or fifteen minutes.”

“But John! You may be away for months!”

He took her hand. “I know it’s a bit of a rush, but I’m luckier than most chaps in the company. They can’t get home at all. The orders came through only last night.”

“It’s not fair! It just isn’t at all fair. It’s a filthy way to run an army.”

He smiled shyly. “It’s not really bad, Val. Between Bailey and myself, we can drive all night and make London early enough to give him a couple of hours with his wife. Then we’ll pop down to Tunbridge so I can see my father for a bit, and we should hit Aldershot dead on time. Works out rather well.”

Valerie said, “Then we’d better go in and see Father.”

“Won’t he mind being interrupted?”

“He’s very fond of you.”

They passed through the hall and paused at the door of the brigadier’s study. The nine o’clock news was still on. “... at this afternoon’s press conference, a spokesman for the War Office made no attempt to minimize the loss of Tobruk, but he appeared to take a much more serious view of the effectiveness of the new 88-millimeter cannon the Germans are using on our tanks. Their firepower from positions of almost perfect concealment cost the Eighth Army fifty-seven tanks in the last two days of fighting. According to our correspondent in the desert ...”

John whispered, “Oh Val, do you think, afterward, we might pop across to the pub? One drink. Just the two of us.”

“Of course, John. I want to.” She knocked lightly on the study door and opened it.

The brigadier paid no heed to the interruption. He sat stiffly in an armchair and stared ahead at the blackout curtain which covered a full wall of the small, square room. He was a tall man, three inches over six feet, thin and big-boned, and his cropped, steel-gray head framed the face of a born warrior. It was a lean, knobbly face with a steel-gray brush mustache and eyebrows and a chin which jutted belligerently as he listened to the wireless. Only the eyes betrayed the warrior. They were small, spiritless eyes which stared dully from dark circles of discolored skin. On the right side of his face, a pattern of ugly keloid scars scampered across his chin and neck and was lost beneath the collar of the tropical bush jacket he wore.

“... As a result of our evacuation of Tobruk, the Afrika Korps under Field Marshal Rommel now controls the entire stretch of Mediterranean coastline as far east as Alamein. However, as the enemy does not control the sea or the air, his overland supply line is vulnerable to the type of raid——”

“Father.”

“For God’s sake, girl, can’t you see I’m listening?”

“John is here.”

“Well, can’t he wait? Shush——”

“... Commenting on the fall of Tobruk, Reuters correspondent observes that while the situation is serious, it is by no means devoid of hope. The arrival of increasing supplies of American Sherman tanks with their high speed and improved maneuverability——”

“He has only a minute or two.”

“Dammit, Valerie, I don’t see——”

“Father, he’s off overseas. To the Middle East.”

The brigadier reached a long arm to the wireless on his desk and turned it off. “Serious but by no means devoid of hope,” he scoffed. “These piddling experts! What do they know about it?” He turned about and when he saw John standing behind Valerie he nodded and his mouth lost its scowl.

“Come in, Wynter.”

“Thank you, sir.” John dropped his arms stiffly at his sides for a quick moment and entered the room. “You look fit, sir.”

“I’m quite all right.” Brigadier Russell smiled narrowly as he studied the junior officer. “Sit down and tell me about this Commando of yours. Is it any good?”

John glanced at his watch, then at Valerie. He sat on the edge of a chair and detailed his company’s stiff training schedule. Encouraged by the brigadier’s approving nods, he brought himself to say, “We’ve got beach assaults down to a pretty fine point, sir. I put a stop watch on my engineer platoon at Inveraray yesterday. From the fall of the ramp to the laying of a bangalore thirty yards up the beach took them exactly nine seconds.”

“First class. Absolutely first class.” The brigadier’s eyes took on an unaccustomed sparkle. “And now, Valerie tells me, you’re off to the Middle East.”

“We’ve had emergency embarkation orders. I can only guess it’s the Middle East.”

The iron-gray face clouded over.

“Are you in the habit,” he thundered, “of spouting emergency embarkation orders to your friends? By God, Wynter! I thought I taught you better.”

John said, “I see what you mean, sir. But it’s rather difficult to be going off for months or years——”

“What’s difficult about it?” the brigadier demanded. His chin came up and the keloid scars on his neck stood out inflamed and ugly. “We’ve become a bunch of ninnies. That’s the trouble. Ninnies!”

Valerie said, “Oh, come now, Father. It’s my fault and it’s not at all serious.”

“You keep out of this, Valerie.” The brigadier’s mouth hardened and he clenched his fists as if trying to control an emotion that was overtaking him.

“Ninnies!” he growled. “The whole damned lot of us! Can’t do this, can’t do that! Sit here and pinprick the Hun with a bomber or two! Fall back on the desert like a lot of cowards! Beg the Americans to come over and help us! The Americans, by God! I remember them in the last party. Running up three divisions to attack on a brigade front! Can’t die. That’s the trouble with the Americans. Never could. Always had to raise the odds on dying. Ninnies! Every last one of them!”

The iron-gray man took to staring at the blackout curtains and his eyes blinked incessantly. John looked to Valerie. She made a hand gesture as if to say, let him go on, don’t try to stop him.

“We should be standing up to the Hun,” the brigadier grumbled harshly, “standing up to him and driving him back. You remember St. Omer. You decoded the order yourself. You did, didn’t you? Fall back on Dunkerque. What nonsense! Fall back on Dunkerque! I said, stand and fight! Attack! Cut off their damned line at Béthune! Or die! When the British can’t stand up to the Hun, then die!”

He kept staring at the blackout curtains.

“If I hadn’t caught their shrapnel, I’d have gone on ignoring the damned order——” Now his voice turned faint and strangely plaintive. “But my 2IC was a ninny. Bundled me up and rolled me back. Didn’t have the decency to leave me there—leave me there with the men who obeyed my order to stand and fight—didn’t have the common decency.”

He blinked his eyes faster.

“You know, Wynter, why they’re keeping me on the sick list. Two years and still on the sick list. When I go back they’ve got to give me a division and they’re afraid to give me a division. They’re afraid I’ll fight. You know that, Wynter. You know it, don’t you?”

John said, “I hope you get your division, sir. I’ll be proud to serve with you again.” He glanced anxiously at Valerie. She went to the back of her father’s chair and passed her hands softly across his shoulders. He was panting like a spent bulldog.

John got up. “I’m afraid I have to leave now, sir.”

The brigadier didn’t look at him. “You’ve the makings, Wynter. I haven’t forgotten St. Omer. Get out there, wherever you’re going, and come to close quarters with the Hun. Close quarters, you understand. It’s the only way. A bit of the bayonet is better than ten thousand of these playthings that take off from Belnorton every night.”

“I understand, sir.”

“All right. Good luck.” The brigadier shook off Valerie’s hands and stood up. He towered over the captain as they shook hands but his gaunt frame swayed slightly and the steel-gray head with its black eye sockets was a shell.

Outside it was black as pitch, and silent except for the feather whisper of rain. Valerie and John walked blindly down the cottage path until their outstretched hands touched the gate. They could barely make out the hulk of the 1500-weight parked in the roadway.

John called out, “Are you there, Bailey?”

“Right here at the wheel, sir.”

“Had your tea?”

“And sandwiches, sir.”

“We’ll have to drive all night. Feel up to it?”

“Piece of cake, sir.”

“That’s the spirit. Pick me up at the pub along High Street in fifteen minutes. And mind your lights. Just the pinpoints. There’s a RAF station over the fields.”

Valerie took John’s hand and conducted him across the walk and the roadway. She broke the even rhythm of her progress only to make certain she had negotiated the open gate which gave entrance to the common. Once on the path which cut diagonally across the common to High Street, she resumed a normal pace but she did not let go of John’s hand. The press of his fingers on hers was inexpressibly shy and tender. She felt like weeping although she could think of no urgent reason for it.

She didn’t know him really well. They had met in the military hospital at Watford. It was on a Sunday, sunny and warm and deathly quiet. The defeat at Dunkerque had stunned the people of Britain into a haze of unbelief as if they were all asleep and the dream was unpleasant and one had to walk quietly because it was impolite to disturb a dream no matter how unpleasant.

She had come down to London from the A.T.S. station at Lincoln on compassionate leave along with a score of red-eyed girls in khaki who sought word of the fate of husbands, brothers, and fathers in the British Expeditionary Force. She had waited with the others in a hostel on Sloane Street for six miserable days while the survivors were sorted out in countless ports and beaches on the southeast coast, until that Sunday the War Office called her to say that Brigadier Frederick Hassard Russell was to be found in the military hospital at Watford. She had stood looking down at his unconscious eyes which were the only part of his face and neck uncovered by bandages, and in the welter of frantic visitors in the forty-bed officers’ ward she had scarcely taken note of the haggard young man in filthy battle dress who hovered near the brigadier’s bedside. And then an M.O. had come by, saying, “By the way, Miss Russell, Lieutenant Wynter can tell you what happened. He was there. Matter of fact, he escorted the stretcher all the way from St. Omer until we had your father safely on the operating table.”

She saw him again several weeks later, after her father had returned to “Darjeeling” on convalescent leave. John had arrived to fulfill his last duty as the brigadier’s aide. He spent two concentrated days compiling an official record of the ghastly defeat at St. Omer. It was then that she first noticed the man’s inordinate shyness. He seemed like a schoolboy in the first flush of puberty, unwilling to look directly at her, and when they passed in the narrow hall she had the impression he shrank against the wall to avoid contact by the widest possible margin, a practice which amused her and to some extent engaged a latent protective instinct in her.

During the next twelve months he had showed up several times, whenever his military journeyings brought him remotely into the area, and he seemed quietly content with tea or a meal and the evidences that the brigadier was gradually recovering from his wounds. But in the summer of 1941, when he decided to volunteer for the Commandos, he had asked her to come out for a walk in the fields and it was to her that he haltingly broke the news of his decision.

His subsequent visits became as frequent as the stern regimen of Commando training allowed, and although he spent most of the time chatting with the brigadier about the new daredevil corps which was to spearhead Britain’s return to the offensive, an understanding, unspoken yet vivid, came into being that the purpose of his journeys to Burlingham was to see her. He had family of his own, of course. He was the second of Viscount Haltram’s three sons but he apparently derived scant warmth from a leave spent at Smallhill, the rambling manor house near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. His mother had been dead for years, his older brother Derek was with the Royal Dragoons in the desert, his younger brother Bertie a fighter pilot, and his father was old, introverted and bookish, a dedicated historian, amateur archaeologist, and terribly inept manager of the tax-ridden estate.

As the months passed she came to realize that she had unwittingly penetrated the fabric of his life to a depth she could not fathom, for he spoke very little of himself and not at all of his emotions, and yet she was conscious of an intensity in him her instincts were defenseless to resist. In the Britain of blood and tears, the only softness left to life was a woman’s softness and she was urged to extend it to this gentle, diffident soldier. She often wondered how much of the urge extended to the symbol and how much to the man himself.

Indeed, his very diffidence constantly puzzled her. She had not been surprised to know that he had fought fearlessly at St. Omer, for she had been brought up in military stations and coolheaded bravery was to her a normal attribute of the British soldier. Yet she was completely unprepared to hear that in his first action as a Commando, the raid on Vaagso Island the previous November, he had won his captaincy and an immediate award of the D.S.O. for breaking the hard core of resistance by closing on the two senior German officers and killing them with knife thrusts in the throat. She would not have believed it of this spare, shy man if her father had not read to her, with appetite, the War Office report on the action.

Even now, as they made their way through the gloom of the common, she could scarcely believe it of him. The feel of his hand holding hers was like that of a small boy being led to school.

She said, “I shouldn’t have mentioned the Middle East to Father. You got a ticking off.”

“I don’t mind really. Probably made him feel like old times, ticking me off. He used to do an awful lot of it.”

A few steps later she said, “John, why are they sending only a company?”

“Can’t tell about the War Office. Odd blokes.”

“Will it be raids? Like Vaagso?”

“Something like that, I imagine. Are you sure we’re going the right way? I can’t see a thing.”

She said, “High Street is just ahead. Will you be on the planning staff or—or on operations?”

“We all do a bit of everything.” He chuckled quietly. “You do have the most remarkable eyes, Val—I mean, they give us all sorts of vitamins and eye exercises so we can operate in the dark, and I can’t see anything but absolute pitch. There’s one chap in my company though, Glenning. He can spot a Bren at fifty yards in visibility zero—hallo! What’s this?”

They stopped, puzzled. A faint, diffused light had broken over the common, giving black definition to the buildings ahead on High Street. In almost the same instant the scream of a multi-engined plane, still distant but rising in volume, broke into the silence. They turned about swiftly. A cluster of searchlights had speared the dark across the fields a few miles to the east, moving back and forth, now crisscrossing, now singly, in an urgent, relentless search along the gray-pink underside of a cloud bank.

John said incredulously, “A raid?”

“A fighter-bomber, probably.” She listened intently. “It’s a German, all right. Hear that rhythmic crump?”

“Cheeky of him.”

“They try to shoot up the runway at Belnorton pretty regularly——”

The wail of Burlingham’s siren shattered their ears. It rose and fell in pitch for a long, sickening minute, and when it petered out the sharp rattle of Belnorton’s light ack-ack filled the night sky. Streams of orange tracers leaped up between the shafts of light. The German was climbing and banking and diving. The labor of his motors receded behind the rattle of ack-ack, then came roaring through over it.

“God, Val, it’s wonderfully exciting,” John cried. “What’s this now?”

A new vibration, full-throated and straining with power, convulsed the night air close at hand.

Valerie said, “Our night fighters taking off.” She raised her head as if she could see them and murmured, “God bless them.” She added quickly, “I’ve seen them afternoons in the pub. They’re awfully keen but they’re boys. Children, really.”

Suddenly the roar of motors came down almost upon them, shaking them physically. A furious gust of wind tore at their clothes and drove the rain hard into their faces. They held to each other to keep from being blown off their feet. Then they saw the raider, its exhausts glowing crimson, swoop across a corner of the common like an enormous black hawk. It pulled up gracefully and thundered back into the night sky.

They half ran the rest of the way to High Street. As they reached the cobblestoned thoroughfare, a blinding flash lit the countryside, nakedly revealing for a brief moment the outlines of the village. Then the crack of an explosion rolled across their ears and a fire sprang up in the fields over near Belnorton.

Now the air was filled with the coarse shrieking of many swiftly banking planes and the shattering crack of the big anti-aircraft guns and the incessant chatter of small ack-ack. The searchlights still wildly crisscrossed the sky, revealing nothing in their beams but soft and innocuous gray-pink clouds.

John shouted to make himself heard. “Come on, Val. We’ve only about ten minutes and—well, I’ve got something I want to tell you.”

They hurried over the cobblestones toward a tiny red light which marked the entrance to The Stag at Bay. The street was deserted but here and there among the windows of the old houses a white face could be seen peering upward into the lacerated heavens.