The Dearest and the Best Read online

  The man regarded him seriously. He could see the wear in the young man’s face, the dark-lined skin, the weary eyes. ‘You have a bit of a rest, sir,’ he said. He turned to go back towards the canteen. ‘After Norway I expect you could do with it.’

  It was amazing, sitting there – to be there in England – on that growing May morning, the fragile sun coming through the weft of clouds; seabirds calling in their wild and vacant way. Staring across the water, Lovatt realized the oddness of it, heard again the crack of guns, echoes from only days before; the cries of his men in the cries of the gulls. Then the silence and his weariness made him drop into sleep. He lay in the old deck chair, crumpled in his battledress, his officer’s boots socketed into the sand. His face was still unrelaxed in sleep, his already thinning fair hair lay wispily over his white forehead. He was twenty-five years of age. Before the war he had been a junior partner in his father’s dull firm of solicitors at Winchester in Hampshire. He had been married in 1937 to a girl he had known in his home village of Binford since childhood. His life, until now, had been unremarkable.

  The taxi driver from Gravesend found him slumped when he arrived ten minutes later, and stood hesitating, as one might when confronted with a sleeping child. He was wearing a black, peaked cap and he pushed it back on his head in his uncertainty. He was not a decisive man and he began looking around for possible help. There was only emptiness and the canteen was too far for the trouble of walking, so he leaned forward and timidly tugged at Lovatt’s sleeve. Lovatt woke up rudely, sitting abruptly upright, shouting and reaching for the flap of his revolver holster.

  ‘No!’ howled the taxi driver. ‘No, sir!’ Staggering back, he caught one heel in the other instep and fell into a sitting position on the sand. He remained there clownishly, his legs astride, his hands held up before his face. Lovatt stared at him, his fingers still on the butt of the revolver. ‘Your taxi, sir,’ trembled the man.

  They walked up the short strand together, the officer apologizing, the taxi driver now, oddly, comforting him. ‘Didn’t realize you was back in England, eh, sir?’ he said. ‘Back home.’ He thought of another excuse. ‘And the cap, sir,’ he said touching the peak. ‘Looks a bit like a German cap, I expect.’

  His vehicle, halted where the disused road ceased being merely rough and became impassable, was surmounted by a curious cage of metal, almost as big as the car itself, and held inside the cage, like some flabby black animal, was a gas balloon. ‘Have the breeze with us going back,’ observed the man, now cheerful. He sniffed at the air in a maritime manner. ‘That’s one thing. When you’ve got one of these gas bags it makes a lot of difference, you know. Sometimes along here when it gets a bit gusty it’s like being on a blessed windjammer.’

  They got into the car. From the rear Lovatt looked out into the flat, unused landscape and thought half idly what a classic assault place it would be for an invading force; easy landing, little high ground and a quick access to port facilities and then to London. A firm support landing on the Essex side of the Thames would secure both banks and the river to Gravesend and Tilbury.

  ‘Been in Norway then,’ said the driver. Lovatt sighed. So much for the canteen woman. He grunted.

  ‘A side show, if you ask me,’ observed the man sagely. Anxiously his eyes switched to the mirror. ‘No offence meant, sir. I’m sure it don’t seem like that to you. What I mean is you just watch them Jerries get through that Maginot Line. Like a piece of cheese that’ll be, take it from me. Or else they’ll go round. They don’t have to go through, do they, sir? Why go through when you can go round? I ask you. Anybody can see that just by looking at the maps in the papers. Go through ’olland and round the back door. Don’t tell me Adolf worries about them countries being neutral. Didn’t care about Norway, did he, sir?’

  ‘He’s not particular,’ agreed Lovatt.

  ‘I was in the first lot,’ said the driver. ‘Somme, Ypres, all that. They didn’t even think to give us tin ’ats until nineteen-sixteen, you know. Thought we had thick ’eads enough, I s’pose. Or we wouldn’t ’ave been there, would we? Then when we got them, the tin ’ats, some blokes wouldn’t wear ’em . . . Used them for washing and shaving. We ’ad one bloke killed while he was washing his face. Lump of shrapnel right through ’is skull.’ The man laughed. ‘Now they’ve got gas masks, the lot. All the kids, everybody. There was a bloke robbed a post office down here wearing a gas mask!’ He snorted. ‘Best one I’ve heard yet.’

  ‘The war hasn’t really started yet,’ offered Lovatt eventually.

  ‘That’s for sure, sir. You’re absolutely dead right. People don’t realize there’s a war on. They reckon they’re “standing by”, whatever that may mean. Playing at it, that’s what we’ve been doing. Playing at it. Air-raid drills and people sitting up all night, drinking tea and eating sandwiches, and getting up to God-knows-what, and dances to help to buy bombers, all that cobblers. It’s just been one big parish pump social so far, if you ask me. Good excuse for some to have a good time. Look at the ruddy fire brigade – more like the darts brigade if you ask me. There’s them that reckon it will be all over by Christmas – and they’ll be sorry. They’ll miss it.’

  Lovatt also thought it might be over by Christmas, although not in the way some believed, but he did not say so. They were nearing Gravesend. The masts of the ships in the Thames side docks stood up like trees behind the terraced houses. People moved about casually in the sunshine that fell in dusty bands between chimney pots and alleys. A milkman laughed with two housewives, while his horse nosed its feeding bag. One of the women was wearing trousers. An old man using a bucket marked ‘For Fire Bombs Only’ swilled the previous night’s spilled beer from the front of a public house. They arrived at the station.

  ‘London train in fifteen minutes, sir,’ said the taxi driver, helping him out with the consideration he would have awarded an invalid. ‘That will be two shillings, sir.’ Lovatt paid him and added sixpence tip. The man looked around at the set scene, the dull British streets that had remained unchanged for so long. Even now it was not worried, not hurried. People walked about enjoying the first morning of the new May.

  ‘Well, sir,’ shrugged the driver. ‘What can you do about it, I ask you?’

  Lovatt grimaced and thanked him for his kindness and conversation. He walked to the platform and bought a penny bar of chocolate from a red iron machine. What could you do about it? He went around the corner to eat the chocolate, realizing that he was in a captain’s uniform. He bit into it secretly. He had not eaten breakfast. Then he went into the platform telephone box and gave the answering operator the number of the House of Commons in London.

  On that same morning at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth, James Lovatt’s younger brother Harry was also disembarking from a warship, the French destroyer Arromanches which had berthed two hours earlier. As he went ashore, with a brief stumble down the gangway, his fellow officers, the young Frenchmen with whom he had spent three months, cheered and laughed from the deck above. The Englishman did not look so fine that morning.

  ‘See,’ he had told them on the previous riotous night in the mess. ‘See, in England, see, we have to obey our parents still – it’s called respect, see? And my mother and father, nice old dears really, wouldn’t like to know I’d been getting plastered with a boatload of Frogs.’

  They had challenged him to stand on two chairs, one resting on the other, and then to close one eye like Nelson. His column had trembled and they had caught him as it toppled. During the voyage they had called him Loup de Mer – the Sea Wolf – because he was a poor sailor. Their patrol had been across the Atlantic western approaches, south over the Bay of Biscay to Bordeaux and then retracing their course to Brest, Le Havre and to Portsmouth. They had seen no action nor come upon any sign of the enemy, although one evening they found three dead men in a life-raft drifting on the sunset; seamen from a torpedoed merchant ship. They lined the rail and watched the bodies being brought aboard. One dead man was w
earing blue-striped pyjamas. That had muted the junior mess a little that night, but then with shrugs, everyone bravely agreed that it was la guerre and to be expected. The following morning they buried the poor fellows at sea with the theatrical maritime ceremony and Harry Lovatt, as their compatriot, was entrusted with their identification discs to return to the British authorities.

  He was broader, shorter and thicker-haired than his elder brother. The gap between them was more than merely three years. At Brest he had gone ashore with the French youths and after some lively drinking he had found himself, surprised and apprehensive, in a small room with a rotund prostitute. Her big, ruby mouth haunted his sleep for weeks. The toast that night, one of many raised in numerous names, was to ‘The Breast of Brest’. Now he was home again from the sea.

  He was certain that his mother would be waiting for him outside the dockyard gates, just as in former times she had waited for him outside his school. He felt oddly worried at the prospect of facing her but then reassured himself. For Jesus Christ’s sake, he was twenty-two, and he was in a war; he could be required to die at any moment. Well, any month. Preoccupied with these thoughts he almost forgot to turn and wave a final salute to his French shipmates as he went ashore. At a signal, in unison, they began to chorus from the deck. ‘Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama . . .’ Harry felt his face warm. He flapped a dismissive hand at their taunts and went towards the dock gates with an exaggerated nautical roll. Their laughter followed him. He presented his papers at the dock-gate guardroom and saw, immediately outside, his mother sitting serenely in the little Austin seven. He felt the eyes of the naval sentry on him as she kissed him with the same warmth that she had always shown and said, looking carefully into his face: ‘You’ve lost weight and you look tired. Was it very tiring, dear?’

  ‘Terrible,’ he laughed. She started the car and when they were on their way he kissed her cheek. ‘I didn’t know war could go on until such a late hour. How are you?’

  ‘Splendid. Waiting for hostilities to start or finish, or whatever they intend doing.’ He had always thought she looked like a middle-aged lovely, like a film star just touching grey. He still remembered harbouring guilty fantasies in boyhood of swopping her for Jean Harlow. ‘Your father, predictably,’ she said, before he asked, ‘is writing to everybody, including the Prime Minister, telling them how they should run the war, and giving advice to people who infuriate him by apparently being too uncaring to reply.’

  Mother and son laughed together. Harry said: ‘He retired just in time to give his time exclusively to beating the Germans.’

  Her laughter diminished to a small smile. She shook her head fondly. ‘He can’t understand why the war has been going on nine months and there has been no mayhem. It wasn’t like that in his time, of course.’ She paused and slowed the little car uncertainly. ‘Aren’t you supposed to report to somebody, dear? I mean, you just walked out of the gate. In the films servicemen always have to report to someone.’

  Harry pushed his arm across the back of her slim neck. ‘They let me out, didn’t they?’ he said. ‘I have to come back to report. Being on a foreign ship makes a difference. Things get a bit unofficial. I’ll come back by train.’

  ‘You’ll have to, I’m afraid,’ she confirmed. ‘The petrol won’t run to two journeys.’

  ‘You’re still getting the odd gallon, then?’ he said. He put his left hand out of the celluloid window and patted the fragile door of the box Austin as he might pat an old donkey.

  ‘A dribble. Your father gets his basic ration and some for his air-raid precautions business. On His Majesty’s Service, as he says in that important way he has – OHMS. But I considered meeting you came under that heading.’ They halted at some traffic lights on the edge of Portsmouth. There were two other cars, a naval lorry with some sailors in the back, several dockers on bicycles and a horse and cart piled with scrap metal. To Harry the sailors looked like new recruits, a supposition borne out when one, seeing him in the following car, attempted to salute. Elizabeth Lovatt looked at him with abrupt seriousness. ‘Did you see that, Harry?’ she said. ‘That sailor was saluting you.’

  They were moving off from the lights. ‘He shouldn’t have,’ answered Harry, covering his pleasure. ‘New intake by the look of it. They’ll salute anything that moves. You can’t start saluting people in cars from the back of lorries. Where would it end? Wholesale accidents.’

  ‘You didn’t experience anything . . . nothing dangerous then?’ she asked cautiously. He could see how anxious she had been.

  ‘Not a sausage, mother. Few alarms but nothing came of them.’ His voice became quiet. ‘All that happened was that we found some dead merchant seamen on a life-raft. Three of them. That was pretty horrible.’ He put his hand into his pocket and took out an envelope. ‘I’ve got their identity discs in here,’ he said. ‘I have to hand them in when I report.’

  She hesitated, and he knew that she would say: wouldn’t it be better to do it today? She said it. ‘Perhaps people, perhaps their families, are waiting for news.’

  He put the envelope away. He could feel the flat roundness of the discs inside, pieces of dead men. ‘No, it’s not quite like that,’ he assured her. ‘Their next-of-kin already know. The captain radioed all the information and their people would have been told. I just have to hand these in for confirmation, to set the record straight.’

  ‘To finish their lives officially,’ she said slowly and strangely. Then: ‘Oh, I do wish it could all be over. There’s you and there’s James . . .’ She left the thought unfinished.

  ‘What’s James been up to?’ he asked to divert her. ‘Still dashing about on Salisbury Plain, blowing up dummy Germans.’

  A frown creased her face. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘It’s two weeks since anyone heard, even Millie, and that was a letter from Scotland. Not a word since.’

  He laughed to reassure her. ‘Well, there’s no war in Scotland,’ he said. ‘He’s probably holed up in some baronial castle, drinking malt whisky and taking pot shots at the poor old deer.’

  She had taken the rural road, skirting north of Southampton, through placid fields, villages of old cottages and bright, child-faced bungalows built in the thirties, and finally to the first trees of the New Forest.

  ‘Since rationing they’ve been keeping a close eye on the deer in these parts,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But there still seems to be the odd haunch of venison around.’

  ‘God, I’d forgotten about rationing,’ he exclaimed. ‘You simply get fed in the navy. Is it terrible?’

  ‘It’s not exactly easy,’ she said. ‘Fancy introducing it in the middle of the worst winter for years. It seems ridiculous. The Thames frozen, everywhere iced up, trains running twenty-four hours late, people knocked down wholesale in the blackout, and you’re suddenly told that you have to eat margarine.’

  ‘Margarine! You’ve never bought margarine in your life.’

  ‘I do now. I hope you’ve got your ration card.’

  ‘I have. I almost didn’t bother. I didn’t realize it was so bad. In France there seemed plenty of everything.’

  She said: ‘If there’s a war we have to suffer. It’s all part of being British. But even your father’s patriotism runs low when he sees his dinner plate in the evening.’

  Harry chuckled. They crossed the main London road and then drove into their home territory, an ancient part of England, a forest in the old sense of a hunting ground, established by William the Conqueror almost a thousand years before for the pursuit of his sport.

  ‘I just wish there was somebody I could ask about James, though,’ she continued. ‘I feel sorry for Millie being left in the dark. It was easy to find out about your time of arrival. Your father just rang his friend at Portsmouth, that vice-admiral or whatever he is, the golfer. And he told us when and where your ship would be in dock.’

  ‘I received the message priority,’ said Harry. ‘It’s amazing what the odd round of golf will do.’

  N
ow they were running through the early summer trees of the New Forest, the light shimmering through the fresh green of the beeches. At the small town of Lyndhurst, they turned away from the main road, and drove, jauntily now, through cloaked copses and open moorland, over wooden bridges that arched wrinkled, brown-stoned streams, along roads where deer and donkeys wandered in the sun and beside which the ancient herds of wild ponies grazed.

  ‘And what momentous happenings have been taking place in Binford?’ asked Harry lying back in the seat. The sun was shining warm through the window.

  ‘Nothing momentous ever occurs in Binford,’ corrected his mother. ‘You know that. There’s not enough room. Even the war would have a job to change that. We’ve got an ARP post and Mr Brice has had an air-raid siren put on his roof. It looks like the head of a large hammer. They’ve tried it out and it makes a terrible noise. Still, it’s no use having something melodic for an alarm, is it? What else . . . oh yes, there’s a mystery man called Mr Stevens who has taken over the junior school.’

  ‘Why is he a mystery man?’

  ‘Because no one knows much about him and you know what the village is for knowing everybody’s business. Even Ma Fox can’t find out. He keeps very much to himself. At first she was sure he was a German spy because he went for long walks and read a book while he walked. Now she thinks he’s just a figure with a tragic past.’

  Harry nodded and smiled recognition. He began to feel a stir, the return of a half-forgotten excitement. His mother smiled because she sensed it in him. It was like only a few years ago, coming back from school, the reassuring road, the unchanged pattern of woodland, the fenced pond at the junction, and then threading down the lane to where the roof of the house appeared ruddily above the cloudy trees. He, Sub-Lieutenant Harry Lovatt, RN, who had sailed through dangerous waters, who had seen dead men taken from a boat, who had drunk and laughed and been with a large and lusty woman in bed, in Brest; he was home. It was a sort of triumph.