The Dearest and the Best Read online

  ‘Well, there was plenty of men on board and you seemed in a bit of a hurry, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  James laughed wryly. ‘To get off. Yes, I was. It was an absolute mess in Norway, Tom. You know that.’

  ‘It seemed like it from where I was,’ nodded the other man reluctantly. ‘Left me a bit short of fingers.’ He held up his stumps.

  ‘I lost some men from my battery,’ muttered James. ‘I’ll never forget it. What’s going to happen now?’

  He had meant it in the wider sense, as if seeking some collaboration from a fellow strategist, but the dairyman misunderstood. ‘Well, sir, it looks like I’ll be invalided out of the army now. I’m no good like this. I’m back to milking the cows.’

  James looked around. ‘Nobody seems to want to wake up,’ he complained, his voice lowered. ‘They don’t know there’s a war on.’

  ‘They soon will, if you ask me, sir,’ said Tom, keeping his voice at his normal tone. ‘Just seeing what they Germans had in Norway. The tanks. Get through snow, anything. And those dive bombers, whistling as they came down on you. Frightened my bowels, sir, that did.’

  ‘You didn’t like the look of it, Tom?’

  ‘I didn’t at all,’ said the dairyman simply. ‘It seems to me that it won’t be all that long before they’re standing right in this very pub, right where you and me are standing now, sir. The soldiers in here. The officers in there.’

  Charlie Fox had wound up the gramophone behind the bar. The fragile records, in their paper covers, were in a special protective case that had come with the machine. He rejected ‘God Bless You, Mr Chamberlain’ for the sentiment of ‘Two Sleepy People’ who were too much in love to say good night. The turntable trembled and then revolved and he put the smooth silvery arm with its needle on the first groove. A blonde young woman came through the door curtain and glanced about her. Harry saw her at once. ‘Bess,’ he said almost to himself, although his mother heard him and looked up. She frowned.

  ‘Bess Spofforth,’ said Harry.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ sighed his mother. ‘I understood she was back.’ She paused. ‘It’s rumoured it might be for the duration.’

  Harry smiled and, walking to the window-seat, whispered: ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Elizabeth replied coolly. ‘It’s just that she was always such a . . . bother. Like her grandmother. She’s a terrible old woman, you know. She hit the vicar with her walking stick. She said he was in league with the Pope and the Devil.’

  ‘Now, now. You can’t blame Bess for her granny.’

  When he was fifteen the man who did the garden in those days had found him and Bess in the summer house, lying on a horse blanket on the floor. It had only been teenage tumbling, but he remembered the excitement of it now, her skirt rucked up and their legs entangled. Breathlessly they had rolled and laughed in the wooden enclosure, hot faced, frightened. Her girl’s breasts were plump under her white shirt and as they tumbled he moved his cheek and then his mouth across them. She had squealed and rolled on top of him, her long hair dropped across her flushed face, her eyes bright. Then the gardener had walked in. He had seen the old summer house swaying. ‘It’s going to fall down,’ he said, staring at the girl’s naked legs. ‘It’ll come down over your two heads. And serve you right too.’

  The story was swiftly circulating in the village and it soon reached Elizabeth, who had watched the girl closely thereafter until Bess had been sent brusquely away to boarding-school after an incident with the young man who ran the local company of the Boys’ Brigade. He had also left the district and the Boys’ Brigade had languished. Now she was back.

  Bess saw Harry’s eyes on her, and although she deftly looked away she then walked towards him. Smiling extravagantly, she kissed him on the cheek. ‘You remember my mother,’ said Harry nervously.

  ‘Ah yes,’ his mother said too quickly.

  ‘Of course,’ smiled Bess concisely. ‘It’s wonderful that so many people have actually stayed here. In six years I thought everybody would have escaped. But no, I seem to recognize everyone.’

  ‘I expect you do,’ said Elizabeth Lovatt. ‘People don’t move off very much, even now. Your parents went to London, didn’t they. How are they?’

  ‘They’re very well,’ Bess returned, adding: ‘In their way.’ She shook her fair hair. Her breasts moved a little under her dress. ‘They’ve sent me back to grandmother. Evacuated me really, I suppose you could say. Just like one of those Cockneys. They have some idea it’s going to be too dangerous for me in London.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Well, I expect the place is crammed with servicemen now . . .’ Harry glanced in annoyance at her. She recovered with a smile. ‘And there’s always the danger of air raids. What will you do down here, dear? Some sort of war work?’

  A splinter of hardness appeared in the girl’s eyes. ‘I haven’t thought very much about that yet,’ she said coolly. ‘I’ll have to do something, I suppose. It seems to be all the rage.’ She turned to Harry as if he were important to her. ‘I’ve got a car,’ she said. ‘The new Flying Standard. It’s very nippy. It’s outside – would you like to see it? I drove all the way from London. It only took three hours.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to,’ he said. He touched his mother’s hand and said: ‘Won’t be long.’ He and the girl went towards the door.

  Elizabeth turned towards her husband and other son at the bar. Robert said: ‘That’s the Spofforth daughter, isn’t it? She’s quite a big girl now.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid she is,’ said his wife. Millie smiled at James.

  Bess and Harry walked out into the old hollow coaching yard. It was still light enough to see the pretty, box-like Standard, with its white mudguards and running board, drawn up precociously on the cobbles. Harry whistled and she opened the door on the driving side. ‘Go round,’ she urged. ‘Get in the other side.’

  He climbed into the little car, bending in half. It still had the scent of newness. He stroked the wheel and ran his finger over the dials on the panel. ‘It goes up to seventy. And it’s got a self-starter. No turning handles,’ said Bess.

  ‘It’s terrific,’ he breathed. ‘How did you get it?’

  Her sudden sulk was visible in the gloom. ‘I went to bed with the salesman,’ she retorted. ‘No one in this one-eyed bloody place ever thinks I come by anything honestly, your mother for one.’

  ‘She didn’t mean anything,’ he said defensively. ‘She still remembers about that day in the summer house.’

  ‘Her little boy almost seduced,’ Bess mocked. Her eyes stared truculently out at the dusk. ‘I got the car as an inducement, if you really want to know,’ she said. ‘An inducement to come back to this dead-and-alive hole. My parents thought I was having too much fun in London.’

  He grinned in the shadow. ‘And were you?’

  Her head affirmed it fiercely. ‘I’ll say I was. Jesus Christ, you’d think I was the only one who ever wanted to live.’ She looked sideways at his uniform. ‘How long have you been in fancy dress?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been in the navy eight months,’ he bridled. ‘I’ve just been out in the Atlantic – in a French destroyer. We picked up some dead men from the sea. From a torpedoed merchant ship.’

  ‘Did you? That must have shocked you.’

  ‘Two of them were naked and one was wearing pyjamas.’ He felt guilty using them to impress her but it didn’t stop him. He took the identification discs in their envelope from his pocket. ‘Thurston, Smith, Wilson,’ he recited, counting each one out separately.

  ‘Pyjamas?’ she remarked. ‘You’d never think of sailors wearing pyjamas, would you?’

  He looked sideways at her. Her pretty face outlined against the car window and the final shade of dusk. ‘I’m sick of this war, already,’ she said bitterly. ‘Sick, sick, sick of it. War, war, war. That’s all anybody talks about. My parents, your parents. They love it, you realize. It brings a bit of interest to their lives. They hav
en’t lived since the last one. They just exist from war to war.’ She mimicked a male voice: ‘ “How would you feel, Bess, to know Hitler was having a bath in Buckingham Palace?” That’s my father. What a stupid thing to say, even for somebody like him. I don’t give a damn if bloody Hitler or Musso-bloodylini or any other bugger has a bath in Buckingham Palace!’ She saw his astonished, half amused mask. ‘It’s all just playing at soldiers,’ she went on doggedly. ‘War? What war? I haven’t seen any war. All this running around, pretending to be brave. Fuck the war, I say.’

  Harry blinked at her language. He had never heard a woman say that before. Eventually he said: ‘There’s a Young Farmers’ Summer Supper on tomorrow in Lyndhurst. Would you like to come?’

  ‘All right,’ she answered briskly. ‘Tell your mummy I’ll pick you up in my new one-hundred-and-fifty-nine pound car.’

  James and Millie, a little apart, went through the Binford churchyard, their steps sounding on the path between the yews. They had left Horace on the triangle of grass beyond the far wall and, having said their good nights at the pub, they walked through.

  Beyond the lychgate there was a tombstone like a white chair in the summer night. James patted it. ‘How’s death treating you, grandad?’ he said. ‘What’s it like down there?’

  Millie laughed unsurely, as she so often did with him. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to think of him being up rather than down?’ she said.

  ‘He’s nowhere,’ he said.

  ‘All right, he’s nowhere,’ she agreed quietly. ‘Please don’t get temperamental about grandad and death in general. I’m sure we can find another excuse for an argument.’

  ‘I’m sure we can,’ he answered.

  They went out of the lychgate and harnessed Horace to the trap. The horse clattered along the road towards their house. ‘I’d like to do something,’ said Millie. ‘You said everyone should be doing something instead of sitting on their backsides.’

  ‘What?’ he asked, surprised. ‘What could you do?’

  ‘A good deal, I expect,’ she replied. Why was it, she wondered, that their mutual anger, their ability to fashion a quarrel from nothing, erupted so quickly? ‘I could join one of the women’s services, for a start. There’s nothing to keep me in Binford. It’s not as if we have a baby.’

  They were at their gate so he did not have to answer. He climbed down and opened the gate sharply, causing their cat to fall from the bar. It protested and slouched away.

  Millie drove the trap to the house, without continuing their conversation, and began to unharness the pony. ‘Can you manage the rest?’ asked James suddenly. ‘I want to hear the news.’

  ‘I always do,’ she replied. He turned and hurried into the dark house. When she had put the pony away she walked slowly to the door and went in. James was standing, hands in pockets, in the room. The news reader’s level London voice came from the loudspeaker of the wireless. ‘. . . The voting figures were: against the Government two hundred and eighty, and for the Government two hundred. Within the next few days Mr Neville Chamberlain is expected to offer his resignation to the King.’

  ‘God bless you, Mr Chamberlain,’ said Millie quoting the song.

  ‘Old fool,’ muttered James. ‘Bloody old fool.’

  They went to bed and made love, but not happily. Afterwards she lay awake and, after he had slept briefly, he woke too.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

  ‘It’s not one of my sleeping nights,’ replied Millie.

  For several minutes they were silent, James with his eyes closed, his wife with hers open.

  ‘Aren’t you glad we didn’t have a child?’ he said eventually.

  ‘A baby,’ she corrected. ‘Yes, I suppose I am now.’

  ‘It’s no world for a child,’ he said before closing his eyes again.

  At seven o’clock in the morning the telephone sounded. James went sleepily downstairs. It was Philip Benson from London. ‘James,’ he said. ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘About the vote. Yes. I heard the wireless last night.’

  ‘No, the other news. The Germans have invaded Holland and Belgium. Churchill couldn’t have timed it better if he had been in cahoots with Hitler. He’ll be Prime Minister tonight.’

  Five minutes later James put the telephone back on its hook on the wall. Millie was stirring beneath the bedclothes. He went to the window and looked out over the early fields bright with day and beyond that to the placid sea. It was Friday, 10 May.

  Four

  THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT the Dove brothers and the old man Sonny had fished six miles out where the long, dull waves rolled. A limp moon rose at two o’clock giving a pale illumination to The Needles at the western cape of the Isle of Wight. The rocks stood out like ghosts walking on water.

  Peter and Lennie Dove had been teasing the old man Sonny about bringing the shotgun again. He had hobbled down to the jetty at midnight, encumbered with his tool bag, which he would never leave on the boat, for he had owned it since he was twelve, the solid pile of sandwiches which he had made himself in his cottage kitchen, and a bottle of Tizer, because he would never drink alcohol at sea. He also, as he had done of late, carried the shotgun, double-barrelled, as old as himself.

  ‘Now what’s that for, Sonny?’ Peter had mocked as they helped him aboard. ‘You got more equipment than the British Army.’

  ‘Rabbits,’ retorted the old man. ‘What d’you think a shotgun’s for? In case there’s rabbits out there.’ He went heavily down the companionway to the engine which, with the cooking galley, was his responsibility. As he pulled away the hatch a cloud of hot, oily air issued into the clean summer night. The brothers did not notice it but Sonny grumbled: ‘You got to get somethin’ done about this contraption down here. Time she had a proper overhaul.’

  ‘Next winter,’ promised Peter. He had climbed into the wooden box of the wheelhouse. Lennie was checking the nets, pulling at them, separating them, securing the lines.

  ‘Be too late when she lets you down,’ the voice came hollowly from the hatch.

  ‘That shotgun,’ Lennie called back. ‘That makes us into an armed merchantman, you know, Sonny. Technically, that is. Geneva Convention. It makes it legal for Jerry to bomb us.’

  The old man’s head emerged from the hatch, the rutted face, the pale, wet eyes, the random teeth and the white hair around his ears and neck and stubbling his chin. ‘They buggers would bomb us whether we got the gun or no,’ he asserted. ‘They don’t know and they don’t care, I’ll bet you. Why don’t you paint a red cross on the roof? See if that makes any odds.’

  They had never been attacked, but fishing boats up the east and northern coasts had. German submarine commanders were honourable and often surfaced within sight of British fishing boats without showing any harmful intentions, but the Luftwaffe were not above using the small craft for machine-gun targets and bombing practice.

  Fishing for the Binford Haven boat had been moderate; a long, easy sea, a warm sky and a late moon. They fished without lights but the night was pale enough to see. There was a good catch of mackerel and some pollack and cod. At five o’clock, with the grey band of day advancing from the green uplands of the Isle of Wight, they paused to eat the sausage, eggs and bread that the old man had prepared, and then turned the wheel and headed north-west towards their home port.

  At six o’clock they saw a merchant convoy crouched on the horizon, going east to west, coasters carrying coal and steel from the north-east ports to the south-west, an economical sea route of long tradition.

  The gathered ships did not attract more than casual curiosity from the Hampshire fishermen until Peter Dove saw that over the distant hulls there appeared small angelic puffs of cloud. The rest of the sky was blank and clear. He turned the binoculars on the horizon and the clouds. Then, like a bad rumour, the sound of the firing drifted to them on the lucid air.

  ‘Lennie,’ Peter called. ‘Have a look at this.’

  Lennie, hearing the gunfire, was
already squinting at the horizon. He took the binoculars from his brother. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I can see the planes. Little dots, see . . . They’re low.’ He handed the glasses back to Peter and called down to Sonny. ‘Sonny, give her full speed. Everything she’s got.’

  ‘She ain’t got anything!’ shouted Sonny, his rumpled head appearing from the hatch. ‘She ain’t got full speed, that’s for sure. I told you.’ He became aware of the rolling echoes of the firing and his face became concerned. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Looks like Jerry is bombing a convoy over there,’ Peter told him quietly. ‘About eight, ten miles out.’ He was still keeping the glasses on the distant shapes. ‘Let’s get a move on, Sonny.’

  Hurriedly, the old man vanished into the hull and the engine laboriously picked up its note. The fishing boat struggled for more power but it scarcely managed another knot. ‘That’s all she’s got,’ grumbled the old man, calling from below. ‘I told you to get the bloody old thing fixed, didn’t I now.’

  ‘Let’s hope they’re kept busy over there,’ said Peter returning to the wheel. His brother had the glasses now. He said to him: ‘I’m sorry for those poor bastards, but at least they’ve got something to shoot back with.’

  Lennie laughed dryly. ‘So have we,’ he remarked. He called towards the hatch. ‘Got your rabbit gun, Sonny?’

  ‘Lot of bloody use that’s going to be,’ said Peter to himself. He was getting the boat as close inshore as he could, gauging the shoals and currents, alongside the steep guardian cliffs of the Island. The Needles lighthouse stood out in the strengthening light, striped and tall, like a man out for an early view of the sea. God, he thought, they were so near land. They could see sheep grazing. If they got into one of the bays then any German plane which turned off from the convoy might well miss them.

  ‘We don’t need to worry, I don’t reckon,’ called Lennie. ‘Jerry looks like he’s got plenty to do. He won’t bother about the likes of us.’

  The Stuka, when it arrived, descended in a screaming swoop out of the opaque sky. They heard it before they saw it, the ghostly screech as it dived towards them. Their faces turned up frantically, searching.