The Dearest and the Best Page 7

  ‘Get down!’ bawled Peter from the wheelhouse. His brother was already flat, flung against the side of the structure, while Peter doubled up against the wheel itself. Lennie was shouting something to Sonny which he never heard, for at that moment the dive bomber reached the pit of its descent and loosed a high explosive bomb which erupted with a numbing roar in the green sea fifty feet away. The fishing boat bucked like a stallion and heeled nervously away from the blast. Every window in the wheelhouse blew in, scattering Peter with glass. He felt the blood from the cuts on his face streaming down his cheeks like tears. His brother rolled across the deck, colliding with the rail. It was the old man who reacted first. He clawed his way from the engine room, shouting, his face rough with rage. Waving his fist upwards at the attacker who had now screamed off into the higher sky, he struggled for profanities. ‘Bastards!’ he bawled. ‘Rotten buggers! Bombing an old man! You wait, you German bastards! You just wait!’

  The wait was not long. The Stuka returned, curling gracefully far up in the lofty morning and then falling like a cormorant to a hundred feet, this time a mile away before howling in on a level run, machine guns firing, making the sea sprout and rattling along the soaking deck of the fishing boat. Peter had crawled from the wheelhouse and lay among the loaded fish barrels. They saved his life. One exploded in front of him, scattering cod over him and the deck. He scrambled back to the wheelhouse and, pulling the wheel violently to starboard, held it there with his foot while he took cover against the life-raft. The German came in for another run. Peter was aware that Sonny was lying flat out on the bow, still howling obscenities and firing both barrels of the pathetic shotgun as the attacker’s grey belly showed across the masts. The plane banked, displaying its black crosses, and then headed back towards the vacant sky. This time it did not come back.

  ‘Bloody swine,’ sobbed Peter Dove towards his brother. ‘I could see the bugger’s face. I swear he was laughing . . . Where’s Sonny?’

  The excitement in their faces stilled and, both shouting his name, they rushed towards the bow. The sea slopped over the wooden prow as the small vessel, itself wounded by the machine-gun bullets that had rent its deck, lolled in the water.

  ‘Sonny . . . For God’s sake, Sonny!’ It sounded like an accusation, as if they were blaming the old man.

  The forepart of the boat was empty. The shotgun lay, as though carefully placed, across a coil of rope. The aroma of its powder was still in the air, mixed with the breeze and the smell of the German bullets.

  ‘Sonny!’ Peter stumbled back and thrust his head into the engine-room hatch. It was empty, the machinery croaking and choking. In the adjoining galley he could see the old man’s bottle of Tizer rolling on the table. He turned back, stark faced. ‘He’s not . . .’ he began.

  He saw his brother standing still, with hunched, hopeless shoulders, looking into the sea. It was the only place old Sonny could be and there he was, floating head and legs down in the water, his back and buttocks in the air. Around him, mixing with the water, was a pink halo of blood.

  Like many fishermen, neither of the brothers could swim, but there was no need for swimming. Lennie picked up the cork life-ring and made to throw it into the waves, but then he put it back on its hook, for they knew there was no reason.

  Peter Dove looked up into the sky, tears running from his eyes to his mouth and chin. His brother followed his look. The sun was rising on a mocking morning, the sky like muslin, a few clouds innocent and lofty, the sea coming in long, silver tongues up the Channel. Wordlessly Peter shook his fist at the empty horizon. His brother was trembling. ‘Fancy killing a poor old man,’ he whispered.

  As the fishing boat reached the mouth of the river, Peter Dove brought her as close inshore as he could, and his brother using the megaphone shouted at the coastguard look-out. His first shouts caused the river gulls to screech and scatter and Danny Durr, the assistant coastguard, only caught half the message as the boat slowed, wallowed, and then went on towards the harbour. ‘Shot? Shot dead?’ he muttered, shocked. Then he thought he realized. ‘That shotgun. Sonny’s gun.’ He picked up the telephone and whirled the handle. Donald Petrie picked it up in the hallway of his cottage. ‘What’s up, Dan?’

  ‘They Dove boys,’ said Dan hurriedly. ‘They just come in. Hailed me and said Sonny, the old man, got himself shot. Dead, they said, he’s dead. It’s that shotgun he takes out with him. Fell on it, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Call the ambulance and the police,’ said Petrie firmly. ‘I’ll get down to the quay.’ He put the phone down. ‘Jesus, old Sonny,’ he muttered, going out through the door. He mounted his motor cycle and drove along the shore road towards The Haven. The view of the waterway was blocked for some of the distance by trees and elevated land and then by houses, harbour buildings, and the masts of laid-up sailing craft. By the time he reached the vessels he could see the fishing boat heading towards the quay. He stopped the motor cycle and took his binoculars from the case around his neck. He waited until the boat cleared the screening rigging of the moored craft and then focused the glasses on her. He saw at once that the upper structure of the little vessel was torn into holes, there was only jagged glass in the wheelhouse, and that the wooden hull had been blown away for several feet at the bow. ‘Some shotgun,’ he muttered. He started the bike forward again.

  When he reached the old stone quay there were already people gathering. The very calling out of the motor ambulance was a matter of excitement, but when Police Constable Brice was seen, set-faced, steel helmet on his head, pedalling his lofty bicycle furiously towards the harbour, then they knew something big had happened. By the time Petrie pulled up on the quayside, there was already a knot of people gathered to watch the Dove brothers bringing in the fishing boat. They stood, as people do when they are uncertain or afraid, in a small, compact crowd, although there was plenty of room on the quay for everyone to stand without touching. Constable Brice, who was an unpopular and officious man, saw as his first duty the clearing of spectators, as if their presence would prevent the boat docking.

  ‘Move back,’ he ordered, dismounting his angular bike. ‘Disperse now, if you please. Nothing to see. Just a small accident. Nothing to see.’

  ‘What d’you think that is then, Mr Brice?’ asked Billy Sanders, the bloodstained boy from the butcher’s shop. He nodded towards the riddled boat as it sidled to the quay. On the deck was half a blanket with a mound beneath it. The butcher boy always had blood on his striped apron. He regarded it with pride, like a trade mark. The policeman looked with distaste at him: ‘Go on away,’ he ordered. ‘Coming down here like that.’ Billy moved back to the extent of the circumference of a cycle wheel. Bert Brice moved forward and stared at the blanket on the deck of the nearing trawler and at the bullet holes drilled along its superstructure. Petrie had moved to get the rope as the ashen Peter Dove threw it ashore. One of the old fishermen who inhabited the quay, Jeremiah Buck, said quietly: ‘They look like they got a good catch too.’ He peered over at the scattered silver fish that had been hurriedly pushed aside to make room for the body.

  ‘He’s dead,’ called Peter Dove to Petrie before the boat had touched. ‘Old Sonny.’

  ‘Bastarding German dive bomber,’ shouted his brother from the shattered wheelhouse. ‘Killed an old man.’

  The boat was alongside. More people came from the two shops and the houses to look. Others arrived from the direction of Binford. There were about twenty, growing to thirty, as the boat was made fast; craning forward, chattering and whispering, women in aprons and with shopping bags, a man who had been mending the road and another who had been sweeping it. Three boys and a girl stopped their bicycles and stared. Another boy, Tommy Oakes, who always wore a wolf-cub’s green uniform stood, curiously, at attention. ‘Go and tell the others,’ whispered the girl, Kathleen Enwright, nudging the nearest boy, Gordon Giles, known as Franco. ‘Go yourself,’ he said, staring at the slow scene. ‘I ain’t ever seen nobody dead before.’

  Thre
e RAF men, from the Air Sea Rescue launch at Lymington, in their pale blue shirtsleeves, stopped their truck and walked towards the crowd. One of them was the youth with the ginger hair.

  ‘Jerry went and done that,’ nodded the man who had been tarring a square of the road. He addressed the airmen bitterly. ‘Where was you, that’s what I want to know? Sitting on your bums ain’t no good when there’s old men getting machine-gunned to death.’

  ‘Sod off,’ said the ginger youth. ‘You stick to mending the bleeding holes in the road, mate. That’s about all you’re fit for.’

  ‘You’d be better off doing that yourself,’ answered the older man. ‘You’re no good for anything bloody else.’

  ‘We ’ave to ’ave orders, don’t we?’ said one of the other RAF men. ‘We can’t just take the fucking boat out when we likes, can we? The officers ’ave to give orders. Blame them, not us.’

  ‘Nobody told us,’ said the ginger youth. ‘Nobody knew anything about it.’

  ‘Move back. Move back and stop arguing,’ said Police Constable Brice. He regarded the RAF men astringently from beneath the rim of his steel helmet and it seemed possible he might add to the road-mender’s accusations. Instead he held out his arms and eased everyone back. ‘Back now, nothing to see. Give us room, please. Give us room! ’

  Four shaky ambulance men stood, a stretcher and a red blanket ready. One also carried a first-aid box, almost an afterthought. As the boat tied up, two of them moved forward with the stretcher, but Petrie, now aboard the vessel, held up his hand. ‘Hang on, boys. Just a moment.’

  The ambulance men stopped obediently among the crowd. Petrie leaned over and gently moved the blanket from old Sonny’s face. The old man’s skin was still wet from the sea. He had a composed expression, almost smug, even the trace of a smile. Petrie had a feeling that the dead man might at any moment sit up, laugh and startle them. He put the blanket back and looked up into the dumb faces of the Dove brothers.

  ‘Tried to shoot at the plane with his shotgun,’ said Peter hollowly.

  Petrie turned towards the quay and beckoned to the ambulance men. PC Brice, officially and unnecessarily, cleared the way for them and then, with growing importance, stepped down on to the deck, putting his black boot on a dead mackerel. He slid and slipped backwards, falling heavily on the deck with a howl. The men around the body turned sharply and Petrie looked angrily. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh . . . Oh . . . my arm!’ the policeman called. His helmet had fallen. ‘It’s broken. I’m sure it is.’ The children on the shore, who had been joined by others, began to laugh.

  Petrie said to one of the ambulance men, ‘See to him, will you.’ The man looked hurt at being dispossessed of his end of the stretcher. He glared at the prostrate police officer. Petrie took the handles. The Dove brothers tenderly raised the wafer of a body, and placed it lightly on the stretcher.

  They carried him ashore before the dumb crowd. Tommy Oakes, the wolf-cub, brought up three fingers in a theatrical salute. A car stopped behind him and Dr Brinton, the Lymington doctor, strode along the quay. ‘I’ll take a look at him,’ he said briefly.

  They laid the stretcher down and Brinton eased the blanket away. A tight gasp went up from the watchers. Several of the women were crying. The little girl with the bicycle suddenly rode away. Brinton glanced up at Petrie. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Not a spark there.’

  Petrie nodded backwards towards the boat. ‘Maybe you’d like to look at the other casualty,’ he said.

  The doctor looked startled. ‘There’s somebody else?’

  ‘Brice, the copper,’ said Petrie. ‘He slipped on a fish.’

  As the tranquillity of that May morning lay across the southern shores of England, as the sun gained height above beaches that were sprinkled with the first wartime holiday-makers, as the seaside shops smugly put out their striped awnings, and the coastal inns opened their doors to the bright air, so Sonny was brought dead into Binford Haven, and on the far side of the Channel, to the east and south-east, the German army was pushing heavily into Holland and Belgium.

  There was news every hour on the wireless. Elizabeth Lovatt kept it on through her morning tasks in the house. Mary Mainprice did not normally come in on Friday, but she pedalled in at the gate on her bicycle, tall, curiously like an upper extension of the bicycle itself, and called breathlessly through the open window, her white spare face framed by the first roses: ‘Mum, Mrs Lovatt. You there?’

  The organist, Sandy Macpherson, was playing on the BBC, filling with soothing, meaningless melodies the intervals between dire war communiqués. Elizabeth turned down Die Fledermaus and went to the window. ‘Mary, what’s the trouble?’ she asked. Mary was trembling with news.

  ‘That old man, Sonny, you know he that helps the Dove boys in the boat. They just brought him dead into The Haven. Shot by they Germans, they say, mum.’

  Elizabeth felt her face go stiff. ‘Dead?’ she repeated. ‘How could he be shot by the Germans?’ The Germans were on the far side of the Channel.

  ‘Jerry plane, mum, came down and shot at the boat. Ma Fox . . . told me . . .’ Her hands dabbed at her face.

  Elizabeth refused to believe it. ‘But . . .’ she protested. ‘She’ probably mistaken. You know how she exaggerates, Mary. I simply don’t believe it. Not the old man . . .’

  Mary’s expression indicated she had already spent too much time. ‘Well, I’m going down to see,’ she announced, as if she would be needed. ‘They reckon ’ee was lying on the quay there covered with a blanket, ’is hand ’anging out of the side. I’ll tell you when I come back.’

  She pedalled away in a curve of small pebbles. Elizabeth returned to the close shadows of the house. No, she refused to believe it. Rumours came too quickly to life while there were people like Mary and old Mrs Fox around them. She returned to the kitchen and picked up a recipe book – A Hundred Meals Without Meat – she had been studying over her coffee. Robert had gone to Southampton. It irritated her that she wished he were at home.

  After a moment she set the book and her cup down again and went purposefully out through the sitting-room towards the telephone in the front hall. She hesitated in the doorway. Yellow sunshine was running quietly through the windows, birds were lively in the garden, and a drift of sea-smell mingled with the scent of the May flowers. Surely not.

  Making her mind up, she took the earpiece from its cradle and turned the handle. The village operator, Kathy Barratt, answered quickly, and immediately asked: ‘Oh, Mrs Lovatt, have you heard?’

  Now she knew. ‘Old Sonny?’ she asked. ‘It’s true is it, Kathy?’

  ‘God rest him, yes, Mrs Lovatt. Terrible thing, isn’t it? Terrible. I saw them bring him off the boat myself. He looked ever so little. Like a boy instead of an old man.’

  ‘Thank you, Kathy,’ she whispered. She had known the old man all her life.

  When she had replaced the phone Elizabeth walked slowly away from it, shaking her head, into the sitting-room. Everything there was as it had always been; the home they had built up over their years of marriage. The flowered covers on the chairs and the settee, the brass pans against the walls, her chosen curtains waving briefly in the air coming in from the garden, the rug and the fire irons before the stone grate, the books and pictures on the wall. The lamp on the writing desk. Her sewing basket, the private ticking of the clock. She found herself touching these familiar things, trying to reassure her heavy heart. Then she sat down, and put her head in her hands.

  She had married Robert Lovatt in 1915, on his second leave from France. It was a ghostly wedding because she had been in love with his brother Gerald who was killed during the opening weeks of that war. She still had Gerald’s uniform.

  Five

  WITHIN THE WIDE anchorage at Portsmouth there lay a grey gathering of ships. Funnels and flags stood in the sun, rigging whistled thoughtfully in the breeze. Nelson’s relic flagship, HMS Victory, sat like a wooden grandfather among the
war vessels.

  Harry Lovatt walked smartly from the station to the dockyard, his officer’s uniform cut and clean in the dusty street air. He took a short way through a row of terraced houses, bright shoes lightly sounding. Two women were washing down the pavement immediately outside their homes, one separated from the other by three or four intervening front doors. Each worked her precise broom along the demarcation lines of her own territory, taking pains not even to splash or sprinkle the immediate neighbour’s paving. As he approached, one woman shouted to the other.

  ‘What you think about ’olland, then, Marge?’

  ‘Poor people,’ responded the second woman, laying the handle of her broom against her wide bosom and wiping both damp, crimson hands on her apron. ‘Wilf says they can’t even run proper in them clogs. That ’itler’s a real bastard, picking on them.’

  ‘Just give me five minutes with that swine,’ responded the other ominously across the squares of paving. She swished her broom violently. They were like Amazons discussing strategy over miniature fields. ‘I’d ’ave the bleeder’s moustache off in no time, and the rest of what ’e’s got!’

  Marge hooted. ‘If ’e’s got anything!’ she returned, and they both guffawed.

  ‘Weedy little bastard,’ agreed the first woman.

  Smiling unsurely Harry approached and, circumnavigating the washed areas, stepped out into the road. A rag-and-bone man’s cart, drawn by a spectral horse, grated down the middle of the road. The rough-skinned driver emitted his bleak cry: ‘Araaaagaboners.’ The women ignored the call and, leaning on their brooms rammed into the buckets, smiled like mothers at Harry. He blushed and wished them good morning.

  ‘Goin’ off to sea, lad?’ asked Marge kindly.

  ‘Might be,’ he returned. ‘You never know.’

  ‘Give them one for us, love,’ added the other as he went by her patch.