A Pair of Silver Wings Page 4

  ‘Did you, er, see the notice about Harry Barclay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you going to get in touch?’

  ‘Look, Pete, I’ve really got to go. Let’s hopefully talk about it later. Three-thirty, you say?’ Pete nodded. ‘See you then. Really good to see you again, Pete.’ Edward shook his hand, and hurried on out of the tent. When he reached the bandstand, to his relief, neither Simon nor Nick was there. Finding another table, he sat down. The band was playing ‘Lili Marlene’. He began humming, softly, along to the tune. The Snakepit. He and Harry had brought the house down that day.

  His explanation, when Simon asked why he was at a different table, was that he’d gone ‘for a pee’ and on his return had found their table gone. If Simon had doubted him, he’d not said.

  ‘So, you want to go back to the Veterans’ Centre?’ he asked his father.

  ‘I don’t think so. Perhaps later on.’

  ‘But you’re going to add your name to the message board?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Simon.’

  ‘Why not?’ Then he stopped, held up his hands and said, ‘All right, fine. Whatever.’

  Edward turned to Nick. ‘What would you like to see?’ he asked. ‘After all, it’s your day.’ He caught Simon’s disapproving eye. Well, sod him, thought Edward. I’m not going to be bullied by my son. And as it happened, there were a host of sites Nick wanted to look at. They stopped for lunch, but otherwise the hours passed as they wandered back and forth across the vast site. Three o’clock came and went; so did three-thirty. They finally left just after four, both Edward and even Simon declaring their exhaustion. And while Nick refused to admit his tiredness, he had by then noticeably begun to drag his feet.

  Simon hailed a cab. (‘I can’t be bothered with the tube,’ he said, having seen the crowds pushing their way towards the Underground at Marble Arch.) In minutes, as they bumped their way down the Bayswater Road, Nick was asleep.

  ‘Well,’ said Simon, patting his knees, ‘that wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  ‘No,’ said Edward. ‘And Nick seemed to enjoy it. He wants me to take him to Duxford.’

  ‘And will you? I’d like to come too, you know.’

  Edward smiled at his son. ‘As long as the questions are about aeroplanes and nothing more.’

  Simon laughed. ‘It’s a deal.’

  Later, much later, Edward lay in bed, but despite his exhaustion, sleep once more eluded him. Even that afternoon, he’d managed to put Andrew Fisher’s notice out of mind; he’d kept his run-in with Pete Summersby to a bare minimum; and when he could have been churning over those blighted days on Malta with Pete and Mike Lindsay, he had been wandering around some exhibition about modern European unity.

  But at night it was not so easy. At night, lying in bed – especially an unfamiliar and, frankly, uncomfortable bed – there were fewer distractions. His mind began to brood, to bring unwanted memories back to the forefront of his consciousness. And even when unconscious, having finally dropped off to sleep, his addled brain mixed those images, scrambling them into a series of indelible sequences that were once again so horribly familiar.

  Surrey – May, 1995

  Edward finally set off for home on Monday afternoon, satisfied that any duty owed to his son and grandson had been more than honoured. Earlier in the day they had all gone to the Mall, Katie and Lucy included. Edward had not enjoyed the experience. To begin with, he had not slept well and so had woken feeling tired and irritable; over breakfast, he had found it trying to have to pretend to be even-tempered when really he wanted to snap at both Nick and Lucy and tell them to stop making so much noise. The Mall had also been far too crowded for his liking. Thousands upon thousands of people had turned up to wave flags and cheer, but although he was a supporter of the monarchy, the sight of the far-off members of the Royal Family appearing on the balcony of the palace stirred no feelings of patriotic fervour within him. They were simply too far away. In any case, his view was spoilt by a large man standing directly in front of him with a young girl perched on the man’s shoulders.

  The fly-past – the supposed highlight of the weekend – was over all too quickly and was marred by the absence of the promised Spitfire, the one plane Nick had wanted to see above all others. He was distraught – not even the sight of the Hurricane could make up for it. Later, it transpired that the plane had suffered some mechanical hitch and been forced to remain on the ground. Only Edward’s assurance that he would accompany his grandson to Duxford in the summer lifted Nick’s spirits.

  ‘Really? Is that a promise?’ Nick had said, his face brightening somewhat.

  ‘A promise,’ Edward replied, conscious he was succumbing to a mild form of emotional blackmail. His mood worsened, however, when Simon took him into the garden and spoke to him in hushed tones about the noise Edward had made the previous night. ‘Nick and Lucy heard you, Dad.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Simon?’ Edward had snapped.

  ‘Dad, you were shouting in your sleep last night. They were worried, but didn’t like to say anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry – must have been a bad dream or something.’

  ‘Dad – please. I want to help, really I do. You shouldn’t be having bad dreams.’

  ‘Not dreams – a dream, Simon. I can’t even remember having had it,’ he lied.

  ‘But it must have been pretty bad if you woke the kids up shouting.’

  ‘I really don’t remember.’

  Simon had put his hands in the air – I despair – and then they had sat in silence for a moment, until Edward had looked at his watch and said, ‘I should think about getting going.’

  He made his escape shortly after, just before four o’clock. Simon’s family all gathered at the doorway to see him off, but his son had walked with him to the car, parked a short way further down the street.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Dad,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, his hands on his hips. The two of them had never quite known what to do at departures: an embrace was out of the question, but a handshake seemed too formal. So they tended to do neither.

  ‘That’s all right. I enjoyed myself,’ he lied. ‘Thank you for looking after me so well.’

  ‘And we’ll see you soon?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  Edward eased himself into the driving seat, Simon closing the door for him. ‘Drive carefully,’ he said, as Edward wound down the window. ‘And Dad?’ he added. Edward looked at him. ‘No – nothing. We’ll talk soon.’

  With a final wave, Edward drove off at last, relief flooding over him. Penance done, he thought. Now home.

  But he did not go straight home. He had thought he had always known his own mind, but his brain was beginning to play strange tricks on him. For the most part, it still told him what he knew to be right: that he should put the war out of mind, and that he should concentrate on the present, not the past. But a quite different part of his mind was sending quite opposite signals: telling him to go to London, to take Nick to Duxford. Now it was urging him to make a pointless detour from his route home. It had come upon him quite suddenly, as he was at last free of the capital and making good progress along the motorway; and although he had tried to banish the thought, a short while later he was exiting the motorway and heading towards Woking instead.

  Turn around, he told himself. It’s not too late. But he did no such thing, driving on through countless sets of traffic lights and over roundabouts, all of which were desperately unfamiliar. How long had it been? Years. Decades, even. What had once been a quiet commuter town was now a sprawling conurbation, linked, it appeared, quite seamlessly with Aldershot, Farnborough and several other old Surrey towns. It was more by luck than anything that he eventually found himself in the centre of old Woking. There he stopped, examined his road map, and then continued on, until he found himself passing a signpost that told him he had reached Chilton. At first he could not understand how this could be – he remembered Woking had been much further
away and the village far smaller; there had been no cluster of modern red-brick houses built up along the edge of the village when he’d been a boy. But the heart of the village, with its myriad of different houses and the ‘The Chequers’ pub, was unmistakably the same place. He drove on, past what had once been the village shop, (he was glad to see the Victorian postbox was still there), then almost at the village’s edge, turned left, following a white sign to the ‘13th Century Church’. The road had hardly been a road at all before the war; rather, just a gravelled lane, its high hedges rich in blackberries by the end of summer. He smiled to himself, thinking of the purple-stained fingers he and his mother would get after an afternoon’s picking. Edward crawled along at barely more than walking pace. There, ahead, was the familiar bend to the left, and then after, a turning on the right. There seemed to be more trees than he could recall, but, with a quickening heart, he saw the house through the now dense foliage. He paused for a moment, looking, remembering, then drove on, until the church came into view, its steeple rising above the hedgerow, and as the road straightened, so its silvery grey body emerged too. He parked at what had once been a turning circle for carriages and traps in days gone by. This at least was still gravel and stone, and largely unchanged from the place of his memory. Freshly cut grass and nettles lay along the verge at the foot of the brick and flint church wall, giving the late afternoon air a heavy scent.

  The lych-gate handle clacked loudly as he turned it and walked through into the churchyard. There was no-one about, although faintly, from across the field behind the church, he could hear the distant sound of music – wartime music yet again – coming from The Chequers. Everyone, it seemed, was using this VE Day bank holiday to have a party. He noticed no new graves, no freshly turned soil, and only on a few of the graves were there some tired-looking flowers. Turning left along the path that ran away from the church door, he soon found the headstone he was looking for. A simple grey stone, now so covered in lichen it was hard to pick out the chiselled writing. He bent down, put out a finger and traced the words along the warm, roughened stone. His father had been a good man, he thought. They had always been close – far closer than Edward had ever been to Simon. ‘We’ll always be proud of you,’ he had said to his son as Edward had left to join the air force. ‘Be strong and always try to do the right thing by yourself and by others.’ Edward had never forgotten those words. He could very clearly picture his father saying it, on the platform at Woking, holding his son’s arms, and framed by the steam from the engine behind him.

  A bee lazily buzzed nearby. Edward left the churchyard and walked the hundred yards or so back up the road to the driveway. Looking around him, there seemed to be no sign of life, so checking once more behind, he gingerly started towards the house. It looked familiar, although different. Smaller than he remembered – it had always seemed vast to him as a boy – yet he supposed that was inevitable; the combination of his increased age and the trees along the driveway, now grown so much, had helped to shrink it. Even so, it was still a fair-sized house: a Regency vicarage that had been palatial for a family of three. He paused for a moment and chuckled to himself. Could it really be fifty-odd years? Those had been happy days – carefree, certainly. A time before, to be cherished. In his mind the house had remained as it had been then, sealed in an airtight room, preserved just as it was forever. How strange it was to be looking at it now, and for it to have aged sixty years in a trice. A conservatory had been added; the house was now pale yellow, not white. And where there had once been his father’s black Wolseley Twelve, there was now a large estate car parked in the drive.

  He stopped, then walked on slowly, his heart beating faster. He wasn’t sure what he would do if someone saw him, or suddenly emerged from the house. What was once his to wander over freely now belonged to some nameless, faceless people; he had no right to be there, and yet his curiosity was urging him on. The gravel crunched underfoot. Small clouds of insects stood out in the late evening sun. He smiled remembering how his mother always complained that the midges seemed to single her out. ‘I don’t know what it is about me,’ she had said on numerous occasions, ‘but they find me particularly succulent.’ And then she would wildly whisk her arms around her head.

  Reaching the end of the drive, he now stood directly opposite the front of the house. He waited a moment, paralysed with indecision. Should he go on and knock at the door, or peer through the windows? Or turn around now, and walk back to his car? More memories stirred within him. A birthday party on the lawn; playing French cricket with his father. Building a snowman with a friend who stayed with him one Christmas – a friend whose name he had forgotten but whose face he could picture vividly. He could hear no sound of life from either the garden or within the house. Surely, he thought, they would have seen me by now? And so he stepped forward again, towards the front door, unmistakably the same front door, with its much-polished door knocker and handle and half crescent of glass above it, glass that helped light the hallway. Reaching the portico, he lifted his hand, touched the cool brass of the knocker, then let go again. What would he say? What was he hoping to find? He turned his signet ring, then stepped back. He looked around once more, but there was no-one. No sign that the current incumbents were about. Must be out celebrating, he thought wryly. A long-forgotten memory suddenly returned, and briskly he walked to the side of the house, to one of two large windows. Yes, it was still the drawing room – different furniture, no eclectic objects that his parents had collected during their time in East Africa and Asia, but the same room nonetheless. Then he peered closely at the second pane from the bottom on the right. ‘Good Lord,’ he muttered. There, scratched into the glass was the inscription he remembered: ‘Tom Isaac’. The very same pane of glass that had been there since 1850-something, the pane of glass Mr Hopcroft, the gardener, had shown him as a boy. ‘Our secret,’ Mr Hopcroft had said with a wink.

  ‘Who was he?’ Edward had asked him.

  ‘A real hero he was,’ Mr Hopcroft had told him. ‘Married my grandfather’s eldest sister and won a Victoria Cross in the Crimea. One of the very first.’ What had become of him, this hero from a long-ago war, Edward could not recall, but he knew the story had fired his childhood imagination. And he, too, had decided he should leave his mark. Edward stood up straight again, his heart quickening. It would mean walking behind the house, to a part of the garden dangerously far from the front drive. He knew it was madness, knew that it was wrong to venture into someone’s house without their consent, but he also knew that he had to look. With a final backward glance he hurried around the house and across the lawn to a large copper beech that stood high over the far end of the garden. One of the main branches had been neatly lopped off, but it still appeared to be in good health, a still tall and proud tree. He put his hand to the bark, and allowed it to slide over the trunk as he walked around it. And then he smiled. ‘Here it is,’ he said aloud. Admittedly, the bark had almost healed over the raw wood where his penknife had once cut, but the letters, ‘EE’, and the date, ‘1935’, were unmistakable, clearer, he realised than the chiselled letters on his father’s gravestone.

  Another furtive glance and Edward hurried back across the lawn, round to the front of the house, down the driveway, and back out onto the road. In just a few minutes he was back inside the safety of his car. He waited a moment, closing his eyes, and breathing out deeply. Really, he thought, he was too old to be sneaking about like a burglar. But it was still there. Edward looked at the church once more, silent and indefatigable, then started the engine and slowly drove off. But as he passed by the entrance to the drive once more, he braked and looked down the drive for one last time. It was, he reflected, quite extraordinary what the brain could keep locked away. It had been a long, long time since he’d thought of the house – a place of happiness and innocence, of security and of simple pleasures; yet seeing it once more, rediscovering those simple links to a life he had supposed had been lost forever, he was aware a door had been unbol
ted and flung wide open.

  A short, sharp blast of a car horn jolted him from his reverie and made him look up. A car faced him, and its driver, a middle-aged man wearing an expression of profound irritation, was agitatedly waving his arm in the direction of the driveway. The indicator, Edward noticed, was also flashing. Beside the man, a smartly dressed woman was mouthing, ‘We want to turn in there!’ Edward held up his hand in apology, and reversed. The current custodians. Shaking their heads, they thundered down the drive, dust clouds rising in their wake. ‘Got away in the nick of time,’ he said out loud to himself.

  But it was too late, as he had known it would be the moment he had seen the house again. He had crossed an invisible threshold from which there could be no going back. The force that had pressed him to find Chilton once more was, he realised, stronger than his will to resist. Sights and smells; such necessary prompts to memory. As he rejoined the motorway, his thoughts were not on the heavy holiday weekend traffic, but on events that had occurred many years before. The beginning of the war; his war at any rate: September, 1940, the start of his flying career. At Cambridge, of all places. Edward shook his head. He barely recognised that man – man! He’d still been a boy! A boy who’d known nothing; just nineteen years old and keen as anything. What a grand adventure it had seemed. What a thrill. What a thrill.

  Cambridge – September, 1940

  It was not the start to his flying career that Edward had expected: nearly three weeks into the course at the Initial Training Wing and he still had not been in an aeroplane. Instead it had been marching up and down the parade ground, carrying out the kind of PT he’d done at school, and endless hours in the classroom: law and admin, hygiene and gas, elementary aircraft maintenance and the correct signal procedure when using an Aldis Lamp. Edward had scored 100 per cent on that particular test, but this did little to ease the frustration he felt. He had joined to fly, to see some action. He worried it might all be over before he had had his chance.