In A Dry Season

doubled over laughing.

“Brad,” said the young man. “Brad Szikorski. And this is my pal Charlie Markleson.”

Gloria did a little mock curtsy. “Charmed to meet you, I’m sure.”

“We’re with the Four Hundred Forty-Eighth? Over at Rowan Woods?” Though they were statements, they sounded like questions. I had noticed this before with both Americans and Canadians. “I don’t mean to be forward,” said Brad, “but would you ladies care to honor us by joining us for a drink?”

We exchanged glances. I could tell Gloria wanted to go. Brad was tall and handsome, with a twinkle in his eye and a little Clark Gable mustache. I looked at Charlie, who was probably destined to be my companion for the evening, and I had to admit I quite liked what I saw. About the same age as Brad, he had intelligent eyes, if a little puppy-dog, and a rather pale, thin face. His nose was too big, and it had a bump in the middle, but then mine was nothing to write home about, either. He also seemed reserved and serious. All in all, he’d do. At least for a drink.

We walked across to the Black Swan. The village green was deserted and the ice crackled under our feet. Icicles hung from the branches and twigs of the chestnut trees and frost covered the bark. If it hadn’t been so cold, I could have imagined they were blossoms in May. Behind us, the illuminated sign over the Lyceum went off. Even in the blackout, cinemas, shops and a few other establishments were allowed a small measure of light, unless the air-raid siren went off. Ahead, St. Jude’s was partially lit, and close by stood the Black Swan, with its familiar timber-and-whitewash facade and sagging roof. We could hear the sounds of talking and laughter from inside, but heavy blackout curtains covered the mullioned windows.

The pub was crowded and we were lucky to get a table. Brad went to the bar for drinks while we took our coats off. A meager fire burned in the hearth, but with all the warm bodies in there, it was enough. Also, in the Black Swan, Brad and Charlie weren’t the only Americans; it seemed to be a popular place among the Rowan Woods crowd, and there were even some GIs from the army base near Otley. They were loud and they used hand gestures a lot; they also seemed to push and shove one another a lot, in a friendly way, as children do.

Brad came back bearing a tray of six drinks. We wondered who was going to join us. Gloria and I were both drinking gin, and when Brad and Charlie picked up their beer glasses, then poured the small measures of whiskey into them, our unspoken question was answered. Nobody. Just another American peculiarity.

We toasted one another and drank, then Brad did the thing with the cigarettes again, and Charlie did it for me.

“What do you do?” Gloria asked.

“I’m a pilot,” said Brad, “and Charlie here’s my navigator.”

“A pilot! How exciting. Where are you from?”

“California.”

Gloria clapped her hands together. “Hollywood!”

“Well, not exactly. A little place called Pasadena. You probably haven’t heard of it.”

“But you must know Hollywood?”

Brad smiled, revealing straight white teeth. They must have wonderful dentists over in America, I thought, and people must have enough money to be able to afford them. “As a matter of fact, yeah, I do,” he said. “I did a little stunt flying there in the movies before I came over here.”

“You mean you’ve actually been in pictures?”

“Well, you can’t really see it’s me, but, I mean, yeah, I guess so.” He named a couple of titles; we hadn’t heard of either of them. “That’s what I want to do when all this is over,” he went on. “Get back there and get in the movie business. My father’s in oil and he wants me to join him. I know there’s plenty of money there, but that’s not what I want. I want a shot at being a stunt man.”

If Gloria was disappointed that Brad didn’t want to be an oil millionaire or a movie star, she didn’t show it. As they chatted away excitedly about films and Hollywood, Charlie and I started our own hesitant conversation.

The beer and whiskey must have melted a little of his reserve, because he opened by asking me what I did. He regarded me seriously as I told him, his expression unchanging, nodding his head every now and then. Then he told me his father was a professor at Harvard, that he had completed his university degree in English just before the war, and when he went back he wanted to go to Harvard, too, to study law. He liked flying, he said, but he didn’t see it as a career.

The more we talked, the more we found we had in common – Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, for example, and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. And Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. He hadn’t heard of many of our younger poets, so I offered to lend him some issues of Penguin New Writing, with poems by MacNeice, Auden and Day Lewis, and he said he would lend me Tate and Bishop’s American Harvest anthology, if I took special care with it. I told him that I would no more damage a book than I would a living human being and that made him smile for the first time.

“Have you got a husband?” I overheard Brad ask Gloria. “I mean, I don’t mean to… you know…”

“It’s all right. I did have. But he’s dead. Killed in Burma. At least I hope to God he was.”

I turned from Charlie. It was true that we had tried to convince ourselves of Matthew’s death, but there was still a lingering hope, at least in my mind, and I thought that was a terrible thing to say. I told her so.

She turned on me, eyes flashing. “Well, you should know better than anyone that I’m right, Gwen. You’re the one who reads the newspapers and listens to the news, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I’m really sorry,” Brad cut in, but Gloria ignored him, kept staring at me.

“So you must know what they’re saying about the Japanese, about the way they treat their prisoners?” she went on.

I had to admit that I had read one or two rather grim stories alleging that the Japanese beat and starved prisoners to death, and according to Anthony Eden, torture and decapitation were favorite pastimes in their POW camps. The Daily Mail called them “monkey men,” claimed that they were “sub-human” and should be outlawed after they had been beaten back to their “savage land.” I didn’t know what to believe. If the stories were true, then I should probably agree with Gloria and hope to God Matthew was dead.

“I’ve got friends fighting in the Pacific,” said Charlie. “I hear it’s pretty rough out there. A lot of these stories are true.”

“Well, he’s dead, anyway,” said Gloria. “So nothing can hurt him now. Look, this is too depressing. Can we have another round of drinkies, please?”

Brad and Charlie drove us home in their Jeep. Charlie seemed a little embarrassed when Brad and Gloria started kissing passionately by the fairy bridge, but he managed to pluck up the courage to put his arm around me. We kissed dutifully and arranged to meet again soon to swap books. Brad told Charlie to drive on, that he’d walk back to the base alone later, and he followed Gloria into Bridge Cottage.

The Indian restaurant Ken Blackstone had chosen was a hole-in-the-wall on Burley Road with red tablecloths and a bead curtain in front of the kitchen. Every time the waiter walked through, the beads rattled. Sitar music droned from speakers high on the walls, and the aromas of cumin and coriander filled the air.

“Did you find what you were looking for in those incident reports?” Blackstone asked as they shared popadams, samosas and pakoras.

“I wasn’t after anything in particular,” Banks said. “Elsie Patterson was unsure as to whether she saw Gwen Shackleton enter the house with her shopping before or after she heard the shot. She even thought the shot might have been a car backfiring. And she was the only witness. Nobody else saw Gwen or Matthew that day. The other neighbors were at work, the local kids at school.”

“What did Gwen Shackleton say in her statement?”

Banks swallowed a mouthful of samosa. So far, the food was excellent, as Ken had promised; it was neither too greasy nor too needlessly hot, the way many Indian restaurants made it, mistaking chili peppers and cayenne for creative spicing. Banks thought he might like to try his hand at Indian cooking, have Annie over for a vegetarian curry. “She just said she found Matthew dead in the armchair when she got home from shopping.”

“Was there any real doubt? Was she ever a suspect?”

“I didn’t get that impression. Matthew Shackleton had a history of mental illness since the war. He was also an alcoholic. Functioning, more or less, but an alcoholic. According to the report, he had tried to kill himself once before, head in the gas oven that time. A neighbor smelled gas and saved him. The hospital suggested a period of