‘You bloody should be!’ I told her. ‘You’re a treacherous little git, and I don’t love you any more.’ That made her smile; but it was a sad little smile, not a come-on.
‘They made me promise not to tell anyone.’
‘Who did?’
‘Mr Halton and the man in Army uniform.’
‘You’re not in the Army, Elaine. You didn’t have to pay them any attention.’
‘He said I could go to prison if I told anyone before it was out. They didn’t want people to know we were mobilizing . . .’ She let drop a couple of tears; though I’m sure they were deliberate. How do women manage that?
‘When was that?’
‘Three weeks ago.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Then I told her. ‘I’ve been called up, and they told my secretary three weeks before they told me . . . I have a rotten hangover because I was stupid enough to go drinking with my dad . . . and I’m so mad I’ve dreamed about nothing else on the way down in the train except bending you over the desk, and giving you the sort of thrashing my old schoolmaster gave me . . . smacking your backside until you yelled.’
Her eyes widened slightly, and the grin she shot me was almost like old times. ‘You could still do that.’
She’d yorked me with five words, hadn’t she? A middle-stumper . . . because her grin made me smile as well, and the storm was over. But I shook my head and confessed, ‘I don’t think my heart could stand it.’
She was still laughing. ‘If you were ill they couldn’t call you up. You’d have to stay at home.’
I gave her enough of a look for her to know I was semi-serious, then glanced away. Shyness between old lovers is really sad.
‘Go away and leave me with the maintenance lists. I’ll come out in an hour in a better temper, and you can tell me all about it.’
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Mm, thanks.’ But the truth was I was already thinking about something else.
Watson had told me that I could expect at least three weeks before I got the brown envelope with OHMS on it. This is the new RAF he explained to me, and nothing happens very quickly. I tapped a pencil against my teeth – trying to remember an Air Force officer I once met who used to do that – and considered haring off around the country for a few months, never staying anywhere long enough for the call-up letter to catch up with me. What do you do with three weeks? Carry on like normal, and pretend it isn’t happening? Spend time with the kids? – I had two who stayed in a pub at Bosham with a couple of good friends – the best really. Go out and roll as many willing ladies on their backs as my wallet and constitution could stand? The truth was more prosaic: I was suddenly and overwhelmingly apprehensive in a way I had never been before. I wanted to dig a large hole, get down into it and never come out. Something odd had happened to the bold old Charlie I once knew and loved – he’d scarpered.
My telephone rang and when I lifted it Elaine said, ‘It’s Frieda. Shall I tell her you’re out?’
Frieda was the woman I’d proposed to . . . which wouldn’t have been a problem if she hadn’t taken me seriously. It had been great at first; she had the body of a Hindu temple goddess, and we’d been wonderfully handy in bed. Her guardian was my employer, Lord God Almighty Halton, who, although he hadn’t exactly smiled upon the impending union, hadn’t scowled upon it either. Now, to be honest, I almost couldn’t stand the sight of her – she was an arrogant, stuck-up, German ogress – and our relationship had declined to a weekly meet in a hotel up in Town, with supper and a desperate fuck. So you might even say that the romance had gone out of it. I didn’t know who to tell first; Frieda herself or Old Man Halton, and if I played it with my usual skill I’d probably end up losing my fiancée and my job at the same time. It was time to show some pluck for a change.
‘Yes, tell her I’m out,’ I replied.
I waited until Elaine had left the outer office to go to where most women seem to go about seventy times a day, and then dialled the number of a girl in Town who I knew. Dolly worked as a driver for a department that dared not speak its own name in the War Office. We hadn’t spoken for a year. She sounded pleased to hear me, but you never know, do you?
After the usual ping-pong she asked me, ‘Did you get married?’
‘No. I would have invited you.’
‘Are you still engaged?’
‘Yes . . . but I’m in the process of becoming unengaged. What about you?’
Pause. That old Glenn Miller eight-beat intro . . .
‘I’m getting married next week, Charlie.’ She said it flatly, like someone trumping you in a game of whist. Then she put the phone down.
I looked out of the window for a minute before I opened my desk diary, with the company’s name on the cover, and wrote an entry which read, This is the week I didn’t have much luck. Then I put my passport into a pocket in my old flying jacket, pulled it on, and climbed inside the first of our aircraft leaving the damned place. Even Elaine looked worried.
Bozey Borland drove out to meet me in the jeep he’d won in a crap game. You might have said that he was one of our overseas station officers. In fact he was our only one, and he stayed in Berlin because
