‘Nice to see you, Charlie. Sit down . . .’
I ignored his outstretched hand, ‘I said—’
‘I heard what you said. Now bloody well sit down.’
I moved the chair around with several bangs before dropping into it.
Halton asked, ‘There. Feeling better?’ I was probably glaring at him. The older I get the better I get at glaring. He said, ‘No. I’m not sacking you, and I’m not pressuring you to go off gallivanting with your peculiar pals in the War Office either. Someone just mentioned a little job they said they needed done, and I just happened to mention that you’d done something of the sort before, and might be free for a few months, that’s all. I know you don’t need the money, but things have been tame around here for a while, and I thought you might appreciate a change – suntanned girls, and warm beaches, that sort of thing.’
‘What kind of a someone were you talking to?’
‘The Air Minister kind of a someone – at a banquet at the Mansion House. He actually knew of you, I think, and seemed quite keen on the idea.’
I asked, ‘Why are we moving from Lympne?’ Our base in Kent.
‘Because we have to. The owners have pulled the rug. They’ve had a better offer from Skyways, and we have to get out. A friend at the ministry pulled a few strings for me, and got us sole use of Panshanger out near Welwyn Garden City – pretty country.’
‘So we’re still flying?’
‘Of course we are. We’ll run a limited operation from our Berlin office with, say, two aircraft for a few months, whilst the rest of the fleet is being converted.’
‘To what?’
‘Troop carriers, Charlie, that’s what I asked you down here to discuss. We have the new contract for troop ferrying out to the Med and the Middle East.’
I was still sulking. ‘I thought Eagle Airways had that all sewn up?’
‘They do, but someone, somewhere, has budgeted for a massive increase in the War Office’s capacity to move soldiers around, and Eagle can’t expand to meet it. I can.’ Then he began coughing again. He always got me when he began coughing: he should have been dead years before. I poured him a glass of water from a carafe on a small side table, and took it round to him.
‘So you want me to go back to Berlin, and run the operation from there for a time?’ He was wiping his mouth with one of his monster white handkerchiefs – they became speckled with blood on his bad days.
‘That’s the point, Charlie. You can’t, can you? The German authorities have placed you on their blacklist. That’s why you’ll have very little to do until just before the conversions are completed.’
Shafted, I thought; completely fucking shafted.
One of the things I failed to mention was that I’d passed June, the red-haired girl my two boys had taken a shine to, as I walked into Halton’s office. The office was over at the Cargo Side at London’s crass new airport at Heathrow. I was as relaxed with her as you can be with a girl with whom you’ve slept, and with whom you wished you still were. We were shy. I hated that. After getting a brief from the old man on what the next few months held for the air arm of our business, and collecting enough papers to fill a dustbin, I shot the breeze with her in the outer office. By which I mean that I had said hello, and she had totally ignored me.
I’m an in for a penny merchant; I can be really subtle if need be.
I told her, ‘I still want to sleep with you, and I want you to smile when I walk in here; instead of that you turn your head away.’
‘I know.’ She still didn’t look at me.
‘I think of you a lot.’
‘I know.’
‘The boys ask about you all the time. They think it was my fault.’
She could have said, It was. Instead she said, ‘I know.’
Len Hutton used to bat like that on his quiet days. Stone-waller.
I hadn’t noticed that Halton had followed me from his office, and stood in the door earwigging.
He laughed, and said, ‘She knows, you know!’ His laughter turned to coughing again, and he lurched back to his room fumbling for his handkerchief.
I went to the outer door, but stopped there and turned to look at her again. In for a pound this time, Charlie.
‘It’s half past three, June. You finish in a couple of hours. When you do I’ll be waiting outside in the car. I’ll take you out to dinner – anywhere you like. Then I’m going to take you back to your digs, and lay you on your back.’
My chin probably lifted as defiant as a schoolboy’s when I said that, and swung away. I expected a mouthful from her, because June had a temper if you pushed her too far. I took three steps away from the door, and then stopped and turned: what she said instead was, ‘I know.’
She must have freshened up her lipstick before she left work, because as soon as she got into the car she kissed me, and left it all over my face. We drove straight to her place and made love. Afterwards she lay back in bed, sighed, and said, ‘Thank God for that!’
‘Thank God for what?’
‘Thank God you still wanted me. I didn’t know if you’d come back for me, or not.’
‘You didn’t give me any encouragement at all.’
‘I wouldn’t, would I?’
‘Why not?’
She didn’t reply at once. I wondered if she had heard me. Then
