‘On the squadron probably, old son. We didn’t drink all that much in Egypt, did we?’
‘No, although I got drunk with Oliver Nansen a couple of times. Do you ever think about him?’
I managed to play a long Jack Teagarden trombone solo in my head before he replied.
‘Often, Charlie. As often as you, I should think.’ He looked away.
‘Did they ever find the bodies?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘I saw him not long after he bought it, did you know that? Sitting on his camp bed as large as death, but charred a bit around the edges. He asked me to find all the photos of the girls he’d made, and to make sure their husbands never saw them.’
‘I wondered why you’d got mixed up in that. The MPs probably still have an open file on it.’
‘There you go, sir. You can call them up in the morning, and tell ’em it was me all the time.’
‘And lose my radio operator? Perish the thought! You look a bit shagged out, Charlie. Why don’t you go home, and sleep it off?’
I stood up. It wasn’t as easy as it looked.
‘Good idea. I think I’m getting too old for this sort of lark.’ I meant partying, but I think his reply was about something else altogether.
‘Aren’t we all? Goodnight, Charlie, and thank you.’
When I thought about that in the morning those last few words worried me: I might have been wrong, but I couldn’t remember him having thanked me for anything before.
You will have noted that he didn’t query my having said that I met up with Nancy, some hours after he’d bought it in an aircraft crash. I think that was because all of us who survived the war still carried our ghosts around with us for a long time. He had his own somewhere, and maybe he’d mention them one day. Or maybe not.
My little wooden house on the prairie was less than five hundred yards away, across the parade ground. I was halfway there when my lioness stood up from where she was lying down in the gloom, stretched, yawned and paralleled me from maybe thirty feet away. I didn’t mind her. We’d met in Egypt during my Canal Zone jaunt. She wasn’t a ghost. She was just something loose inside my head; I understood that now.
Warboys’s voice suddenly sounded from close by: I thought it was word association. Lion: lioness.
He said, ‘Heading off early, Charlie?’ He was alongside me. I’ve known them all my life: these bastards who move as silently as an owl flies.
‘Yes, Tony. Early shift tomorrow – I thought I’d get some kip. Why?’
‘You’re walking in the wrong direction. Come on, I’ll walk you home.’
How had that happened?
The last thing he said was, ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘Coming up into the mountains. You didn’t have to do that, and I appreciated it.’
‘I worked with some Aussies like you once.’
‘I know, they told me.’ I was at the door of my hut now; I was so pissed that I’d walked straight past it.
‘Goodnight, Charlie.’
‘Goodnight.’
The last person I thought of before I slept was Stephanie: Steve. I wished I was in her bed instead. Then it was dark.
Chapter Thirteen
The Chanctonbury Ring
Pat picked me up again in the morning. Obviously I wasn’t old enough to walk to school on my own yet. I had a sore head, and Pete’s bed hadn’t been slept in.
‘Watson’s running the show, isn’t he?’ I asked him. ‘I worked it out when I was shaving. It’s not Collins, or Warboys, or de Whitt in the radio room. It’s bloody Watson again.’
Tobin winced. Maybe his head was giving him the gyp as well, or maybe he simply didn’t want to talk about it.
‘He just doesn’t like to make a song and dance about it.’
‘Where does the budget come from? Who pays?’
‘Fuck knows . . . but there’s plenty of it. I think the boss has friends in low places.’ Then he threw the points on me, and put us on another track. We were coming to the gate of our compound. ‘Make sure you have your pass handy – they’re running checks this morning.’
We turned left and on to the dusty road. It was going to be another bloody lovely day, and I would miss most of it cooped up in their communications box. After the roundabout, on the track up to the operational block, Pat suddenly said, ‘I came from Sussex. Did I ever tell you that?’
‘No.’
‘The first girl I went with wasn’t that different to the one we picked up yesterday. I was fifteen, so was she. Mary Walters.’
‘I don’t usually talk dirty at this time in the morning, Pat. In fact, I don’t often talk dirty at all. Is this conversation going anywhere?’
‘I haven’t come to the point yet. We used to call her the Chanctonbury Ring. It was where we came from, see, a place called Chanctonbury. She was like me – an early starter. Her old man had a market garden there.’
‘I thought there was a stone circle or a burial mound called that?’
‘No, a hill fort. It was where she went a lot – we took our girls there when we wanted to get laid. That was the joke about her nickname. We’re cruel little beggars when we’re young, aren’t we?’
We were approaching the gate to the ops block compound.
I asked him, ‘What about it?’
‘I’ve been thinking about her since yesterday. I’ve been thinking about all sorts of things, that I wished I’d done differently.’ This was a new rueful Pat.
The guard waved, opened a small wired picket gate for me, and Pat began to turn the Land Rover.
‘It sounds to me,’ I told him – I was probably grinning – ‘as if you need a few days’ hard work, to get both the booze and the women out of your system.’
Pat smiled weakly back, but didn’t respond. He
