'No,' said Louise. 'But PFC Whitacre knew her back in St Louis.'
The General laughed hoarsely and good-naturedly. 'I know when I'm being given the business,' he said. 'Her mother. That's a new one.' He clapped Michael heavily on the back.
'Good luck, Son,' he said, 'glad to have met you.' He peered around the room. 'Where's Ottilie?' he demanded. 'Is she giving out those damned cards here, too?' He strode off, the Captain with the moustache in his wake, looking for Mrs Kearney, who was locked by now in the bathroom, with one of the sergeant pilots.
Louise smiled at Michael.
'Having a good time?' Michael asked.
'Charming,' Louise said. 'The General fell right on top of me when the bomb hit. I thought he was going to spend the summer there. Ready to go?'
'Ready,' said Michael.
He took her hand and they went out.
Outside there was a sullen smell of smoke in the air, foul and threatening. For a moment, Michael stopped, feeling his jaws and his nerves panicking again, and he nearly turned round and ran back inside. Then he controlled himself, and started down the dark, smoky street with Louise.
From St James's Street came the thin tinkle of glass, and the heavy orange flicker of fire, spitting up through the smoke, and a new sound, thick and gurgling, that he had not heard before. They turned the corner and looked down towards the Palace. The street reflected the quivering orange fire in a million angles of broken glass. Down in front of the Palace, the fire shone back off a small lake of water. The gurgling was being made by ambulances and fire engines pushing through the water in bottom gear. Without saying anything to each other, Michael and Louise walked swiftly, their shoes crackling on the glass, making a sound like people walking through a frozen meadow, towards the spot where the bomb had fallen.
A small car had been hit right in front of the Palace. It was lying against a wall, crushed and compressed, as though it had been put through a giant baling machine. There was no sign of the driver or any of the passengers, unless what an old man on the right-hand side of the street was carefully sweeping into a small pile might be they. A woman's beret, dark blue and gay, rested, almost untouched by the catastrophe, a little to one side of the car.
The houses facing the Palace still stood, although their fronts had slipped down into rubble. There was the familiar and sorrowful picture of rooms, ready for living, with tablecloths laid, and counterpanes turned back, and clocks still ticking the time, laid open to the eye of the night by the knifelike effect of the blast. It is what they are always striving to achieve in the theatre, Michael thought, the removal of the fourth wall and a peep at the life inside.
No sounds came from the broken houses, and somehow Michael felt that very few people had been caught by the bomb. There were many deep air-raid shelters in the neighbourhood, he comforted himself, and probably the inhabitants of the houses had been cautious.
Nobody seemed to be making any effort to rescue anybody who might still be in the blasted buildings. Firemen sloshed methodically through the pond of water, from the gushing, ruptured main. Air Raid Rescue people pushed desultorily and quietly at the more obvious bits of the wreckage. That was all.
Against the wall of the Palace, where the sentry boxes had stood, and the sentries had marched and saluted in their absurd wooden-toy manner whenever they saw an officer half a block away, there was nothing now. The sentries, Michael knew, had not been permitted to leave their posts, and they had merely stood there, in their stiff, pompous, old-fashioned version of soldiers, and had accepted the whistle of the bomb, accepted the explosion, stiffly died as the windows evaporated behind them, and the old clock in the tower above them tore loose from its hinges and hung greyly out from its springs. While he, Michael, a hundred yards away, had been sitting with the whisky in his hand, smiling. And overhead, the desperate boy had crouched in the bucking plane, blinded by the searchlights, with London spinning crazily below him in an erupting glitter of explosions, with the Thames and the Houses of Parliament and Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch swinging murderously around his head, and the flak flicking at the wings. The boy had crouched in the plane, peering shakily down, and had pressed, finally, whatever button the German Air Force pressed to kill Englishmen, and the bomb had come down, on the automobile and the girl with the beret and the houses that had stood there for a hundred years and on the two sentries whose units had been relieved from other duty and honoured with the job of guarding the Palace. And if the boy in the plane above had touched the button a half-second sooner, or a half-second later, if the plane had not at that moment bucked to port in a sudden blast, if the searchlights hadn't blinded the pilot for a second earlier in the evening, if, if, if… then he, Michael, would be lying in his own blood now in the wreck of the Canteen of the Allies, and the sentries would be alive, the girl with the beret alive, the houses standing, the clock running…
It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.
'Come on, darling,' Louise said. He could feel that she was shivering, and he was surprised, because she had always been so cool, so contained. 'We're not doing any good here. Let's go home.'
Silently, they turned and walked away. Behind them, the firemen had managed to reach some valve and the gushing from the broken main diminished, then stopped completely. The water in front of the Palace was calm and black.
Four days after the opening of Hamlet, Michael was called into the orderly room of the Special Services Company to which he was attached for rations and quarters and told that he was ordered to report to the Infantry Replacement Depot at Lichfield. He was given two hours to pack his bags.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE landing barge went round in a monotonous circle. The spray heaved in over the side, puddling on the slippery deck. The men crouched over their weapons, trying to keep them dry. The barges had been rolling a mile off the beach since three o'clock in the morning. It was seven-thirty now, and all conversation had long ago ceased. The preliminary barrage from the ships was almost over, and the simulated air attack. The smoke screen thrown across the cove by a low-flying Cub was even now settling on the water's edge. Everybody was wet, everybody was cold, everybody, except for the men who felt like throwing up, was hungry.
Noah was enjoying it.
Crouched in the bow of the barge, tenderly keeping dry the charges of TNT that were his special care, feeling the salt spray of the North Sea batter against his helmet, breathing the sharp, wild, morning air, Noah was enjoying himself.
It was the final exercise for his regiment in their assault training. It was a full-dress rehearsal, complete with naval and air support and live ammunition, for the coast of Europe. For three weeks they had practised in thirty- man teams, each team to a pillbox, riflemen, bazooka men, flame-throwers, detonation men. This was the last time before the real thing. And there was a three-day pass, waiting like a promise of Heaven, in the orderly room for Noah.
Burnecker was pale green from seasickness, his large farmer's hands gripping his rifle convulsively, as though there, at least, might be found something steady, something secure in a heaving world. He grinned weakly at Noah.
'Holy jumping mule,' he said, 'I am not a healthy man.'
Noah smiled at him. He had grown to know Burnecker well in the last three weeks of working together. 'It won't be long now,' Noah said.
'How do you feel?' Burnecker asked.
'O.K.,' said Noah.
'I'd trade you the mortgage on my father's eighty acres,' Burnecker said, 'for your stomach.'
There was a confusion of amplified voices across the sliding water. The barge veered sharply and picked up
