The Last Mission Page 18

  While all this was happening, I had much more time to devote to my duties as public-affairs officer. I arranged meetings with every citizens’ group within twenty miles of the base. I addressed women who were rolling bandages, aircraft spotters who kept a sharp eye out for Germans, conservation groups that were learning how to live without petrol, civil defense volunteers who piled sandbags around the periphery of the field, farmers in an uproar because their chickens had stopped laying, churchmen who blessed our efforts and churchwomen fighting to maintain moral values, pub owners who wanted less disruption from GIs and pub owners who wanted more business from GIs, medical professionals aghast at the spread of venereal disease, even schoolchildren who wanted a close-up look at our planes. The frantic schedule brought me into Whittingbridge two or three days a week. On each of those visits I managed to meet with Angela. My only problem was that on each of the visits I had to do my best to avoid meeting with Sergeant Browning.

  Browning was still pushing his murder investigation and becoming even more determined to gain access to our base records. No matter which group I was addressing, the sergeant would appear at the back of the hall. He would wait patiently until the business of the meeting was completed, and then fall in by my side as I left the building. There would be a few words of congratulations on my good work, a favorable review of my comments, and lavish praise for the heroic efforts of the American flyers. Then he would update me on the case, give me new reasons why the answer to Mary Brock’s murder would be found in our crew files, and then bring up a new request.

  I dreaded these moments, because I knew I couldn’t help him. My squadron commander had threatened to replace me if he even saw an Englishman at the base. My legal officer was, with good reason, interested in protecting American flyers. He was not about to assist an investigation that might point at his assigned clients. Ignore Browning and I was raising the risk of an official complaint to Colonel Mast by British police officials. Help Browning and I would be instantly replaced in the role that made it possible for me to see Angela.

  I had survived so far by feeding the detective trivial information from base records. Things that would seem responsive, yet would fall well below the official interests of American commanders. But Browning was demanding more data of a more confidential nature. He was pushing me into the confrontation with Colonel Mast that I dreaded.

  I should have resigned from my no-win dilemma. There were numerous new officers, junior to me, who could take on the public-affairs responsibilities. But the fact was that I would have risked anything to keep my relationship with Angela. There was nothing else in my life so essential for my survival.

  “Do we have lists of English women who are listed as beneficiaries on American flyers’ insurance policies?” Browning asked as I left a meeting of Gray Ladies.

  “No, I don’t think so, Sergeant,” I answered without breaking stride.

  “Hmm,” he mumbled thoughtfully as he kept abreast of me. “I should think that would be valuable information.”

  “Why? We don’t keep lists of beneficiaries in America. Why would we treat our allies differently?”

  “But in view of the possibility that your young men are being preyed upon…”

  “I agree, and I think we should be keeping those kinds of numbers. But I doubt if we are. Up until now, there’s been no need.”

  He walked silently beside me as we stepped out of the building and onto the street, then he stayed with me for half a block until I stopped, turned to him and asked, “Is there anything else you need to discuss?” I glanced at my wristwatch to hint that I was on an urgent mission.

  “No, certainly not. Nothing worth imposing on you.” But then, as we shook hands, “The information resides only in the individual records, you say?”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s never been pulled together.”

  “But you could…”

  “I could what?”

  “Pull it together. You could go through the individual records and see if there were recurrences in the beneficiaries’ names. I realize it’s an imposition, but you should be able to do it in a few days. Or, if you put one of your clerks on it, in a few hours.”

  “Sergeant, I could get in a hell of a lot of trouble if I assigned any of our men to unauthorized projects.”

  “Yes, of course. I would certainly have to go to your commander to get the proper authorization.”

  Did he know he had me by the short hairs, or was it my own scheming that made his simple request seem so devious? I couldn’t let him go to Colonel Mast. The colonel had specifically ordered me to keep the “Limeys out of my face,” and warned me of the consequences of failure.

  “Let me see what I can do, Sergeant. I may need some time, but I think I can get it done.”

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “Time,” he answered. “How much time will you need?”

  “The woman is dead, Sergeant. What’s the hurry?”

  “Just that this loathsome practice should be stopped at once. I’d hate to see even one more American defrauded.” He had this way of cutting off every avenue of escape.

  “Can I have a week?” I asked.

  “Oh, most certainly,” he said with enthusiasm that sounded as if he had been expecting my time frame to be in years.

  We were still shaking hands. “Within a week,” I promised. Only then did he let go.

  As winter approached, the cold, rainy weather put an end to drives into the country, so my romance with Angela was confined to Whittingbridge. That meant one of three pubs that had entered the modern world by allowing women at the tables and benches—or Angela’s home. The problem with the pubs was that they were crowded and noisy. If one of Angela’s girl friends didn’t stand by our table until we asked her to join us, officers from the base would descend on us and drag along the girls they had met at the door. The problem with Angela’s home was that her parents never left it. Her mother was there day and night, and her father parked himself in the parlor, willing to outwait me, no matter what the hour.

  I tried to win her parents over with gifts that I commandeered at the base. I could generally get the mess sergeant to put aside a few cans of hash—difficult to come by in wartime England—or to wrap a steak, which was unheard of anywhere in Europe. Her mother’s eyes would glaze over. I also bought an occasional bottle of rye or corn liquor from the mess officer and smuggled it under my coat to Angela’s father. His eyes would light up with delight. It took a bit of diplomacy to deliver these treasures without seeming condescending, or worse, without appearing to be bartering for Angela’s favors. The liquor I passed off as something won in a bet, which made me seem to be sharing my good fortune rather than the Americans’ resented abundance. The food I explained as a gift from the cook so I wouldn’t have to sing for my supper. If the gifts were seen as boasting by one of the colonists, the Priests never let on. Mrs. Priest would gush her gratitude and give me a slice of pie to take back to the cook. Mr. Priest would simply pour me a drink, toast the war effort, and then carry the bottle off into hiding.

  But nothing I did, no matter how extravagant by wartime standards, could win me a moment alone with Angela. She was with her mother, fluttering around the stove until the supper was ready, leaving me in the hands of her morose father. At dinner, Angela sat across from me, putting her mother to my left and her father to my right. When the meal ended, Angela returned to the kitchen and Mr. Priest and I sat side by side in soft chairs faking conversation. After a while, the women joined us and the conversation came a bit easier.

  Dinner had its own dynamic. Her mother smiled at me kindly, encouraging me to take seconds and even thirds. She shot radiant glances at her daughter, as if to remind Angela that these were the happiest days of her life. Mr. Priest concentrated on his food, except when he glanced up to look at me suspiciously. It was obvious that while he respected my uniform, admired the American flyers, and was grateful for the rations, he hated the idea of a Ya
nk courting his daughter. He had been in the first war and had been bivouacked in French villages, so he had once been the uniformed savior himself. Maybe he remembered liberties he had taken with grateful young women and assumed that I was getting into his daughter’s pants. Or perhaps he understood that no matter what Angela and I thought we felt for each other, it would all end with the end of the war. He may have known long before I did that I would disappear without an explanation.

  I have occasionally wondered what might have happened if I had said, “Sir, I’m in love with your daughter and I want to marry her.” Or if I had asked Angela for her hand and then let her plead her case with her father. But there could be no thought of anything permanent, or even anything that might last beyond the evening. The disasters we had suffered during the fall of 1943 were pretty much common language. The conventional wisdom was that we would begin flying again as soon as the weather turned, and that once we ventured back into Germany, the bodies would begin falling again. Of the four people at the table, I was the one least likely to live for another year, so there really wasn’t much to talk about.

  I came back for those awkward evenings, because at the end of the night Angela and I could share a moment alone at her doorstep. I would announce my departure, thank her mother for the dinner, shake hands with her father, and then take my cap and my raincoat from the coat tree by the door. Angela would open the door for me, step out behind me, and then close the door to cut off her parents. The anticipation that had boiled all evening would explode like steam through the safeties, and we would hurl ourselves into each other’s arms. I could feel the curves of her body as she rolled against me, and the heat of her breath on my face. Then I would taste her mouth and draw in the joyous life that she exuded like light from a flame. For an instant, there would be only us, sustaining each other with gifts that neither of us knew we possessed. I would come to the fullness of life in a world of slaughter and death.

  In those moments, I knew what it was to be in love. To be so emotionally, mentally, and physically joined to another person that life without her became a horror too ghastly to imagine. My awful mistake was that I thought love visited every relationship. I had no idea that the ecstasy I felt was the rarest of God’s gifts, that it had touched this girl and me, and that neither of us might ever feel it again.

  We plotted for more time together. We took the car and drove it off a dark and deserted stretch of road, running the heater until we were nearly out of gas so we could survive without our topcoats. Our hands roamed over one another and slipped between the buttons of a shirt or down the top of a dress, but the car was too small and too cold for anything more intimate. We went to movies that had opened again after the air raids were over and before the buzz bombs began to fall. I could put an arm around her, or slip my hand above her knee under the coats that were spread on our laps, but there were censoring murmurs from the seats around us. All this would certainly bewilder my children and their children. “Why didn’t you just take a hotel room, for God’s sake?” But that would have involved a cold and calculating decision to flaunt the moral code of her community and would have invited a tarring of public scorn. Certainly thousands of American soldiers and flyers were bedding down the looser ladies of pub society. But as in America, good girls didn’t, and decent men didn’t ask.

  “Hypocrisy,” my kids would laugh, and they would be perfectly correct. Given a discreet place and a credible excuse, Angela and I would have rejoiced in intimacy. But then there was no private place to share, and no protection for a woman’s reputation. Propriety dictated that we act as if sex were the farthest thing from our minds. Even with death hanging over me, there was no way I could ask her parents if we might have a few moments alone. And the fact that death was hanging over me would have made them even more certain to refuse.

  Suddenly, as if from nowhere, there came a moment of hope. Angela had used her lunchtime to sit outside one of my conferences with churchmen, and we walked together back to her office.

  “Soup at the pub,” I offered. It was a public place, where sharing lunch was scandal-proof.

  “I don’t have time,” she answered, and then fell into an uneasy quiet.

  “Is something wrong?” I could hear the fear in my voice. Had I done anything to hurt her? Or forgotten something I promised?

  She shook her head. “No…” she said, as if she wasn’t sure.

  “What is it?”

  “My friend Sylvia…at the office…”

  I feigned recognition, even though I had never met her—never even heard her name that I could recall.

  “Her husband is going down to Southampton on government business. Very hush-hush. She’s going to be alone. I told her I would stay with her.”

  “When?” I was afraid Angela was about to cancel our upcoming dinner date.

  “Friday next, and then for the weekend.”

  “But on Friday…” I started to protest.

  Angela cut me off. “I asked her if I might bring you along. Since you had probably already arranged to be in town…” She glanced casually up at a building we were passing. “And she said that would be fine…as long as we didn’t mind her going out for a while. She’s already agreed to dinner with a friend.”

  “Alone! We’d be alone! Just you and me…” I could hear the lust in my own voice.

  “Just for a while,” Angela hastened to assure me. “I could get us a few things and cook supper. She said that would be all right. And she’d be home at a decent hour, so we wouldn’t be…or anything like that.”

  Visiting a lonely friend whose husband was away for the good of the nation and returning home at a decent hour. It was a perfect cover. I stopped abruptly. Angela stopped and turned back to me. Her smile was shy and her face was crimson with embarrassment. “I said yes. I thought it might be all right with you…”

  “All right? It’s fantastic!”

  “But I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I mean, I’d rather if you didn’t tell anyone. And I don’t want my mum and dad to know that you were there.”

  “They won’t hear if from me, that’s for certain.”

  “And we can trust Sylvia. She’s not a gossip or a busybody.”

  “She’s an angel sent from heaven,” I said.

  Angela smiled broadly. “It was really her idea. I’d been telling her how the dinners were going. I guess I mentioned that if Mum’s cooking didn’t drive you away, Dad’s conversation probably would. So she said we could have supper with her and David. David’s her husband. I told her we’d love that. And then she told me that David was going to be away, but that we could still have supper. And then this morning she mentioned that she would be away for a while. I said we wouldn’t come, but she said it would be perfectly all right…”

  I took her hands in mine. “Maybe tomorrow she’ll tell you that she won’t be back until Saturday.”

  “Oh, no!” Angela said, genuinely shocked.

  “Maybe not until Sunday,” I said hopefully. Then I took her in my arms and kissed her.

  She called me twice during the week, each time changing her mind and then changing it back again. She was both thrilled and frightened by the thought of a lover’s tryst, emotions that I, to be honest, also felt. Nice people didn’t do what we were covertly planning, which made us both apprehensive. But, of course, lovers had always done exactly what we were planning, which made it thrilling beyond belief.

  “Is this right?” Angela asked.

  “Right?”

  “I mean, how will we feel about each other? Will you think that I’m…loose?

  “Loose? Don’t be silly.”

  “Well, compromised then? You know…”

  “I’ll think you’re wonderful. Just what I think now, only stronger.”

  “That’s how I feel. That no matter what, I’ll always love you. But I don’t want you to lose respect. And I don’t want to lose respect.”

  “Angela, we don’t have to do anything. If we’re jus
t together it will be enough.”

  “I don’t think I can just be together anymore.”

  “We’ll see what happens. How it seems at the moment.”

  “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We won’t plan on…anything happening.”

  “Okay, no plans. We’re just going to cook together, and eat together, and be together for a little while.”

  There was a long, awkward silence on the line. Then Angela whispered, “But you’ll bring…one…just in case.”

  “One what?”

  “One of those…you know.”

  “What? What do you want me to bring.”

  “One of those…protection…things.”

  “A rubber? A condom?”

  “Shh…” As if saying the word was automatically a public announcement.

  “Yes. I’ll have one with me.”

  “Maybe…” This was not an easy conversation for a proper young girl raised in East Anglia.

  “Two, or three,” I said. “They come in packages of two or three.”

  The week crept by, rainy, cold, and sullen. We pushed a week’s coal into the stove in two nights, scrounged more coal, and then wood from the packing cases. The stove glowed red, but the corners of our huts were damp and icy.

  We wrote letters. Kay had been managing to get a newsy letter to me each week, filled with her schoolwork, her graduation, and then her work at Governor’s Island. I responded with things I knew would never trouble the censors. I recounted my meetings with the ever-helpful British, told her about the boys in my crew, shared a laugh over Carberry’s antics, and described the beautiful countryside of East Anglia.

  “Are you going to tell her?” Michael asked one night as I was writing, with Kay’s photo framed on my desk.

  “Tell her what?”

  “About Angela.”

  “No. That’s not the kind of thing you put in a letter. Besides, how do I know how I’m going to feel after the war? If I make it until after the war.”