Trusting to Air

 

 

Part I

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

 

This story was inspired by and in large part drawn from the wonderful Czech film ‘Tmavomodry Svet’ – Dark Blue World, directed by Jan Sverak and written by his father Zdenek Sverak – in which the role of Franta Sláma was played by Ondrej Vetchy.

 

I would like to acknowledge and pay homage to their beautiful work here, as well as (I hope most sincerely) having done so in my story.  My gratitude also extends to all who worked on and acted in this extraordinary movie.

 

My particular thanks also go to my Czech friend & muse Monika Adlerova, who provided language, musical and grammar support; to the musicians of the band Czechomor, whose arrangements of traditional Czech songs uplifted and moved me endlessly; also to my friends for understanding, and as always to my family for putting up with me.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

The story of the Czech pilots who fought for the RAF in World War II and their subsequent fate on returning to their homeland is true.

 

 

This story is dedicated with my deepest thanks to

Zdenek Sverak, Jan Sverak, Ondrej Vetchy,

and to all the pilots.

 

Chapter 1 – Hurtling

 

Mirov Prison, Moravia, 1950

 

 

Eric Poindexter stared round him.  The room was bare and ugly;  scuffed green paint ran round the walls to shoulder-height.  What once had been cream above was now a grimy tan with streaks of rust.   There were some stains into whose origin he did not wish to enquire too closely.  It stank – of what God only knew.   Though he could imagine;  didn’t want to, despair and carrion being at least as present as more obvious stenches.

It was a long wait.  He had been shown in here reluctantly, after an earlier and equally lengthy wait on aching feet outside the office of the prison warder.  This latter rejoiced in the name Dvorˇak, but upon meeting him Poindexter decided not to mention Antonin, nor the magnificent strains of the New World Symphony that played through his mind absurdly as they spoke.  This one was a Miroslav, and looked it.  Poindexter would give all he had not to be under that nicotine-stained thumb.

 

Clearly his presence here was an unwelcome intrusion.  It had taken him six months to gain admission at all;  during that time he had often wondered whether it was worth it.  The file had grown thicker with refusals, both formal and informal.  ‘Might as well knock your head against a brick wall,’ his colleagues had said.  He would stare at his typewriter in agreement, the file open in front of him with that face circled out of a group of young men, leaning casually against the wing of a Spitfire, the features half in shadow, smiling.

He probably wasn’t smiling now.

After a while he could see it even when the file was closed.  It was contrasty and hard to see well;  looked Slavic, though, definitely, with a prominent nose that cast a sharp shadow over the dimpled cheek and the hint of a slant to the dark eyes hiding in the creases of that easy grin.  The chin was tilted up, a bit defiantly.  They were in flight rig, sheepskin jackets and boots, life-vests round their necks;  a blur at their feet was apparently a dog.  The circled face looked jaunty, almost arrogant.  The sort that could belong to a man with this history.  Half the rest of them were dead, now.  They had defied the Luftwaffe, through the darkest days of the war, and paid the price.  He came to close the file on it with increasing resignation, tinged with regret.   Perhaps there wasn’t anything he could do, despite all this effort.  He had often wondered when it would be time to give up.

Then another letter would come from the woman in Oxfordshire, asking if there were any progress, and he would make another application, wearily.  It was difficult, since diplomatic relations were formally severed between the two countries – but there were back-channels, through the Austrians, and international opinion might sometimes briefly and quixotically count for something — except when it didn’t, which was most of the time.

 

He felt as if he knew more about the face than the file contained, by now.  Not a handsome face, but the kind women like.  As one had, apparently – quite sincerely so.  One that I know of, at least, Poindexter added to himself, wryly; there had probably been more.  It was an attractive one, a cleft in the chin that caught the light and shadow,  eyes squinting into the sunlight;  hair tousled from the leather flying-helmet still dangling from his hand.  Women liked that, too, didn't they:  rumpled hair, a uniform?  Poindexter, who owned neither, felt absurdly jealous for a moment.  Not of what Sláma was now, but of what he had been;  of the young man in the photograph, about his own age now, already a hero as Poindexter would not, could never be.  What would he look like now?

 

 

 

God, but this was a dreadful place.  The stuff of nightmares.  He had seen photographs – there was one paperclipped to the inside of the file that even now lay back on his desk on the Franz-Josef-Platz – of a brooding structure jutting from a rocky outcrop against a sky streaked like bad bacon.  But nothing could prepare you for the actuality.  It was beyond grim:  it was terrifying.  He felt little doubt that men were tortured here; that they died.  What on earth had the fellow done, to end up here?  Could it really be true that they all had, just about, every single one of them, the pilots who had left Czechoslovakia in 1939 to fight against the Nazis with any free country that was left? 

František Sláma had;  a copy of his service record was part of the file.  In the past year the edges had got dog-eared.   It was quite a tale:  trained in Czechoslovakia, a Kapitán in the wretched Czech Air Force that was made to turn over their airfields and their planes to the Nazis without even a fight that dreadful day in March of ’39, when the weather was too poor for any of them to take off and fly to freedom even had they wanted to, or dared;  he was (apparently) second-in-command of the airfield at Olomouc, and a flying instructor to boot.  Having made his escape across the border, bringing along the best of his trainee pilots in a battered motorcycle-sidecar, they had fought for the Poles till they were defeated;  then for the French ditto;  finally making their way via Spain and Gibraltar to England and the RAF.

Whose defeat must have seemed equally certain, all through those early days;  but they had come anyway to join the fight.  Where else was there for them to go?

It was easy to take victory for granted, now that it had been won;  but Poindexter was old enough to know how very nearly it had not been.   And, save for the courage and determination of men like that, men with jaunty chins and young faces, throwing themselves at the enemy no matter what the losses, it would have remained beyond reach;  and he might at this very moment be making a Hitler-salute and using his German at home, not as HM Junior Attaché in Vienna.  But thanks to the few, it wasn’t so.

Some of them, like this one, men who didn’t even owe any allegiance to their adopted country – but who fought for it, died for it, because it was fighting their enemy;  was the last country left to do so.  They had learned another strange language, put on foreign uniforms, thrown themselves into the fight again, five entire squadrons of them in the RAF alone – and that was just the Czechs, not even counting the Poles and the Free French.

 

And then come home again, safe supposedly – and fallen prey to another totalitarian regime, almost as brutal as the one they had just defeated.  It didn’t make any sense.

What in god’s name had become of them now?

He was about to find out, apparently.

 

 

 

There was some commotion in the echoing corridor outside.  Voices were raised, and then another one that was lower, but with a weary tone of defiance to it even now, in automatic  protest.  Somehow Poindexter knew that would be Sláma’s.

He wondered how much that carefree face would have changed;  whether he would even recognize it.

 

Whether she would, if he was successful.  Not that there was much chance of that.

 

 

The man Sláma entered between two guards, but his stiff uprightness and set front stare pretended otherwise.  One took him by the shoulder and pushed him into the chair opposite Poindexter.  He resisted, enough to show that it was not of his own volition that he sat, but not long enough to earn the shove written in the brutal face that surely was coming next.  Apparently this finely-judged timing was of long acquaintance.

The envelopes in Poindexter’s inside-breast pocket seemed to burn for a second, reminding him they were there;  that they had waited six months in a manila file for this moment.

The man Sláma raised weary eyes to his.  When the guards withdrew, Sláma rose to his feet: a gesture of politeness.

Poindexter did likewise.

They stared at one another, the Battle of Britain pilot and the diplomatic attaché just too young to have fought in his own country’s war.  There was a gulf between them almost as wide as that between Sláma and his guards.  But not quite.   Sláma’s eyebrows were raised;  he said nothing, though, with a caution born it seemed from hard experience.  The handsomely rugged broken nose of the RAF photo looked as if it had had another few knocks;  the cheeks were hollow, unshaven.  The eyes were dark, their pupils so dilated as to be almost black, though under the glare of the single bulb that hung from the ceiling Poindexter watched them narrow and a dark-brown take their place, the whites red-rimmed and bloodshot.  Dark and bitter as sloes, but – unlike the prison commandant’s – they did not slither away from his own;  instead, they offered themselves and the rest of him too for appraisal.  This man had done nothing of which he was ashamed.  There was suffering in them, though;  suffering and a flicker of something else, too faint to be hope.

 

Poindexter was aware of his own appearance suddenly, the slicked-down mousey-gold hair, the horn-rimmed spectacles;  his not-too-formal tweed jacket and fawn slacks, the neat knot of his tie, the gleam of his brown shoes.  Sláma wore heavy boots with no socks, and prison-issue blue overalls.  They looked thin and not warm enough for the bleak day that it was.  Sláma looked thin, too;  much thinner than in the picture – and it was not just the absence of the sheepskin and the life-jacket round his neck.  He looked half-starved.

Sláma seemed to be drawing some answering set of conclusions about him;  but they ended with a question, since there was no equivalent file in Sláma’s mind – only (Poindexter saw) a learned caution.  The face he had carried with him in memory had not looked cautious.

It was the same face, though, that was without doubt.  He wondered what the woman in Oxfordshire would think if she could see it now.   He thought she would probably cry.

“Eric Poindexter,” he said, keeping his voice non-committal with a diplomat’s dryness, “and you are — Squadron Leader Sláma?”

 

Sláma looked taken-aback for a moment.  God, thought Poindexter, he had no idea I was English, even.  They’ve told him nothing.

“Yes,” he answered after a pause.  It came out accented, not unpleasantly so:  ‘yais?’

“I am here as a representative of His Majesty’s Government,” said Poindexter, a bit stiffly, he thought, but it was the truth, and he felt he ought to begin formally.  It was as much in honour of the man’s service as anything;  one addressed a war hero who’d won the DFC and bar with respect, even if he was in filthy prison overalls, didn’t one?

They shook hands.  Sláma’s grip was firm, quick.  It was Poindexter’s palm that was sweaty.  God, but this place gave one the willies.  Sláma’s hand was calloused, the knuckles swollen;  he looked a good decade older than his forty-two years.  Poindexter was reminded that this was a forced-labor camp, not a traditional prison;  wondered what had made the callouses.  Sláma’s hair was cropped close to the scalp, crudely so that stubbly pale streaks showed where the clippers had actually touched the skin.  Poindexter remembered the dark curls in the photograph.

“How ken I help i-you?”  asked Sláma, his eyebrows still a question.

“Ah,” said Poindexter, wondering why he had not prepared something to say for this moment, “well — let’s sit down, shall we?”

They did so, Sláma cautiously, as if he did not know what to expect next but it might not be good;  and also (perhaps) as if he was sore and it hurt to move.  “Zo,” he said slowly, into the silence left by the younger man, “you air Eric Poindexter of Hees Mejesty’s Government, end somehow zere is somesink you need wis me?”  His syllables were careful, precise.  “Pardon,” he added, “I hev not spik Engleesh in fife yearss.  Iss not so good es it voss.  Woss.”

“I’m hoping,” said Poindexter carefully, “that there might be something I can do for you, sir.”

Sláma smiled swiftly.  It was gone before it started, almost, but in it Poindexter saw the young man lounging by the Spitfire with his crewmates.  “Thet is not oh-ften for me,” he said in explanation, as if he did not want Poindexter to think he meant anything scornful by the smile – as if a smile needed explanation, even, for that matter –  “not now, to be callet sir.”   He said it ‘Surr,’ and the ‘not’ was more of a ‘noht,’ but his English was nonetheless so infinitely superior to Poindexter’s Czech that one could hardly find fault with it.  After all, the man had shaken hands with the King, not once but twice, and bowed his head to receive his medal pinned-on his dusty-blue uniform.  If his English was rusty from disuse, it had been good enough when it was needed.

“Squadron-Leader Frantisek Sláma, RAF, DFC and Bar, of the three hundred and thirteenth Czech Fighter Squadron?”

“Yais,” said Sláma, simply, waiting for him to continue.

 

Poindexter felt stirrings of liking.  The face in the file had looked arrogant, but (he saw now) it had been the easy arrogance of young men fighting against impossible odds;  they had all worn it.  The man before him now was modest, reticent almost.  There was a painful patience in the fretwork of creases round the eyes.  This was not a place where one put oneself forward, nor admitted to anything, he could see that now.  This was a place where one said as little as possible, and waited to see what would happen.  He felt conscious of his age, wished he had been born in time to have done his bit;  felt, absurdly, embarrassed and ashamed that he had not and had instead gone to Oxford, read History, joined the Diplomatic Service, been safe with his mother at home and then behind a desk all that time.

He also felt too young to judge the rest of the file-contents – a thing that had been automatic to him at the beginning, when the letter first arrived from London and he read the (as it seemed to him then) rather sorry and distasteful story.

 

“I need to establish a few facts, sir,” he said carefully.

“Ask avay,” said Sláma. The colloquialism seemed to come easily, as if now that he had begun speaking English again it was not so deeply buried after all.

“Why in god’s name are you here, sir?”  It came out almost naively, and Poindexter already knew the reason;  but he had to ask, it was part of his instructions.  He would have to write up a report to His Majesty’s Government;  the Prime Minister was interested, now.  The case had assumed some notoriety, even.  Not that Sláma had the least idea, of course.  Poindexter wondered how this decorated officer would explain the inexplicable.

Sláma shook his head then and smiled once more on a sigh.  This time there was scorn in the smile, unmistakeably, and a flash of anger too.  “Dey don’t tell you wote I hev done?” he asked in reply.

“I’d like to hear it from you, sir,” answered Poindexter, “if you don’t mind.”

“Eef I don’t mind,” Sláma repeated slowly.  Poindexter felt younger than his twenty-six years.  “No, I don’t mind.  Not if you hev come oll dees vay to see me.  Pairheps you vill tell me vy, so, den?”

“Absolutely, yes, sir,” said Poindexter, in what he hoped was a warm tone.   It was hard to make anything sound warm in this stark, dank room;  but he did his best.

“Nusink,” said Sláma.  He waited for Poindexter’s response.  His dark eyes creased;  they were amused now.  Poindexter thought about the woman in Oxfordshire, and all the letters;  the campaign, the extraordinary lengths she had gone to that had led to this oddest of moments.  The sacrifices she was making;  the humiliation she was prepared to face.  Her good name thrown away, publicly so;  others invited in its stead, far less kind.   And they had come, of course, been used quite freely;  she must have foreseen it.  All for this.

God, life had strange twists.

“What are you accused of, sir?  Why were you sentenced?”  He knew, of course, at least the file had something to say on the subject: words, anyway.  ‘Subversion,’ ‘crimes against the state’.   Codewords for nothing, for disagreeing with the powers-that-be, and perhaps being foolish enough to say so.  Foolish – or brave?

Poindexter saw what it had come to, and thought on the overall, foolish, then.  Or both, anyway.

 

“Dey don’t sentence us,” said Sláma, and the words ‘you fool’ hung in the air at the end of the sentence, unsaid:  “Sentence is thing efter trial, yes?  Ve don’t get trial.  Not de pilots.” He pronounced it pea-lots first, repeated it the English way: pie-lots.  “Ve air dangerous mens, no?  Don’t need trial to prove dees.  Coult overtrow de government et any moment.  Ve dit it vonce, yes, against de Nazis – ?  So again ve coult do.  Eef ve vish.  Against de communeest.  Eet’s plain to see.  Zo dey lock us up – can’t make trouble, so.”

“So you’ve done nothing?  Committed no crime?”

“Eef it’s not crime to fight vit de RAF, den no.”  Sláma said RAF the Czech way first, as he must have been used to saying it here, ‘air – ah – ef,’ – then corrected himself and repeated it English-style, “Excuse me, are-ay-ef.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s enough,” said Sláma, eyeing him.  What did he want?  Why was he here now, after three long years?  Why did His Majesty’s Government suddenly care, when it had washed its hands of them all up to now?  Poindexter could see the questions in his eyes, but he left them unasked – perhaps for politeness’ sake.  The man was an officer, after all, and presumably therefore (however little of one he might have proved to be on a more private footing) – here at least, a gentleman.

There was an old bruise the colour of irises on his left cheekbone, yellow and purple.  He was lantern-jawed, a two-days’ stubble; missing a couple of teeth to the upper right side whose absence was visible when he spoke or smiled.  He looked like death-warmed-up.  His posture in the chair was ramrod-straight, though;  Poindexter felt like a slouch, straightened himself.  Sláma’s breathing was a slightly harsh rasp.  It seemed a little more rapid than was healthy.  Again, he waited for Poindexter to speak.

Fair enough. 

“If it were possible, let’s say… then would you be interested in returning to England?”  Poindexter asked.

Sláma snorted.  “Pigs can fly, is how you say?”

“I’m here to see if we can get you out,” said Poindexter quietly.

Sláma said nothing;  his nostrils flared.  He drew breath a little more harshly yet.

“No promises, of course,” said Poindexter, “and there’s not a damn thing I can do about anybody else.  I’m sorry.  But there are — special circumstances — there’ve been questions asked in the House — your case, in particular — I’ve been sent to see what I can do.”

“Vy me?” asked Sláma.

“It’s not your war record, sir,” said Poindexter, even more quietly.  “It’s on personal grounds.  Seems that’s the only possible way to get anywhere.  His Majesty’s Government is making the representation that you ought to be released to Britain as a matter of moral and financial responsibility – and on humanitarian grounds – in order to fulfill your family obligations.”

Sláma shook his head.  “You air confused,” he said.  “I don’t hev femily.”

“Are you denying that you are the father of two British children, sir?”

Sláma drew breath sharply.  It turned into a cough;  a long, hard fit of coughing.  Poindexter could do nothing but watch.  Sláma’s face paled, then turned dusky as he gasped for breath.  Poindexter hoped he did not have TB;  turned his own face aside, discreetly he hoped.  He didn’t know what he had expected, but this display of sudden emotion wasn’t it.

It was fully a minute before Sláma could speak.  When he did, it was huskily:  “One,” he said, “I hev one.  A daughter.  But – I am not named on de - how you say - birth certificate? –  for de father.  So I don’t understand how det you know.”

“How do you think?” asked Poindexter, quietly.

“Her mother?” asked Sláma, in disbelief.

Poindexter nodded.

Sláma stared him through as if they both sat there naked.  Poindexter shifted uncomfortably in his seat.  He thought briefly of earnest Eileen in the documents section.  He wondered if he would tremble at the mention of her name, six years from now, or even at the thought of her;  probably not, he suspected.  He trusted he had not got her into trouble;  they had been careful, ‘used something’ as she put it.  She was a nice girl, and from a good family – but he had someone more intelligent in mind for a wife one day.  She also represented the extent of his experience with the opposite gender.  Her stocking-tops were very pretty against her pearly thighs;  it was these that had been his undoing.  Or hers, rather.  But she was forgettable, he knew that.

Unlike this woman in Sláma’s past, it seemed.

He wondered now whether he, Poindexter, was essentially any more decent;  decided that probably he was not.  After all, he did not even have the excuse that he might be killed at any moment, did he?  But he was perfectly happy to go to bed with Eileen, nonetheless.

Sláma had cared, though;  still did.

But – that being so – did the man honestly not know there was a second child?

Apparently not.  Painfully, carefully, he spoke again:  “You sayed two?”

Poindexter nodded.

Sláma’s breathing quickened again.  If he had not spent the last three years hiding his emotional reactions, he might have said more;  but Poindexter could still tell he was shocked, stunned even.  The dark eyes glistened.  “Tell me,” he said at last.

“Why don’t you tell me, sir,” said Poindexter, not quite knowing how else to handle the gap between what he had been told and what Sláma seemed to know – or not to know, to be more precise.  He felt he ought not to give too much away, if Sláma couldn’t confirm it.

“Wote is dere to tell?”

“I’m supposed to determine the facts of the case, sir,” said Poindexter, drily.  “If it is in fact true – the representations that have been made on your behalf.  According to sworn testimony, you have two children.  Sir.”

“Pane bozhe,”  murmured Sláma, under his breath.  He looked poleaxed.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Godt,” said Sláma shortly.  “Is eet possible – ?  – only det – vel — ”  His eyes went soft and distant for a moment, and he swallowed as if at some painful thought.  “No — yes — it ees possible – but I didn’t know — I didn’t know…  dear got, dere is one more?”

“Apparently so, sir.”

“Son or daughter?”  Sláma did not say boy or girl, Poindexter noticed, but used the nearer words, the possessive ones.  There was more emotion in his face now than he could conceal.  The dark eyes were overflowing. 

“A boy.”

“How olt he ees?”

“You tell me, sir.”   Sláma ought to be able to give a guess, anyway.

Sláma closed his eyes.  What memories were playing themselves on the insides of those bruised, creased lids?   “Was one time only, so – must be – some time in spreenk – nineteen forty-six?”  He seemed to be counting.  “April, yes?  Or May, perheps, I don’t know…”

“May the second, sir.”

“Ent his name?” asked Sláma, in a whisper now.

“Charles.  Charles Henry.”

“Charles Henry Strickland  — !”  Sláma said it slowly, pronounced it streeklent.

Poindexter nodded.  “And just for the record, sir, your daughter’s name?  You do acknowledge paternity, then?”  He had wondered if this was going to be embarrassing.  He had hardly imagined being the one to break such news.  But it wasn’t embarrassing, not now when he got down to it.  It was, rather, extremely moving;  he felt a lump in his throat, squeezed his question out past it.

“Frances,” said Sláma, softly.  It came out as Fren-ses.  Sláma swallowed.  Frances  –   for František.  The child might have been deemed to be the husband’s;  but the mother had named her for her actual father.  Good god, thought Poindexter, that’s more balls than I would have had.  Though the first one, as he understood it, had been conceived while the husband was posted missing-believed-killed, which was at least some slight excuse.

Not the second, though.

He had wondered, all those weeks and months when the file sat on his desk or in his drawer with its slightly sordid tale,  if the second was in fact even Sláma’s – whether the woman in Oxfordshire was making every claim she could, founded or not, in the hopes that two would prove adequate where one had not;  but apparently she had been telling the truth.  Even not knowing the child existed, Sláma could say when it must have been born.

Not too difficult a piece of arithmetic:  it was just about nine months after the hundred-and-thirteenth RAF Czech squadron was disbanded and returned to Czechoslovakia, planes and all, a wing of Mark IV Spitfires purchased by the new Czech government.  Which had folded like a wet newspaper so soon afterwards.  What had happened to the planes;  hadn’t they ended-up in Israel?

And their pilots here, god help them.

It brought a new definition to the term ‘hollow victory.’

Poindexter felt himself judging them again,  Sláma and Sarah Strickland;  stopped, flushing.  They must have met again that last time to say goodbye;  Sláma hadn’t hesitated in his guess at the date.  It seemed more sad to him than repellent, now.

“So you tell me I hev also a son, den,” whispered Sláma.

“Yes, sir,” said Poindexter.

“Proboha,” murmured Sláma, “Jezishi Christe …”    He said nothing else.  When he closed his eyes a tear rolled into the crease of his cheek;  the end of his nose was wet.

Poindexter had wondered if it was a casual thing, at least on his side.  Apparently not.

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” he said.

“No — vait,” said Sláma then, coughing again as he drew breath too quickly.  He swallowed with difficulty, wiped the remaining spittle and sputum from his mouth with his sleeve; continued, urgently:  “Excuse me — sorry, dey don’t give here hendkerchief…  you hevn’t tell me — how dey are — how is she, Mrs. Strickland?”

Poindexter offered his own handkerchief.  “Don’t worry sir,” he said, “I wasn’t leaving quite yet.  They are perfectly well, so I understand, all of them.”

“And so — Lieutenant Strickland – he is – I don’t understend — how can she do dis?  I come back to England if they permit me, if you want, for the children – to support them – I understend not to see them, but only to send money – but what about him?”

“I understand he is deceased, sir.   She sought to have the paternity of the children – er – the official record, that is – the birth certificates – changed after his death…  of course, under English common law, any child born during a marriage is deemed to be the husband’s legitimate issue;  but there are ways – legal proceedings, a doctor’s signed declaration…  I have forms for you to sign…  and a letter — ”

Sláma’s eyes nearly started out of his head. Their intensity skewered Poindexter, bloodshot as they were.  He felt as if he were a Nazi in Sláma’s gun-sights, for a moment;  was glad he was not.  “A letter — from her?  From Sarah?”

He had called her Mrs. Strickland, up till now. Poindexter nodded;  reached for it, pulled it out of his breast-pocket.  The fierce gaze never left him.  It was hungry, desperate;  no, it was starving.  Wolfish.  Concealed, or concealment attempted, but badly so.  This was a man who had nothing left — but this.

He gave it.  Sláma’s hand shook as he tore it open.

A photograph fluttered out.  Sláma made a grab for it, almost falling out of his chair;  did not let the curling snapshot touch the floor.  He held it, then;  touched the two little faces with his other hand, just the forefinger, hovering above it at first and then, trembling, tracing their shape one after another.  They looked just like him, both of them;  the same cleft chin, the dark eyes, slightly almond-shaped, exotic-looking in an English child – and masses of dark curls. The little girl’s were held back with a ribbon, the boy’s cut short at the sides but insisting on their own shape on top where there was a little more length.  

Poindexter waited, said nothing.  Sláma’s jaw trembled too, till he clamped it shut.  He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again.

“Dey are mine,” he said at last, “anybody can see.”

“That’s quite plain, sir,”  said Poindexter softly.  He hoped to god it would be enough to get Sláma out of this living hell;  feared it would not.  But at least this was something, wasn’t it?

Sláma put the picture down on the table, slowly, and opened the letter.  He scanned it quickly, breathing fast and shallow, and Poindexter looked away;  he could give him that much consideration, at least, in this most private of moments.  The children’s faces looked up at the ceiling in front of him, at the crumbling wet plaster and the naked bulb swinging slightly in the draught.  God, how had that splattered dark stain got on the ceiling?  Poindexter shivered in spite of himself.  They looked innocent, too innocent to be in this room, this ghastly place, even just their likenesses.  It was a small print of a studio portrait, well-lit, charming.  The little girl was smiling at the camera;  she had Sláma’s dimples, though her cheeks were round and his, hollow.  They had been fuller in the squadron-picture, even more like.  The boy looked straight out, gravely; his eyes were huge and darkly intense, like his father’s.  Almost smouldering, one would say, except that in a child’s face they were more wistful than that.  Sláma’s held pain;  the child’s, only questioning.

Sláma held out the letter to him.  “Take it,” he said quickly, “before dey come beck.  I hev read three times.  Ees enough for now.  Keep, for god’s sake, brink next time.  Please.  De picture also.  Put away, for now.”   He picked up the photograph and touched it once more; clearly it was a struggle to relinquish it.

“No, old chap, you can keep it,”  Poindexter said, not understanding at first.  “These don’t belong to me, not any more – they’re yours.   Sir.”

“Dey vill take, eef I hev,” said Sláma.  His voice shook.  “You keep.  Prosím — please.  You come again, yes?”

Poindexter understood, then.  “Yes, of course,” he said at once, warmly.  “If they come back, I’ll put them away for you.  Let’s just leave them out, for now?  Here, where you can see them… mm?”  He set them down on the table in front of Sláma.  Upside-down, he read:  ‘My darling Franta — ’

Must be short for František, he thought.  He hadn’t read the letter;  he could have, of course, but he had chosen not to steam open the envelope.  Someone probably already had, back in London:  why submit it to such indignities twice?  He was glad he hadn’t, now, though he rather thought he wouldn’t be able to help it now it was torn open and the train-journey back to the Austrian border was so long and dreary.  The communists, it seemed, couldn’t even keep the trains running on time.  Hardly surprising, if they had locked-up the most responsible and competent men remaining out of an entire generation.

Sláma picked up the letter.  “Put it away,” he said, “prosím. Before dey come.”  If someone came in, a letter might be confiscated.  Poindexter put the letter away carefully, left the clearly-harmless photograph on the table for now.  Sláma could not take his eyes off it – not even to look into the face of the man who might effect his release.  Poindexter stared at him, patient now as he had not been earlier.

So here was Squadron-Leader František Sláma, having survived the war and the worst the Nazis could throw at him, apparently barely hanging-on through the ensuing peace.  Sláma coughed again, wiped his mouth on the handkerchief this time with a grateful glance thrown Poindexter’s way.  Poindexter looked past him, saw the spiraling white cloud-trails and cartwheels of a dogfight across a summer sky;  saw himself at fourteen watching open-mouthed as the beautiful deadly thing played out – heroism and danger scribbled all across a heaven of matchless blue, day after day throughout that long agonizing summer when every day seemed carved out of glass and preserved at all costs against the shattering of all they had, all they knew.

He heard once more the drone of bombers overhead, heading for London;  saw also ‘Uncle’ Gene, pushing away the accompanying memories of his mother exclaiming at the stockings and the bars of coarse chocolate that Gene called candy, with his big Iowa grin.  He recalled against his will Gene’s pale-khaki colonel’s uniform, always so crisply pressed, and her aproned, recognizable self kneeling in front of its self-confident American glimmer at the bottom of the garden, out-of-sight (as they supposed) of young Eric… These things happened in wartime, he knew they did – and as far as he knew his father had had no idea.  Nothing was ever said, at home, certainly not by him.  And Gene had gone back to the States, to the red-headed fiancée he’d spoken-of;  and his father had come home from the Far East looking dark and thin and stooped and careworn, and Eric’s mother had seemed genuinely glad to see him, as if solid slow-talking genial Gene had been no more than a dream.

 

Poindexter thought he remembered a note in the file about the Strickland woman having been Sláma’s fiancée, briefly, if a woman who is not actually widowed can be such a thing.   She had mentioned it in one of her many letters, as if it excused things.

Oops, he thought.  Unfortunate, that.  Rather a large gaffe, as it were.  He wondered just how awkward it had been.  So the couple had considered themselves engaged, apparently – till the unfortunately-timed return of Lieutenant C. A. F. (Charles Albert Foster) Strickland.  Crippled below the waist in his country’s service, on convoy-duty; hidden thus in occupied Norway for two years before he could be smuggled out – and needing his wife's support therefore:  hardly a chap one could readily divorce, under the circumstances.  Not even all the circumstances. 

Awkward, though, god yes;  dashed awkward.  To say the least.  Excruciatingly awkward, in fact;  painfully so, no doubt shatteringly to the already shattered Lt. Strickland.  But were there guilty parties here?

What about that goodbye? – the one that had produced young Master Charles Strickland, now aged four?

Well, Sláma had paid for it. 

So had she.  One of the pages in the dossier was a digest of the coroner’s report on Lt. Strickland.  He had taken his life while the balance of his mind was disturbed, it said.  His suicide-note specifically absolved his wife of blame;  a thoughtful touch, though hardly adequate to the task under the circumstances.  Meant well, though, clearly.  There was tragedy upon tragedy, here:  Strickland had scrawled it, drunk apparently – and then in despair over his ruined health and prospects, he had managed to hang himself.

 

Sláma was speaking again;  his grating voice cut through Poindexter’s reverie.  “She is well, you say?  She says here — but this letter is date already ago six month — she is well?”

“Perfectly well, sir, as I understand.  Perhaps we should take this time to discuss your own situation?”

Sláma turned sarcastic eyes on him. “You see — don’t you?”

“I think there is a small possibility we may be successful.  Not because anybody here gives a shit about you, sir, begging your pardon, but because once in a while governments want to make a little gesture, shove a pawn here and there on the chessboard, without giving away anything serious – and – that might be you.  Sir.”  Poindexter spoke in earnest;  taking the other envelope from his breast-pocket, he unfolded the papers claiming paternity of Frances Emily Strickland, born the sixth of September, 1942, and Charles Henry Strickland, born the second of May, 1946.  He unscrewed the cap from his fountain-pen then, and held it out for Sláma to sign.

Sláma smoothed out the sheets on the table and read them.  “I never thought,” he said, more to himself than to Poindexter, though as a courtesy he spoke English still;  “never… I had not idea … ”  He took the pen, held it for a moment in admiration, the pleasure of beholding something fine, and then signed swiftly.  His hands might have been shaking but their movements were decisive, his signature bold.  It was also clearly legible, even in the foreign shapes of his letters:  František Sláma.  He dated it the European way too, with the month written-out in Czech, and Poindexter added it in English afterwards.  He blew on it then, to dry it, and replaced it in his pocket.

“Are you sure you don’t want the letter back again?” he asked, gently.

“I can’t,” said Sláma.  “But to see again, yes, please – if there is time – for now… ”  Poindexter handed it over.  Sláma read it once more, nostrils flaring, and Poindexter again looked away.  He was not sure from what compunction;  that sense that a chap ought have some privacy, perhaps?  There could be precious little of that here, of that he was quite sure.

“Do you have cigarette?” asked Sláma, when he had read the letter a couple more times.

Poindexter felt a pang:  he should have offered earlier.  He opened his case, expecting  Sláma to take them all, but he helped himself only to one.

“Take the rest,” said Poindexter, thinking it would be a long train-ride back if he couldn’t replace them, but god only knew here was a man that needed them more than he did.

“Ne,” said Sláma, “no, thank you – just this – they take the rest, anyway.”

Poindexter reached over and lit it for him.  Sláma leaned forward for the light, then back; took a long sucking drag, coughing a little, and another.  “Do you see her?” he asked then, his voice shaking.

“No, we’ve never met – I’m a junior attaché over here, in Vienna,” said Poindexter.  “But we’ve corresponded.  I’ll be writing to her, when I get back to the Consulate...  you may not realize it, but she’s moved heaven and earth for this, sir.  For you — to get me here.”

Sláma stared at him.  Poindexter could see him thinking.  It took all of a second.

“Please,” he said, “give me envelope that you have.  From this papers I sign.  And again pen.”

Poindexter obliged.

The cigarette burning unnoticed now between his fingers, Sláma wrote.  The words formed quickly, unraveling from the nib as he stared up briefly in-between and then wrote more.  His head was cocked to one side;  was it with effort, or was he listening for the guards?

Both.  Poindexter watched, said nothing.

Sláma finished;  folded it in two and gave it back with a look of triumph.  “Thank you,” he said, his voice more eager than Poindexter had heard it yet:  “you send for me, please?”

And then there were footsteps outside the room, coming down the corridor,  and Sláma folded Poindexter’s hand round the folded envelope with a fierce grip and Poindexter understood, put it in his pocket discreetly and swiftly as the guards came in.

Sláma took two last swift pulls on the cigarette, and ground it under the heel of his boot.

They said something short;  marched Sláma out between them, as he had arrived.  He looked over his shoulder once at Poindexter.  The little snapshot lay on the table;  Poindexter pocketed that, too, quickly.  Sláma nodded and turned before they could accuse him of lingering.

 

Poindexter did not know his way out, so had to wait in the wretched room another few minutes.  It made him shudder.  He wondered why they had left him alone with the prisoner.  They didn’t even care enough to go through the motions of pretending he was a dangerous subversive, he thought;  they truly didn’t give a shit.  Probably there was a snug little guard-room down the corridor, where they could smoke and huddle up to a brazier.  Sláma had made the most of it, though.

He unfolded Sláma’s letter, scribbled on the back of the envelope; read it through quickly before the guards returned.  He had managed to say a lot in a little space and less time.  Poindexter found himself moved in spite of himself, scanning the uneven lines of blue ink and seeing again Sláma’s fingers holding his fountain-pen, its hasty bobbing as he wrote, the bony swollen knuckles; the cigarette-smoke wreathing up in a thin stream from the other hand that steadied the paper. 

‘Sarah srdíèko – so you remember that?  Too I don’t forget — what I can to say?  How I can to thank you for this that you try now?  And the childrens, holy mother of god, Sarah, I have did not know for the boy — your letters has not reachd me.  They are krásný – beootifull.   The fotograf has make me cry.   Your life have been hard I think – I am sory.  I pray each day for you Sarah.  And for Frances and now also for Charles.  Have you think for Karel also when you name him this?  I think you do.  Thank you for all thing that you do.  I am well.  It is not so bad, don’t be too much worry.  I have not family here.  H has married Kanko long time.  I telled you I expect it.  I am sory for your husband.  Goodby now miláèku.  In big hurry.  I kiss you.  Miluji t˘e, Sarah.  God bles you always.  Franta.’  

 

He thought of Sarah Strickland in Oxfordshire going to her doorstep and picking up the post;  still now and then there were hate letters, he had heard.   And finding a letter from him, Poindexter, from Vienna – with that inside it.  She wouldn’t even know he had been successful in finding Sláma, till she got it.

The thought made him misty-eyed, and he sniffed.  Sláma still had his handkerchief.  Poor sod, he thought, he needs it worse than me —

 

 

 

It was a long train-ride back, as he had anticipated.  The war had been over for five years, and still there wasn’t so much as a decent cup of coffee to be had anywhere in central Europe.  The prison commandant’s face floated before him, swinish and low-browed;  the man’s words echoed in his ears, casually cruel:  “So you see your Squadron Leader Sláma.  Tell your government he is alive and well.  Tell them to mind their own business.”  They were spoken in German, a language Poindexter excelled in – which was why he had been sent to Vienna – and clearly one the commandant had had plenty of opportunity to perfect during the German occupation.  This was not a man who had been abroad fighting for freedom.  The country was full of them.  He was still not sure why he had been allowed to see Sláma, but at least now he could make his report.

 

After some hours of tedium, during which the sky grew light enough to see by again, he took out Sarah Strickland’s letter with more than idle curiosity, now.

She had kept herself to two small, closely-written sheets, on blue paper.  Poindexter identified it without thinking, part of his training;  an upper-middle-class bond type, without lines, of course:  Harrods or some such.  Blue was more classic than pink, but more bourgeois than white or grey.  Her hand formed a small Italic with flowing joins between the letters.  The lines ran perfectly straight.  To save space, she had run the paragraphs together somewhat;  they were indicated only by slightly larger gaps between the sentences.   It said,

My darling Franta —

Since the day I learned you were in prison I have been doing everything I can.  I only hope to god it’s enough.  You never wrote back to me my darling so I don’t know how you are or what you think about the children now they are growing up or anything.  I can’t imagine you would ignore me, it’s not like you, so I think you haven’t had my letters or you can’t reply.  God Franta I have missed you every single day my love.  It’s been five years and I can’t forget.  I kiss them goodnight every night and wish you could know them.  Frances is as sweet as you and very dreamy.  She likes to draw and paint.  She is also a good little reader and reads stories to Charles now at bed-time.  He is hot-tempered like someone else I know and gets over it just as quickly too.  He wants to be a pilot.  It’s all he talks about.  I didn’t start it, I swear to god.  They talk about pilots at nursery-school, and he wants to be a big boy so he can fly.  Charles made him models of planes and ships and he plays with them all the time.  I am sending you a picture so you can see them now.  This was taken on Charles’s fourth birthday.  You will see that even if I wanted to forget you, which I don’t and never have, it would be impossible with those two little faces looking up at me every day.  We still have rationing even now, though the government promised it would be over by now.  But I’m sure it’s more than you are getting.  Oh god Franta what have they locked you up for?  When are you getting out?  I don’t understand it at all.  I thought you boys were national heroes when you went back.  It said so in the papers.  Now this!  I won’t write about them but you know what I am thinking.  The c. are as bad as the n.  Are you well?  I can’t imagine you in prison, not for a second, you always hated to be cooped up, you loved flying and the open air.  I think about the time we — well you always loved being outside, let’s just say that, we both did.  Are you getting enough to eat?  How can you be?  What work are they making you do?  How do you keep your spirits up?  Is your family allowed to come and see you?  What happened with Hanichka?  Are you married?   Do you have children?  How are they coping, if you are in prison?   Did you get my letter about Charles?  It was awful, Franta, he was so unhappy.  I can hardly blame him but we did try.  I did my absolute best.  He did love the children.  He just couldn’t manage being the way he was any more, it depressed him dreadfully.  It wasn’t your fault.  Oh darling I am running out of space and they told me no more than two sheets, if I was to get anything at all to you.  How can I fit anything important in?  I could take 2 pgs just to tell you how often I think of you — Franta Franta Franta, my love. Come home to us if you can, if you want to.  Serjichko.  You never taught me how to write it you know darling.  Miluyi-chi.  Sarah.

 

He read it twice before folding it and putting it away again, tried to imagine Sláma’s feelings upon giving it back to him for safekeeping – and the photo of the children, too.  How many Englishmen would have admitted to weeping upon seeing a picture, even if it were true?  Sláma had done so straightforwardly.  Thinking of his flying record, and the number of enemy planes confirmed shot down, Poindexter thought that the admission hardly made him a sissy.  But perhaps a man that women would love easily – one who was open with his emotions?  He had been to Sarah even in those few words, for all his tightly-contained prison demeanour otherwise.  Poindexter took out the letter again and Sláma’s too, laid them side-by-side on his lap.

The train jolted.  The windows were covered with a film of grime and cigarette-smoke that filtered the dim light.  Both handwritings were clear, though, even while Sláma’s was rushed and scrawled here and there, the lines not as even as his sweetheart’s.  Poindexter wondered how much to tell Sarah Strickland of the actual conditions at Mirov Prison.  Sláma had assured her that he was well, that it wasn’t too bad;  that she shouldn’t worry.  It was hardly up to him to spoil that reassuring illusion, if it meant so much to Sláma to make it.  He would have to be more direct in his report, though.

Outside the train window, someone called-out.  He peered:  they were in some hole-in-the-wall place called Konice.  The name was familiar, he didn’t just then recall why.  A sad-faced woman was hanging washing on a line;  the station-master was blowing a whistle.  Things looked dour, here in Czechoslovakia.  They were a little better in Austria, though not much.  He lit up a cigarette.  He hadn’t even reached the Austrian border yet. When he did, there would be another interminable wait, of that he was quite sure.  Slowly the train began to move again, albeit at a snail’s pace.  Poindexter returned the precious letters to his pocket, wondering if he would ever see Sláma again.

 

* * * * * * * * *

 

Back at his desk, he wasted little time in making his report. 

He reached for the file first and opened it.  There was that carefree group of flyers, lounging beside the Spitfire out of which (it appeared) Sláma had just climbed.  He had his hand on the wing in a casual possessive gesture.  Their names had been added in small neat printing underneath, not a British hand from the shapes of the letters:  P/O Bedrich Sysel, P/O Karel Vojtíšek, F/Lt František Sláma, P/O Jiri Blasek, F/Lt Jan (Honza) Machaty, P/O Vaclav Zdenek.  It was undated.  Four pilot officers and two flight lieutenants, Sláma being (as he recalled) the section leader.

There were specks on the photograph;  on the fuselage of the aeroplane, in particular, though none on the faces.  These were fresh and laughing.  He could see the small Czech roundel in front of the cockpit.  Wasn’t the fair-haired Vojtíšek, who looked all of sixteen here, the same lad Sláma had brought from Czechoslovakia with him in 1939, the best of his flight-trainees?   And Sláma had mentioned a Karel in his letter from prison, even with so little time and space:  wondering if the child Charles was named for this Karel as well as for his not-father poor old Lt Strickland.  Well, there were complications here Poindexter would doubtless never unravel.

He took a magnifying-glass from his drawer and stared at the specks.  They were even in size, and seemed now he looked more closely to form part of the plane;  jagged fringes of metal caught the light on one, and an indentation framed another.  God, he realized, they were bullet-holes.

Sláma squinted, grinned into the camera.

 

Poindexter typed.  He regretted he did not hold out much hope for the success of his intervention, though he had been able to obtain S/Ldr Sláma’s signature upon the requisite documents (attached).  The prison conditions appeared poor, although Sláma made no specific complaints.  He looked undernourished, added Poindexter, and bore signs of ill-treatment.  He appeared to be suffering from some respiratory ailment, though how serious Poindexter could not judge.  It would be advisable for His Majesty’s Government to make the strongest representations to obtain his release, before any further deterioration – if possible.  And of course to demand medical attention in the meantime.  And yes indeed, Sláma old chap, pigs may fly, and probably will, first, he added under his breath.  As for all the other flyers, he thought, those without family ties in Britain — god help them.

 

He took longer deciding what to say to Sarah Strickland.  After some staring out of the window down at the crowded Franz-Josef-Platz, he inserted a fresh sheet into his typewriter and began:

Dear Mrs. Strickland,

I have the pleasure to apprise you of the news that I was at long last successful in obtaining access to S/Ldr Sláma.  I gave him your letter, and he sends you this in return.

While I must say that conditions at Mirov prison are less than ideal, he was in excellent condition when I saw him. 

(That this was more true of Sláma’s emotional state than his physical one was not perhaps necessary to mention.) 

He readily signed the papers accepting paternity of your two children, so we may now redouble our efforts to secure his release into British hands on those grounds. 

Poindexter stared out of the window again.  Why not be straightforward about things that would do no harm?  After all Sarah Strickland had been through for this, he could at least offer her something more to feast her imagination on.  There might be nothing else come of all her efforts but that, after all.  She had endured private anguish and then (once her actions became known to the press) public pillory.  Through it all she had maintained her dignity, kept-up her one-woman campaign of letters to her member of parliament;  to the Air Vice Marshal;  to the Foreign Secretary and the Minister;  to the Prime Minister even;  to the Palace.  When she obtained no results there, and the beans were already spilled, she had taken her campaign to the pages of The Times – including all its damaging and embarrassing revelations about her own conduct.  Being minors, the children weren’t named – but Poindexter had little doubt that they would hear about it all, and sooner rather than later, in the unkind way that schoolchildren have of picking-on anything odd about their fellows.

It had led to questions being asked in Parliament about the shameful treatment of the Czechoslovak airmen, and what (if anything) His Majesty’s Government intended to do about it.  (Nothing.)  HMG might not interfere into the workings of a foreign government, no matter how egregious nor how closely tied its citizens might be to Britannia.  The former RAF pilots remained Czech nationals, not Britons;  their fate was out of the hands of HMG.

Except, possibly, for this one.  Not that there weren’t others, without a doubt, under similar circumstances — but this one had a woman prepared to leave no stone unturned in the fight to free him.

So she deserved some small joy, then, if he could find the right words.  He slapped the carriage-return, tabbed the start of a  new paragraph:

I wish you could have been present to see his emotion upon learning of the birth of your son.  Apparently as you see from his letter the news had not reached him and he was altogether unaware.  He was surprised —

Poindexter thought of Sláma almost coughing his lungs up in shock, but could not find a way to say that — 

and appeared deeply moved. 

What if he had TB?  They could treat it effectively, these days, couldn’t they?  It sounded at the  very least like walking pneumonia, the way Sláma breathed, his shortness of breath, the dusky blue of his fingernails.  Poindexter had not realized he had noticed so much, but he was trained to observe and afterwards a picture of the symptoms came together in his mind.  He thought he would talk to the doctor assigned to the Consulate, describe what he had seen, see if he couldn’t make some representation to the authorities at Mirov to obtain treatment for Sláma if his suspicions were founded.  Unless it would make more trouble for the man?

He could hardly pretend not to have read Sláma’s note, knew it would be disingenuous of him to do so.  The Strickland woman had not behaved in any way that would suggest she was either a fool or naïve.   So it seemed all right to write ‘as you see from his letter,’ then.  And it relieved him of the necessity of describing Sláma’s condition further, didn’t it, knowing Sláma himself had stated firmly that he was all right, that it was not so bad?

No;  that was letting himself off too lightly.  She would expect more truth than that.  Still, he saw Sláma’s weary bloodshot eyes, the care with which he had told his sweetheart specifically not to worry.  He thought a moment, and continued:

 

S/Ldr Sláma would benefit from better treatment, and we will do all we can to see that this is forthcoming.  His spirits appeared excellent, however.  He looked at the photograph you sent for a long time and with much feeling.  The resemblance is quite marked, of course.  Naturally I commented on it, to his pleasure.

I shall be making strong representations to the authorities at the prison on his behalf, you may be sure, and let me repeat that HMG will exert every effort to bring pressure to bear for his release as soon as possible.

In the meantime, having succeeded in seeing him once, I shall of course immediately make further application for another visit.  While I cannot promise to be able to deliver correspondence, I shall endeavour to do so again, so please feel free to write to him in care of myself here at the Consulate.  Two sheets is a good maximum.

 

There was no way that Sarah Strickland would be able to imagine that cadaverous face, the hollow cheeks, the stubbly skull.  The Franta Sláma she had loved lounged against his Spitfire, looking out into a future the bullet-holes laughed at.  His friends were either dead or locked-up like him.  Poindexter thought he had heard that the Machaty in the photograph was being held at Mirov also.  The man looked quite a card, in the snapshot;  dapper, a small neat moustache, crinkled hair already neatened back into place, unlike Sláma’s wild curls.  Probably had a comb in the pocket of his flight-suit, did Machaty;  he looked that sort of chap.  There was amusement in his eyes, a cigarette in a long slender holder between his fingers.  Karel Vojtíšek was dead, it said on the back of the photograph, a date added:  23rd April 1943.  Sysel also, a year before — and young Jiri Blasek too, in 1944.  Whose photograph was it?  When was it taken?  Had they already met, Sláma and Sarah Strickland?  How had it come here to be in Sláma’s file?

Unanswerable questions.

Poindexter signed himself Mrs. Strickland’s obedient servant, folded the letter and put it in a large manila envelope, along with Sláma’s own precious scrawl.  The small black crown and letters OHMS in the top corner gave it a satisfying gravity;  she would know at once that it was of some importance.  He imagined her opening it.  Neither had seen nor heard from the other in five years;  if there had been tears from Sláma, he could hardly think this would bring less from her.

He was sorry he couldn’t be there to see her face.

 

Chapter 2 — Speed

 

 

England, 1941

 

Karel’s voice crackled in his ear, in Czech: “Do Prdele!  He’s right on my tail — ” and in a rising note of hysteria, “Franta, I’m hit!”  Sláma could hear the German plane still firing over the radio.

“Bank, Karel!” he cried, turning his head to see.  Karel’s Spitfire was a spiralling plume of grey behind him.  In English he yelled, “Bail out!  Don’t wait, Karel, bail out!” — but as he tried to find the dot that would be Karel and then the blooming of white silk he saw the Messerschmidt instead, coming for him now.  He swore under his breath and pulled up sharply, curled his thumb over the firing-pin in the joystick.

He nailed the bastard in a quick up-and-down pursuit, shaking him off with difficulty and doubling-back almost at a stalling angle to deliver the last burst that did it.  It took a minute;  two, perhaps — time telescoped when you were under fire, or else drew itself out like a tired rubber-band, so you never could be quite sure how long had actually elapsed.  Would Karel’s chute still be in the air?  That would be miles back, now…  he craned his neck to look behind him, anyway.

Nothing was visible but a blaze on the ground and a column of black smoke in the distance, over toward Coventry — unless that was the Me.

 

 

Heartsick, he made a heading for home.  As if it were someone else speaking he heard his own voice making the report over the radio, the weariness in it:  “Spearhead Blue Leader to Wizard, over?”

“Come in, Blue Leader.”

“I have to report one Messerschmidt shot down, sir.  And my number two’s plane has also gone down.  I don’t know if he has bailed-out.  Over.”

“Sorry to hear that, Blue Leader.  Your location, please?  Over.”

“Fifty miles south of Coventry, about.  Perhaps thirty-five minutes from base.  I am low on fuel.  Returning to base.  Over.”

“Roger, Blue leader.  Will keep you informed if we hear anything about Pilot Officer Voy-teezek.”

He was about to correct Wizard – it was spelled Vojtíšek but pronounced Voytishek, with a ‘sh’ in the middle – but it was nice of the fellow to have said his name at all, since Sláma had not.  Some of them wouldn’t have tried.  “Thank you.  Please do that.  Over,”  he said.

 

 

Jumping down from his plane, he saw a couple of the lads running over to him.  They had got back earlier; perhaps they had news of Vojtíšek?  He pulled his helmet off, ran towards them, stumbling a little from the cramped hours in the tiny cockpit.  In Czech he called out to them:  “What have you heard?  Have you heard from Karel?”

“Ne,” said Machaty, panting.  “Hoped you had, old man.  What happened?”

“I saw him go down.  Fucking Messerschmidt, just a loner.  Took him by surprise, I think. I got the bastard but I couldn’t see what happened to Karel — he had time to bail out….  but I didn’t see his chute – !”

“Fucking Nazi son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Havlicek.

Sláma felt hot tears spring to his eyes, brushed them away angrily.  “They all are, Pavel – Christ, don’t you know that by now?  This one’s no different…  anyway, he’s not flying for Adolf any more, the son-of-a-bitch.  And I didn’t see his chute either.”

He knelt to greet the raggedy spaniel that had flung itself at his legs.  It was an opportunity to turn his face away.  He’d always had a dog;  the habit died hard.  Didn’t want to have one here, not of his own, but this one did as a stand-in.  After Barcha there’d been the collie at their first base, till it was run over, and then this black-and-white creature that was Pilot Officer Weddell’s, when they had arrived.  After Weddell was shot down over France, it attached itself to P/O Masacek;  after which, Masacek having crashed in flames outside Slough, it was happy to see anyone at all in a blue uniform, and greeted Brits and Czechs alike as long as they would rub it behind the ears.

Usually he made much of the little bitch, talked nonsense in Czech and English, the same endearments he’d used to Barcha – as much to have the pleasure of saying them to any living creature as out of affection for the animal itself (he would have preferred a smarter one, more like Barcha).  But Barcha he’d left behind in a muddy lane that bitter March morning in 1939, telling her in a voice that cracked to go back to Hanicka or he’d hit her.   Hanicka had probably married Kanka by now, and he doubted he’d see either of them again.   So Flags stood-in.  It was better she didn’t belong to anyone in particular, not the way things were.  It would save her a lot of doggy heartbreak, one way and another.  He didn’t feel like talking today, though, not to Flags or to the rest of the bunch.   His throat was too tight.  And he was the one with the heart that ached, not the dog with the absurdly wagging stump of a tail.

He saw Karel’s eager face that day, as they rode away from everything they had and the boy asked him if he could have permission to bring his little photograph collection along – of girls, that was.  Girls without too many clothes.  He heard himself promising not to laugh, and keeping his word even though he had to suck in his cheeks.  ‘That’s your only girl?’ he had said, gently, to the lad — ‘then you should keep her…’ 

Eighteen years old, he’d been:  of course Trainee Pilot Officer Vojtíšek was still a virgin.  And hadn’t managed to make any progress since then, either, god love him.  The WAAF’s around the camp were determined to keep their legs together – especially for a young Czech boy without a future...  So now was it over for him?  No;  no, no, no.  Sláma stood up, clearing his throat, determined not to give up hope till he was forced to.  Plenty of lads bailed-out;  plenty survived crashes.

And plenty of others didn’t:  Weddell, Masacek, Vaclav Doubek, Jiri Stryk…

 

At dinner that night he lost his temper.  The steward meant well, of course, was wanting to say something kind:  passing the empty place to Sláma’s right, he said softly, “It might still be all right, sir – he was an excellent pilot – ”

And Sláma brought his hand down on the table with a crash that startled the entire mess-hall;  shouted, “Don’t say was!   He IS – he is an excellent pilot –!”

God, where was he?  Why hadn’t he telephoned to let them know, if he was all right?

Was he in a hospital somewhere, broken and burned?

Was he dead?

It ate him up, not knowing.  He felt more responsible for Karel than any of them;  after all, he – Kapitan F. O. Sláma, as he was then – was the one who had invited the boy to come along, as soon as he’d made his own mind up to leave.  Vojtíšek was the best of them all, a natural – and Sláma’s favorite, even if he was wet behind the ears and rash in the way only a truly brave lad can be rash, before he learns to temper courage with judgement. 

Two years later and they were still fighting the Nazis, side-by-side, Karel’s plane just behind his and to the left, always.  He’d taught the kid to fly, for god’s sake;  encouraged him, clipped him behind the ear when he needed it;  comforted him when he was homesick, helped him with opening lines to start talking to girls, and understand what they really wanted…  listened to him say his prayers in a whisper every night before he went to sleep.  Karel always prayed for him, too, right after his parents and sister:  he murmured, ‘God bless tata, maminka, Josefa – and God bless Franta,’ unashamedly saying it in front of him now they bunked together with Sysel and Liska.

Sláma didn’t pray out loud, but he was praying now.  His stomach knotted, wouldn’t let-up.  He pushed his plate away with the food half-eaten.  They all knew what he was feeling;  no-one complained about his outburst.  Instead they looked away and carried-on dining, which was perhaps worse. 

He drank half a bottle of scotch, leaned over the jangling old piano and listened to Machaty’s tunes till he couldn’t stand-up any more from weariness and despair.  Machaty chain-smoked and twinkled up at Janet, his girl;  she gave Sláma sympathetic glances now and then, which he acknowledged with a small shake of the head.  He felt, absurdly, that he should have been able to save Karel – not only that, but that he should have done so, that he had failed.  He would have preferred Slivovitz, but this was all there was.  It was rough and tasted of peat:  apparently it was supposed to.  Still, it produced a heat in the belly and then an increasing sense of wellbeing, or at least numbness to pain, followed by insensibility, which was mostly what he wanted just now.

 

 

He went to bed.

The picture of Hanicka by his bed seemed to mock him;  tonight he didn’t want to look at it before he put out the light.  She was probably screwing Kanka now, the officious little shit.  And if she was, he understood;  but he didn’t want to think about it.

He slept anyway;  you had to, or it would be all over.

 

 

He was called in to the Wing Commander’s office about ten the next morning.  The old fellow looked happy, which made a pleasant change;  his usual face was stern, offering a deliberate example of the good old stiff-upper-lip they were supposed to be acquiring as well as bloody English, as if that wasn’t enough to drive them crazy.  W/Cdr Bennett found his new charges difficult, and made no bones about saying-so;  over-emotional, he called them, and immature, given to speaking Czech over the radio after he didn’t know how many strictures thereagainst, and breaking the unwritten rules they were somehow supposed to know about, and acting like big shots.  He sometimes treated them like children.

With difficulty Sláma had convinced him that these were a matter of style, not character;  and that his boys were as trustworthy and capable as any British pilots, and better-trained than anything the W/Cdr might otherwise lay his hands on in a twelvemonth;  and that furthermore, they were more than deserving of taking up their machines – his precious Spitfires – and delivering all they had to the enemy, wherever and whenever they found him.  You would think the old sod had personally crafted each Spitfire out of solid gold, thought Sláma sometimes, the way he guarded them, and the reluctance with which he would permit them to be flown by any foreign chaps, even these that were supposed to be on ‘our’ side —  but he was a conscientious commander, and perhaps he was doing his duty the way he saw it.  He wasn’t prepared to let them go up till they were good and ready – and till he was, too.  Once they were, they had proved themselves and that was that;  there was never any further argument from him.

The Wing Commander’s little bristly faded-fox-coloured moustache twitched this morning.  “Ah.  Sláma.  Yes.  Had some news I thought you’d like to hear.”

Sláma’s heart turned-over.  The morning’s porridge curdled like lead in his belly.  Damn the man, couldn’t he just say it?  What was this cat-and-mouse game he was playing?  “Sir — it’s Vojtíšek?  You’ve heard, yes?  He is all right?”

Bennett’s pink face creased into a smile.  “Couldn’t let me get it out, eh, Sláma?  Yes, you guessed.  Lad’s making his way back from Oxford, I understand.  Came down within spitting distance of Blenheim Palace, actually – well, a few miles – too far out in the country to get to a telephone till this morning, so I hear, but he’s all right.”

Sláma felt his body let go of something – a pain he had not permitted it to know, but which it had been bearing anyway in a tight gut and shoulders tense as steel.  The W/Cdr nodded in dismissal, and Sláma saluted;  Bennett returned his salute, and Sláma left feeling as if he had been carrying the world, and had put it down.

 

 

 

Bennett watched him go.   Sláma closed the door with his customary care:  he was a man who took care.  He was the best of the bunch, and they were a good bunch.  There was a spontaneity to them, as a group;  they could be a handful at times – and then you couldn’t help liking them, as disarmingly sincere and direct as they were, even with the thick accents.  They were the best of the best:  tigers, men who hadn’t hesitated to find the fight, not waited till it came to them and could no longer be avoided.  A bit over the top in their ways, of course, like a bunch of children, highly emotional and apt to say whatever came into their heads before thinking twice – but they were brave and skilled.  At least, the survivors were – and lucky, too.  

Sláma kept them in line, slapped down the ones that needed it and made sure they kept their eyes firmly set on the prize.  He had a senior officer’s sense of responsibility – would doubtless have amounted to something in the Czech Air Force, if he’d stayed.  If the Nazis hadn’t had other plans.

Well, Sláma wasn’t one to take surrender lying-down.  He had a stern side, underneath his genial manner.  Bennett had seen him light into one of his boys over a piece of foolishness, not because it was such a great sin but because (as Sláma insisted) it was about their honour as Czech airmen.  They were here representing their country, he’d  said.

Bennett appreciated that, as he appreciated Sláma’s neat appearance and efforts to speak proper English, over the radio and around the base.  The other lads had a way of slipping into Czech when they got excited;  he’d had to be very firm with them.  But if the Czech chatter started up over the air and Wizard was about to reprimand them, half the time Sláma’s voice would come over first:  Boyss, det’s enough.  Spik English ohn de radio, pleasse.  And when it came from him they’d shape-up.

Of course, he was still a foreigner – but he was a good one, better than most.  As good as anyone could expect, if not better.  And a good section leader.  Calm in his manner, usually, but still with fire in his belly when it came to combat.  He had a bit of a hasty temper, but he kept it under control.  If they followed his example, they’d be bloody good officers – and pilots.  Sláma didn’t know it yet, but Bennett had recommended him for the DFC:  a piece of business over the Brittany coast, with a damaged bomber to be nursed home, several fighter-attacks repulsed single-handedly, an engine fire and a crash-landing.  Sláma deserved it, if anyone did.  The aircrew owed their lives to his cool head – and his pure courage in pulling them out afterwards, all five of them.  He’d been modest on getting back, barely mentioning it;  Bennett had heard the details from the pilot of the stricken bomber, and the commander of the airfield in Devon where they’d all managed to land.  They’d both been quite insistent about it, spoken in the warmest terms about putting Sláma up for the gong.   If it was approved, he’d be the sixth Czech to be awarded the decoration.

Bennett would be very surprised if it wasn’t.  But he’d tell Sláma all in good time;  no need to tease, unless it was going to happen.

He watched Sláma walk across the concrete apron and back towards the row of planes.  He had a jauntiness in his step, now.  As well he might;  he’d taken the lad’s disappearance hard.   Bennett sat back down at his desk.  Young Vojtíšek had sounded quite elated, on the staticky telephone-line.  Glad to be alive, he supposed.  Sláma would be glad to see the lad’s safe return;  he was attached to him.  Brought Vojtíšek out with him, as Bennett remembered;  had been his instructor, back before the war.  He would feel responsible, then, in ways beyond a mere section leader – almost like a father.  Vojtíšek was young still, though he had the makings of an excellent pilot.  Bennett shook his head:  they were shot down faster than he could get replacements, sometimes.  They’d already lost three of the Czechs, just in the few months they’d been flying.   And seven planes – almost as hard to replace.  Now another one, gone.  Damn.

 

Sláma found himself whistling all the way back from the W/Cdr’s office to the row of sagging chairs by the blister-hangars.  Thank you, god, he said softly.

 

 

And that was how everything started.

 

 

Vojtíšek turned-up the same evening, when a birthday-party was well under way in the officer’s mess.  Sláma saw him and hurried outside to greet him, a second beer in his hand for the lad, his lad.  Machaty watched them through the grimy window;  what was the kid saying?  He made the shape of a woman with his hands, and Sláma was laughing:  then what?  One-two-three-four-five?  Five what?  Five times?  Holy mother of god!  But what else could he have meant?

The cigarette fell out of Machaty’s mouth, holder and all.

 

 

“You landed on your feet, then, you silly little bastard,” Sláma said, holding out the bottle of beer.  “Gave me a scare, you scamp.”

Vojtíšek took a swig.  “No,” he said, colouring, “not on my feet — I landed on a woman, Franta — I swear to god!”

Sláma looked at him in some incredulity.  The boy’s blush spoke for itself.  “Tell me!”

“Honest!  I lost it!”

“What, your cherry?  Honest to god?  In one night?”

“Yes!”  Karel’s voice was triumphant, like that of a rooster in the morning.  “She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met – a shape like this, heavenly – prettier than my postcards – and she took me in – and she was kind to me – and she cooked me a dinner even though it was late when I got out of the tree and found her house – and she has a whole bunch of children but they’re not hers — one – two – three – four – no, five, I remember…  ”

“Wait a second,” said Sláma, “you’re losing me.  Five what?  Children?”

Karel nodded, unable to stop the flood of words.  “And she fixed-up my cut, and put me to bed in her husband’s pyjamas, and told me goodnight, and asked me if I needed anything, and I said I did, and — well ——  she was going to leave, but I asked her not to, and – she didn’t leave.  Not till later, anyway.”

“Good god,” said Sláma.

“She cried afterwards.  She is very sweet.  God, Franta, it was everything I’d imagined only better — she took some of her clothes off – well, I did, I pulled them off and she didn’t stop me – you understand, I couldn’t leave and go find a house with a telephone, not when she was so beautiful, even  before I knew she was going to be that generous — but I hoped — ”

“She has five children?  And a husband?”  The story was getting more puzzling by the minute;  only the flags in the boy’s cheeks told him it was no exaggeration.  It seemed the details were a bit confused, though – at least, they weren’t at all clear to Sláma.

“No!  She hasn’t got any children at all, not of her own.  But she has children from London, strangers’ children, you know, evacuees.  Because she has a big house and she lives in the country.  And she gave me her husband’s pyjamas because he is missing.  He is in the Navy.”

Sláma looked at those shining eyes.  “Gave you more than that, mm?”

“Yes, when I asked.”

“Jezishi Christe, Karel.  First time lucky, kid!  I’ve been here two years and I haven’t got laid once yet!”

“Franta!  You haven’t been trying!  Not like I have!”

“Perhaps.  What was she like?”   Sláma imagined someone desperate, lonely.  His heart went out to her.  That she had thought to offer a kindness to this lad he cared for made him love her a little bit, whoever she was.  For a second or two he judged her, and then decided why?  Karel was a sweet lad, and one with an ache you could feel;  and she had seen that, seen also the brave flyer who’d been shot down once and might not be so lucky the next time.  She must have.  God love her.

“She’s about your age – and has long chestnut hair – and – god, Franta!”

“What’s her name, this rescuer of yours?”

“Rescuer – yes!  In more ways than one, Franta – I still can’t believe it, that she let me — Sarah.  Sarah Streecklent.  I don’t know how you write it.   But I know where she lives.”

Sláma reached out, ruffled the boy’s blond hair.  “You son of a gun,” he said, “Let’s drink to that!  My friend Karel, no longer a virgin, eh?  Dekuju – cheers!”

“I’m totally in love with her,” said Karel, tipping back his head and taking a long draught that made him splutter.  “Absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent.”

“Of course you are,” said Sláma, grinning, “ – why wouldn’t you be?  God, to be so sweet to you – what a woman.”

“Yes.”  Vojtíšek’s voice was grave, earnest.  Sláma could see him now, in borrowed pyjamas, so sincere, so pathetic – so irresistible, if you were a woman left vulnerable and hurt, with a kind heart.

“Krásný,” said Vojtíšek, “I’m telling you, Franta, she was no old bag, she was gorgeous – glorious – beautiful, krásný, krásný!”

“I bet,” said Sláma, kindly.  “Come on, Honziku is staring at us as if you’ve come back from the dead!  Come inside and tell us all the rest of it… ”

 

 

Vojtíšek wouldn’t stop going-on about her.  Sláma, whose own frustration had become increasingly hard to endure over the past two years, listened patiently.  A few times he felt like telling the boy to shut up, but then thought that was a rotten thing to do to a lad in love for the first time, and let him keep talking as long as he wanted.  He was behaving just as he should, a twenty-year-old with his first serious crush, and Sláma would be a shit to say he didn’t want to hear it.   Who else did the lad have to confide in?  Who else could he trust to be discreet?  Nobody.

So Sláma listened, and smiled to himself;  felt more than a little jealous, and shook his head over the force of the boy’s feelings even while he remembered them well from his own youth.

He’d not been in love;  though he’d perhaps fancied himself to be so, just as long as it took the coach’s wife to seduce him.  The coach was a bastard and a sadist, hated equally by his team and his wife, and she had a habit of singling-out the most promising and energetic lads for some special treatment….  It was a way for all of them to get back at him, the fact that the rest of the team knew about it when she was banging one of them, as well as being extremely entertaining in its own right.   It didn’t last, but word got about that it didn’t matter;  it was bliss while it did.

Which it was.

Back then he’d been close to unquenchable, of course, which was what she was after, no doubt.  She’d dropped him for a kid a year older, which hurt at the time, but Sláma was grateful for the experience.  It had made him a better lover, he thought, all in all – and at least when he got serious about a woman again, later – when Hanicka had given herself to him altogether, after two years of courting (and a mounting pitch of feeling on his part that left him just about beside himself every time they kissed and didn’t quite get there) – at least he’d known what he was doing.

But it hurt to think about it now.

Yes, Karel, he said.  Go to sleep now, for God’s sake.  Sysel would be snoring away in the bunk opposite, and Karel filling the dark with his hoarse whispers – not crude, but just how pretty she was, how amazing it felt…

“That’s enough,” said Sláma, “look, it’s gone one o’clock... if you don’t want any sleep, fine, but at least let me get some, all right?”

Vojtíšek sighed, turned over.  His breathing slowed, steadied.  Sláma waited till he was asleep to jerk-off, so he could get some rest finally.  He hated it, in one way, but it was better than lying there for hours.  It had been all right till Vojtíšek kept on talking about it right at bed-time;  that was unbearable.

Well, give him a month or two, he’d get past it.  Please god.

 

 

 

“I want you to meet her,” said Vojtíšek, as soon as he heard they had the whole day off.

“Don’t be daft,” said Sláma.

“No, I mean it!  I told you, we can go and see her!  I know where she lives!  I told her all about you…  She’ll be glad to see me, I know she will!”

Sláma wasn’t quite as sure about that as Karel, but he was willing to give the lad a day, if that made him happy.  They could take his car, and go together, and at last he’d see her for himself, as Karel so wanted him to:  this paragon of all female virtue the infatuated lad couldn’t stop talking about.  Which might shut him up a bit – and that (god only knew) would be a blessing.  And yes, he had to admit, he was curious.  A little.  All right, more than a little.  It was time to turn her from a mystery into an ordinary person.  Anyway, he liked children, and apparently there were five – so he could amuse himself with them while Karel got another chance to sweet-talk his darling.  Sláma could oblige that much, at least:  a friend could hardly do less.

 

He helped Vojtíšek talk the local farmer out of a whole ham, a couple of bottles of scotch in hand and the promise of some help with the fence where one of the squadron had run his Spit right through it.  Karel had been going to bring the scotch as a gift, but Sláma suggested with all the children and rationing being how it was that she might prefer something they could all enjoy.  Oh, yes, Karel had said, I forgot the rationing…  Sláma smiled, shook his head.  The lad ate everything on his plate, no matter what it was;  always had.  Perhaps he really had forgotten.

So they got the ham, pressed their uniforms, tied their ties even more carefully than usual.  When they were more than presentable,  Sláma cuffed him affectionately:  “Come on, I’ve even shaved twice in your honour.  Let’s go.”

It seemed a perfect day;  the showers of the morning gave way to a watery sunlight and then a sparkling afternoon as they made their way through Oxford and out towards the Cotswolds.  Beyond Woodstock Vojtíšek remembered his way down country lanes, right here – no, left, sorry, Franta – down there, see, another turn – that was it, the copse he’d got stuck in, thirty feet up a tree and altogether out of sight, coming-round from his knock on the head to find himself dangling far above the ground… yes, and that was the field he had walked through in the gathering dark, and that hedge, and that stream – yes – look!  They were there!

He bounded out of the car, the ham under his arm wrapped in muslin and brown-paper, calling out her name:  “Sarah!  Sarah!”  – and disappeared round the back of the house, through the garden.  It was an old-fashioned house, rosy brick with stone windows, quite isolated:  a nice place, Sláma thought.

He applied the handbrake, leaned forward to free his tunic from the door-handle where it had caught.  In the wing-mirror he saw a woman, coming down the lane towards him and the house.  She had brown hair pinned-up, some of it blowing in the breeze, and a frock with small pink-orange flowers on it.  It had gathers and smocking at the bosom to make the most of what little she had under there.  Slender, not his type, but quite lovely nonetheless;  the lad had spoken nothing but the truth.   She probably had pretty ankles, he thought, and looked to see if that was so,  but the low hedge hid the rest of her from sight. 

He got out of the car, took off his hat.

She looked up at the sound of the car door closing, though he’d tried not to slam it.  “Excuse me,” he said, “are you – are you Sarah?”

Her brows knitted briefly in a frown.  “Yes,” she said, cautiously, “but – how do you know my name?”

He was about to explain, but was taken-aback for a second as she came closer into view and more heads materialized beyond the hedge one by one.  He realized she was holding the hand of a little girl, with several more children following in a rather uneven line like a gaggle of young geese.  She looked him up and down, rather warily.  He was glad he’d pressed his uniform, anyway;  hoped it withstood her scrutiny.  He thought she’d be prettier when she wasn’t frowning quite so darkly.

“I am a friend of Karel,” he said, feeling a little awkward now suddenly because he had to make his own introduction.

“I see,” she said.  Her cheeks were a fetching shade of pink, a natural one, and getting pinker.  There was a hard tone to her voice, somehow, he thought.  Was it his fault?  “So you thought you’d come to check me out?”  she asked.

He wasn’t sure quite what that meant, but it sounded reasonable, so he began to answer:  “Yes... ”  He’d been going to add more, but she was too quick for him.  She seemed angry.  “If he thinks he can send his entire squadron here for some recreation, then he’s very much mistaken,” she said, her eyes flashing.  “You can go back right now, and tell him that from me.  Tell him he’s not welcome.”   She said the last part very clearly, the way people do when they are speaking to foreigners who don’t understand too much, so that it was an insult to Sláma as well as Vojtíšek.  The children stared, five pairs of eyes turned on him in suspicion. 

Oh, god, what had he done?  “No,” he said, feeling helpless to correct the misunderstanding now, “no – !”  How did you say ‘misunderstanding’ in English, anyway?

Karel appeared then, calling-out still:  “Sarah!  Oh, there you are!  Sarah, I am happy to see you!  Look, we have the whole afternoon off!”

Sláma watched her realize her mistake.  It was rather amusing, if excruciatingly embarrassing, all at once.  He wished he hadn’t made the gaffe, but wasn’t sure how to put it right.  Vojtíšek was coming towards them now, his eyes shining.  The ham was in his arms like a baby.  “Sarah, this is Franta,” he said happily, “I told you about him.  He is my friend, do you remember?  And Franta, this is Sarah… ”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Sláma, raising his eyebrows a little and holding out his hand.

To her credit, she recovered wonderfully.  Looking up at Sláma, now that she was standing right in front of him, she said with only the slightest hesitation, “How... do you do?” as if these were almost the first words she had spoken to him.

He grinned, shook hands.  Hers was warm and slender.  “How do you do,” he said in reply, as one did.  “Karel has told me a lot about you… ”

“Has he,” she said, cautiously.  God, he thought, I am going to have to be more tactful here.  Heaven only knows what she is thinking.  Or for that matter, what she thinks I am thinking…!  Which I am – how am I supposed not to?

Vojtíšek interrupted the pleasantries that followed-on the introduction, as if he couldn’t wait;  in Czech, moreover, asking Sláma, “There!  I told you so – isn’t she pretty?”

“Very,” murmured Sláma, conscious of all Karel was wanting him to say;  that he must express admiration, but not too much – “Pretty, yes, Karel.  Piekný.  Though I prefer bigger tits, but – very pretty.”  He looked back at Sarah then, not wanting to go on in Czech like that, and noticed that the little girl whose hand she held had tear-streaks down her cheeks.

The poor little sweetheart!  Her lip was trembling.  Was it his fault?  Surely not!  He dropped on one knee at once.  “What’s the matter here?” he asked, his voice soft and light in the same way he’d talk to Barcha, so as not to frighten her.

Mutely, she showed him her arm.  The upper part was red and swollen, with an angry scarlet lump in the middle of her little egg-round biceps.  “We went to see the bees, and Beth got stung,” said Sarah.  Beth herself looked tearfully into Sláma’s face and sniffled.

He looked up at Sarah, questioningly.  “Have you got any ammonia?” he asked, conscious of his accent and hoping she understood.  She must, surely?  These introductions had interrupted poor Beth’s first-aid, he saw, and the lass had been waiting all this time till the grown-ups worked things out.  Now she was staring at him, her eyes wide and grey and brimming, and he reached out gently with his forefinger and brushed away the tear that trickled down her nose.

“Yes, I’m sure I do,” said Sarah, as if she were just now regaining control of her feet and voice.  “Beth, you stay here – I’ll go and get it.”

The little girl put her hand confidingly in Sláma’s.  The other children led the way through the gate and round into the back garden, where a table and chairs sat out on a stone-flagged terrace.  Sláma sat in one and opened his arms, and Beth scrambled up onto his lap.   He thought she must be all of five years old, if that.  She smelt of soap, was an odd little solid lump on his knee, all petticoat and short dangling legs.  Her hair tickled his chin.  He smiled at her gently in reassurance and she smiled back – a slight watery trembling smile but a smile nonetheless.

Vojtíšek had followed Sarah into the house;  he returned now, looking slightly crestfallen.  She came out after him, a small bottle in her hand, exclaiming in exasperation, “It’s evaporated!”

“Never mind,” said Sláma, trying to think what the word was in English for his grandmother’s remedy for bee-stings – it wasn’t as good as ammonia, but it was better than nothing, and took your mind off it – how the heck did you say ‘vinegar’ ?  “Do you have any – what is it called, Karel?  It’s sour and you use it for pickling… ”

“Vinegar!” cried the children in a chorus.

Sarah sent one of them inside to fetch it, and so Sláma had the honour of pouring some onto a clean handkerchief and binding-up the afflicted arm.  To be the recipient of all this attention from a tall man in uniform seemed to help;  Beth squirmed, but did not pull away. Sláma kept her entertained with a little explanation:  “Look,” he said softly, “it’s worse for the bee than for you.  Because when the bee stings you, it dies.  It defends its hive, and that’s the end for it.”

She turned down the corners of her mouth.  “Wasps don’t die,” she said, trenchantly.

“It’s true,” said Sláma, smiling, “dey don’t.  Wasps are allowed to sting as much as they like.  But they are not allowed to make honey… ”  He finished tying the folded handkerchief in place.  “There,” he said, raising her arm to his nose, “it smells good, mm?”

Beth wrinkled her nose.  “It smells awful,” she said, slithering down from his lap.

He looked up, smiling;  found Sarah staring at him.  He had been altogether preoccupied with the child, and in doing so, unselfconscious;   now he felt quite the opposite.  Her cheeks were pink still, her pupils wide.  She said nothing, but he felt her gaze.  It wasn’t at all like Beth’s wide-eyed regard;  it was wistful, pointed.  Something in it made his cock stir. 

He told it not to be such an idiot, and sat up in the chair;  re-corked the vinegar-bottle.  She was watching his hands.  Then she seemed to become aware that she was, and looked away;  her cheeks flushed even more.   “Well,” she said, “let me go and put the kettle on.”

He watched her walk away into the house.  Her ankles were as pretty as he’d thought.

 

The rest of the children had greeted Vojtíšek like a long-lost cousin.  He’s still half a child himself, thought Sláma, he’s really closer to the ten-year-old than he is to either of us!   They were off playing in the garden, boisterous as puppies, running about and laughing when he caught them;  playing aeroplanes, taking-turns flying in his strong young arms.

Sarah poured Sláma his tea and he sugared and stirred it. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was such an idiot.”

“No,” he protested, not wanting her to apologize, “no.”  The memory made him shake his head, smile slightly.  “You were very angry.  I understand.  Actually, it was attractive.”  He had meant to make small-talk, found this piece of truth coming out of his mouth instead.  She coloured.  They sipped their tea;  the breeze rustled in the leaves of a lime-tree a few yards away, behind her.  She had put-on a scarlet cardigan to match the dress.  It was the colour of those little red berries that grew in the hedges.  Under it her slight bosom had a pretty shape in the sunlight.  Sláma took his eyes off it and returned them to her face.  She smiled at him shyly, sadly.  He felt he ought to bring her attention back to Karel, and gestured over to where he played with the children.  “Look at him,” he said, affection warming his voice.  “He can’t stop talking about you.”

“Oh, dear,” she said softly.

 

He knew, of course, had known it even before he met her.  No woman falls in love with a lad overnight.  She had done it to be kind;  and out of her own pent-up feelings, perhaps, in answer to Karel’s so-obvious wanting.  The last thing she must have expected was for Karel to turn up again on her doorstep.  He hoped she didn’t regret it now.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said, a-propos of nothing he had said, but all he was thinking.

“It’s understandable – nobody can help that,” he answered gently, wanting her not to be so hard on herself, “ – it’s the war… ”

“I ought to,” she said, more sharply. “I ought to know.  I’m married… ”  Beth was scrambling back into her lap;  the child’s brown curls brushed against Sarah’s face and neck.  She tilted her head to snuggle against them.  She looked even sadder – or regretful anyway. 

She had been sorry for Karel, then.  He felt sure of it now, seeing her expression.  In a moment of weakness she had seen a need and answered it with her own.  He doubted she had thought about it over-much.  Washed and tended and in fresh pyjamas, tucked-up in bed and with those longing eyes turned on her, Karel must have looked utterly helpless, desperately sweet — sweetly desperate.

So it had been out of pity – no, there was a better word:  what was it?  In the sonorous Latin of his childhood masses it was misericordia: mercy.  What she had done for Karel was an act of mercy.   He could read it in her expression as she stared into the distance.  Karel had said she’d cried, afterwards, and he had wondered about that;  now he could see why.  He looked away before she saw him looking at her;  she didn’t need to think he was judging her, now, for having been kind.  The wind lifted his hair, and hers also;  he wanted to touch it, where it grazed her neck.

“I’m going to marry David,” announced Beth, making sheep’s-eyes over the back of the chair before slithering down again.

Sláma smiled, with a ‘hm!’ of amusement.  The child had obviously forgotten about her injury, even while the tracks of her tears still stained those round red cheeks.  Once more he felt Sarah’s eyes on him;  met them this time, curious to see what was in her gaze.

She looked as if she were holding her breath.

He felt himself start to stiffen again in a wave of desire, willed it away.  “He is a good man,” he said warmly, nodding his head over toward Karel.  “You can trust him.”

The tea was hot and sweet, the way he liked it.  Not too weak, either – but not stewed, as it was at the base.  She served it with milk, of course, the English way;  he’d got used to it by now, found it quite pleasant.  He finished it, set the cup back carefully in the saucer, and she poured him another.  They were china cups, with small flowers on like her frock and the tablecloth.  She must really like flowers, he thought.  The garden was pretty, too.  He wondered if it helped her to deal with her husband’s being missing, having the children to care for and the garden to tend.  He thought it probably did.  He was going to ask her, but thought it might hurt her feelings to mention it, so he said nothing. 

It was one of those silences where it’s enough, without the need to speak.  That surprised him, because he wasn’t used to that happening so early-on in getting to know someone;  but her face was shuttered with her private thoughts, and she said nothing — and yet they were comfortable together just drinking tea and letting the breeze kiss their faces.  He thought he smelt lavender on it, from somewhere.  The children’s laughter came to them.

She gathered herself from whatever reverie had taken her, and looked at him again.  Her look made him feel strange inside.  “Are you  married?”  she asked, politely.

He opened his mouth to reply, but Karel came zooming past with one of the twins in his arms, both of them breathless and laughing, and chimed-in before he could speak:  “No, he’s not,” he said, “ – but he has a serious girlfriend back home, don’t you?  Her name is Hanicka,” he added, to be sure Sarah understood Franta was spoken-for.

Sláma smiled faintly, nodded.  It was indeed so – well, even if Hanicka thought he was dead by now, and probably did, and home was a place they’d likely never see again, her picture was still by his bed.  And in honour of something, maybe even that, he had not run after any of the WAAF’s.  Or perhaps it was just that life would have been too complicated, if he had. 

“That’s a pretty name,” said Sarah.

Sláma thought about Hanicka, as he still did sometimes.  A sharp ache came to him, and the memory of her coming in his arms, the little sounds she made.  The night they had stood at her window, looking down on Kanka on the rainy platform, and she had said, to tease him, “My mother says I’ll end-up marrying Kanku – he’s set his sights on me… ”  and he’d asked her, “you think I haven’t!?”  – and they’d made love again, till those bloody walnuts laid-out to dry on the dresser at the end of her bed started falling on the floor with sharp reports like gunfire….    He sighed, turned his inner gaze out again.   Sarah was looking at him with that look.  He felt his cheeks colour faintly.  Could she read his thoughts?

Is that because she was thinking the same kinds of things?

Well, they were the same age, more or less, and in the same situation, so it was hardly surprising if it took them both the same way, sitting in the presence of a person of the opposite gender and thinking about their own absent sweetheart.

She stood up, almost sharply.  “I’d best be getting some supper ready for the children,” she said.

Sláma stood also, manners ingrained, and she gave him a last brief look before leaving the table.  He couldn’t tell what was in it, but longing was certainly one of the ingredients, and helpless attraction another.  He hoped his own wasn’t quite so transparent, for Karel’s sake;  looked away, to make sure it wasn’t.

 

 

Leaving, Karel asked him, “See, Franta, what did I tell you?  Isn’t she beautiful?”  He used the word ‘krásný’ again, not the ‘piekný’ Franta had allowed before.

She was more than pretty.  That was how she might first strike you – as she had – but having talked with her, watched her, he had no difficulty agreeing:  “Yes, Karel, krásný – altogether.”  They were still in her driveway as he said it;  he was looking over his shoulder, reversing back down the lane.  Sarah stood in her gateway, waving.  The action lifted her left breast along with her arm, Sláma could see it plainly, the slight movement under that red cardigan as she bid them goodbye.  He felt it, too.  “Krásný,” he repeated, meaning it.

Karel talked about her all the way home.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Strickland stared.  The officer looked quite debonair in that immaculate uniform – the blue shirt, the black tie, the wings above the breast;  the embroidered strip over his shoulder that read “Czechoslovakia.”  He even admitted it – what he was here for.  Christ, she hadn’t thought Karel would be so ungentlemanly as to blab about her gift all over the base, but he must have!   She felt her cheeks get hot, knew her eyes must be snapping;  didn’t care.  Who was this fellow?  A complete stranger!  The arrogance…  How dare he?  She gave a sharp retort, the sharpest she could think of.

“No,” he said, starting to shrug and colouring too, looking altogether surprised and undeserving of her sharp tongue, and amused too somehow, “no – ”

And then to her horror and surprise she heard Karel’s voice, and realized she had just jumped to the most dreadful and insulting conclusion, in her haste to take offence – and been very, very rude on top of it.  And that this was no seeker after a casual tumble between the sheets, but Karel’s hero:  his revered friend and section-leader, his former flying-instructor – the man he’d gone on about, wanted her to meet (so he’d said).  This was Karel’s beloved Franta;  his model for all a pilot should be – all a man should be.

And she had just made the most complete fool of herself – and given away everything, too, confirming anything this Franta might know or think.

He smiled at her slightly;  there was kindness there.  “Pleased to meet you,” he said softly, as if they had not exchanged any words at all.

She bit her lip, drew breath.  “How… do you do,” she said, recovering herself.

His eyes met hers in amusement and understanding – and also, perhaps, something warmer still? – forgiveness, it looked like.  They were dark and danced in his face.  It was an attractive face, if a quirky one;  straight-on you did not see the prominence of his nose, but only its slight crookedness where it had been broken.  The imperfection lent it an appealing quality which perfectly handsome faces lacked.  His cheekbones were high and tinged with a flush, now;  he looked freshly-shaved, the darkness of his whiskers a faint blue note under his skin.  There was a marked cleft in his strong chin, that drew the eye.  The dusty RAF blue suited him, she thought;  it really was a very flattering uniform.  Karel too was in his best, not the flying-rig he’d arrived-in on her doorstep.  He appeared younger than ever, dressed-up.  He was looking at her like a spaniel, eager and energetic, utter adoration and devotion shining from wide young eyes.  His friend Franta saw it too, the naked love in his boyish face;  watched him with tenderness.  Karel’s blond hair reminded her of the twins’, a flat slab that needed brushing to lie down straight.  Franta’s was very dark, and without his hat it curled crisply on top of his head.  “How do you do,” he replied, twinkling at her. 

They exchanged some words briefly in Czech, Franta replying to some question of Karel’s – about her, she thought.  Then he looked down, saw Beth’s face.  “Oh!” he exclaimed, “what’s the matter here!”

His voice was immediately tender and light, filled with sincerity as he knelt in front of her.  The gaffe, it seemed, was altogether forgotten;  his care was turned to the little girl whose tears he had just noticed and who now commanded all his attention.  He was transformed, suddenly absolutely dear;  dear in the genuineness of his concern, in the soft way he spoke to her.   The accent made it altogether irresistible.  He knelt in the muddy lane in all the glory of his uniform, whose clean appearance it seemed mattered not at all beside a little girl in tears.  He wasn’t even aware of it;  was lifting Beth’s arm gently in his hand to see better.  God.  This was Franta?

She had imagined someone older – or younger?  No;  she didn’t know.  She’d seen the hero-worship in Karel’s face that evening as he spoke, smiled at it, listened indulgently.  What had she imagined?  A nice chap.  Not like this, though.  Just someone ordinary, another Czech airman.

This was Franta.

 

His hands were strong, careful;  tender.  He folded the hanky and knotted it with a casual care that knotted something in her gut.  His voice when he told Beth that wasps were not allowed to make honey was honey itself.   It left her wet, trembling.  She was shocked at herself – and on another level she saw everything clearly, her own hunger as sharp as Karel’s that night, and nothing poor Karel had to offer coming anywhere close to filling it – but this did:  he did.  Or could, would, if ever he touched her —  touched her like that, with that note in his voice ——

If he ever did, she would be lost.

 

The rest of the afternoon was a blur, with Franta’s face at the centre of it.  He was impeccably polite, sat quietly and spoke in low tones.  If he was thinking anything about her and Karel, you would never have known it from his courteous manner.  He was considerate, slightly reticent;  when she said unhappily that she didn’t know what she was doing, and ought to, he shrugged:  “It’s de war… ”  he said, understanding and sadness written in every line of his face, as if he too felt overwhelmed sometimes, and buffeted, and unsure of himself, and was offering that in a gesture of compassion and fellow-feeling.  She knew he knew about what had happened – and yet he didn’t seem to be judging her, at all;  in fact, the opposite:  he looked at her as if she had done something quite lovely, and kind; something to be honored and treasured.  When he spoke of Karel it was with warmth, a deep affection shining in his eyes.  She noticed he attempted to bring the conversation back to the boy, when it strayed;  he was decent, then, had not come here to poach but for politeness’ sake, because (quite clearly) it meant the world to Karel.  As did he.

And as did she.

The breeze lifted his hair a little, a lock or two on top of his head as he sat and drank carefully from her best china.   She wanted to feel it in her fingers;  watching, it was as if she already could.  She kept her hands in her lap to control them.

Karel’s face was a bonfire;  she couldn’t meet his eyes, not the way they blazed whenever he looked at her.  He’d followed her into the kitchen, clearly longing for a kiss or some sign of affection;  she’d been too preoccupied and flustered to respond with anything kinder than offhand comments and brusque looks.  It had meant more to him than she was ready to face, that hour of helpless generosity and weakness in which she had given him what he so badly longed-for.  

Franta did not think any the worse of her for it, though;  in his eyes there was nothing but friendly interest, and a sort of glow – almost an appreciation.  Yes, that was it;  he knew, but he thought the more of her for it, not less.

 

Why had she?  What had it meant to her?  Under his gentle appraisal she wondered again.  Would he understand?

He already did.

He saw, and she saw that he saw.  He saw that it had meant a moment of purity in a world gone mad, a world in which boys were sent up to their deaths before they were even old enough to know what it was to lie with a woman.  It had meant human warmth and contact again, for which she too was starving;  it had meant someone who needed something even more frantically than she did herself.  A thing within her gift – a small thing, in the end, unless you made it more than it was.  It was kindness, compassion, generosity;  it was not wanting Karel to go back up there again and die with that young-man’s ache still in his eyes, without ever having felt himself welcomed and enfolded.  He had been a stranger on her doorstep;  but a sweetheart, entreaty in his face as she went to turn out the light.  She had given him that the way she would have shared bread with him if he had been starving.  And Franta saw that, honoured her for it. 

And saw the need in her, too;  and smiled softly, and looked away.

 

 

After they left she sat in a chair and shook for an hour.

 

 

Charles looked down at her from the mantelpiece.

A year, already;  ‘missing, believed killed.’  His ship had gone down with almost all hands on convoy duty in freezing seas, somewhere in the North Atlantic. 

They had been married almost ten years.  People get set in their ways, she thought, over that much time.  She missed him, of course.  At the beginning, when the news first came, she had felt numb with shock.  He had been away already since the beginning of the war, so his absence in itself was no different than it had been the day before, the month before.  But as the months dragged on and no more letters came, she knew it was different.

His cheerful, bluff voice followed her round the house sometimes.  She found herself saying his name, trying to call him back into some greater sense of presence, as if by doing so she could make him real again.  He seemed very far away, already lost to her.  When she thought of him, it was silly things that came to mind:  the way he’d decided it was all right to break wind in her presence once they were married, the incomprehension in his china-blue eyes when she was moody from her periods.   His pleasure when she got dressed-up for a Naval ball, his tight-faced refusal to talk to the doctor about their childlessness.  He looked in his element, in the photo:  informal in his creamy Naval sweater, a square-shouldered bonhomie to him, he radiated sturdiness and calm – someone solid, trustworthy.   He took himself rather seriously;  his career demanded it.  In uniform he stood straighter, walked with a bit of a swagger – he was proud of what he did, who it made him.

Why were these flyers lighter, easier?   Was it really some part of their respective elements that entered into their souls, or had they chosen the air because of who they were?

She wondered if Charles had any idea who she was, really.  Charles:  a good man, unimaginative and uncomplicated but essentially kind.  He had little sense of humour, though he liked those long complicated Naval shaggy-dog-story jokes. They were safe and predictable;  you knew when to laugh.  His idea of amusement was a loud guffaw at the right time, when the punch-line was delivered.  He was embarrassed by his desire, brought it to her like a dog that wanted feeding, expectantly, apologetically.  His hands were clumsy, like slabs of sausages.  He didn’t do the washing-up, by mutual agreement, not after their first few months of marriage, because too many cups and plates got chipped.  He was awfully sorry, old girl, he’d said, couldn’t help it.  When he was home on leave he’d sometimes keep her company in the kitchen while she did it, roaming round between the stove and the table fidgeting till she had finished drying and dodging past him to put-away.  She felt guilty wishing he’d go and sit down and read the paper, wondered in vain how to tell him he was in the way when he seemed not to notice.  After making love, he’d grunt in satisfaction and fall dead asleep.  She wasn’t sure what else she wanted, but it wasn’t that – though she was perfectly sure he appreciated her.  He said so, often, quite heartily, that he knew he was bloody lucky.  She wasn’t sure what he meant by it.  She’d asked him, once, and he’d spread his hands in bewilderment:  well, you know – good woman like her – good lord, absolutely.  When at home he clearly missed the sea and the camaraderie of his shipmates, as if he wasn’t quite sure who he was without them, a fish out-of-water;  he was happier in a crowd than an intimate conversation. He liked to read pieces to her out of the paper.  Pieces that interested him, of course.  When he brought her presents, they were never anything she would use or wear.

He was here on the mantelpiece, or his picture was, in this house that was his home;  but how much of it all had he taken for granted?  And of her, how much of her?   She had never felt ‘seen’ as she had today, in the way this Franta seemed to know just by looking at her.   If Charles did understand, he had never let-on.   She had always felt herself to be a cherished mystery to him, one he did not attempt to fathom;  chaps didn’t do that sort of thing.  Chaps didn’t think about their feelings at all, really, did they?  – they just felt them and acted on them, or not, and that was an end of it.  Emotions – specially male ones – operated mostly below the level of awareness.  They certainly did in Charles’s case.  One hid them, overcame them.  They illuminated things, if you let them – but not, if you didn’t.  Charles saw her through a lens of his own preconceptions and prejudices.  He really didn’t know her, his own wife.   Or rather, he thought he did, but it wasn’t from observation.  He had a picture of her, into which she fitted, or tried to.  It would no more have occurred to him to question who he was, or who she was, than – well, than it would to fly.

Franta Sláma flew.  He dropped to his knees in front of little girls and tended their ouches;  put himself up in the sky all alone between them and the enemy, every day, without a second thought.  He took machines into the air that ought by rights to fall out of it, and kept them there with only speed and skill – and daring;  his was the casual arrogance of men who defy even gravity.  Doing so, he didn’t need to swagger on the ground.

And he made her tremble.  It wasn’t anything he did;  it certainly wasn’t anything he said, or any way he looked.  His manners were impeccable.  And yet, in his company, she felt as if every nerve-ending on her entire body was exposed. 

 

It was almost too simple, really.  No wonder Karel thought the world of him. He knew her;  he knew himself.  He was at ease with both.  Karel’s Franta seemed entirely aware of his feelings.  He owned them, enjoyed them, even:  shared them with words and looks – with a touch, smoothing a tear from a child’s face.  He was transparent.  Well, no, he was entirely more complicated than that, and there was a good deal he didn’t say – but you could see that he might be thinking it.  And that if you asked him, he would say so, straightforwardly, in that precise Czech accent, the consonants formed with care to be understood, the vowels getting away from him now and then.  She wondered if he had any idea how stunningly charming he sounded when he spoke, so earnestly, so correctly.  How attractive, how endearing it was.  Probably not.

He’d offered her a cigarette, politely, as people did;  when she’d refused he’d smiled and put the case away, hadn’t lit-up himself.  A small thing, but somehow it spoke volumes.  Charles knew she didn’t care to smoke;  said heartily, “You won’t mind if I do, then?” and gone ahead.  After all, it was his house.

Franta Sláma had also thanked her, formally, gravely, for the tea, for her hospitality;  but meaning (she was sure of it) also her kindness to his young friend.  It had been a serious moment;  she’d felt suddenly as if the world stood still, while he spoke.  The flicker of amusement in his eyes had turned to something earnest and luminously sincere.  He was really thanking her for giving Karel his manhood, while he was still on this earth to enjoy it;  before it was already too late and his chances were over, his future wiped-out.   It was all there in the tender creases round his eyes, the way he said ‘thank you’ very deliberately, holding her gaze with his till she shivered.  It was most unlikely they’d see one another again, and it was too important to pass over;  he wasn’t going to leave without acknowledging it to her.  Because he saw who she was and why she had done it – because he loved the lad.

That was when she had started to shake.

Hours later, the children bathed and in bed, she still couldn’t stop.

 

 

 

He thought about how Karel had said she’d cried.  He thought probably she’d meant to be generous, found herself vulnerable instead.  She hadn’t seemed so vulnerable, at home in her element among the children and the tea-things and the comfortable English furniture and the flower-patterned chintz tablecloth and curtains and slipcovers.  It was perfectly clear why she had been kind to Karel – but over tea she didn’t look the sort to cry afterwards.  Karel had mentioned it in passing, just as something else that had happened, without questioning it.

He questioned it, thought about holding her in bed and feeling her hot tears on his bare shoulders;  the thought gave him a hard-on that wouldn’t leave.  He had to stop thinking about her while he was flying because it was too bloody uncomfortable.  Karel talked about their visit endlessly, and Sláma listened, said nothing.  Karel didn’t question that, either.

 

 

Chapter 3 — Lift

 

 

They flew almost every day for a month.

 

 

The fog came as a blessed respite.  Sláma woke-up smelling it, knew right away they’d get a break.  No-one could fly in this, not the Germans either.  He let his body relax back against the mattress, felt the aches in every joint seep slowly out of him between the lumps and buttons.  The air felt like damp rags, even in the bunk-house,  so welcome he could almost have cried.  He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was. 

Karel was all excitement, though.  “Franta, I can go out, right?  Lend me your car!”

“You’re an idiot,” said Sláma, sitting-up in bed and putting his feet to the cold floorboards reluctantly.

“No, I’m not!  I mean it, Franta, give me the keys!”  The boy was already dressed and shaved – he must have been as quiet as a cat not to wake anyone.  Normally Sláma heard the slightest sound of anything important, even though he had learned to sleep through the barrage of Sysel’s snoring.  

Sláma ran his hand through his hair, rubbed his face.  “All right, all right!  What’s the hurry?”

“I’m going to see Sarah!”

“I realized that, you nutcase, where else would you go?  But Karel, give me a second to wake-up, all right?”  He didn’t really need it, not to wake-up;  flyers couldn’t afford to be half-asleep when they got out of bed.  Sláma was always wide-awake as soon as he came to consciousness at all.  But he wasn’t ready for Karel to go gallivanting all over the countryside before he saw for himself how thick it was out there.  And he wasn’t going to bother saying-so, till he knew.  There was no point in antagonizing the lad.

Karel danced from one foot to the other in an agony of impatience while Sláma rose, went to piss; stood in front of the basin and sluiced his body down quickly, rubbing the coarse British service-issue soap round face, groin and armpits before toweling himself half-dry and pulling his clothes on with difficulty.  “For Christ’s sake, Karel, what’s the hurry?”

“I just want to be on my way!”

“Look, I’ll lend it to you, all right?  Just let me shave and get a bite to eat, and we’ll see about it.  Nobody’s going anywhere in this, it’s too thick to see.  You won’t be able to see, either, you idiot.”

Karel looked disappointed, but he had no choice about waiting:  it was Sláma’s car, and he was the one needing the favour.  Sláma took pity on him, did his best to hurry, dragging the razor across his stubbly jaw in more haste than care.  It was a half-arsed job, but good enough for a foggy day on base.  Together they walked over to the mess-hall, and Sláma made him sit down and eat a bowl of the glue-like lumpy stuff the steward called porridge.  Sláma quite liked it;  the lumps made for something to chew.  The lad would do better with something inside him,  Sláma felt sure:  he was far too excited to be allowed out on the road on an empty stomach.  He needed steadying a bit, first.  He made Karel down a mug of tea, too;  “It’s my car,” he said, “and I’m not giving it to you till I’m satisfied you’re wide-awake.”

“God,” said Karel, “Bennett isn’t such a hard-arse about his bloody Spitfires!  He lets us jump out of bed and fly them in our pyjamas, under our flying-suits – why’d you have to be so difficult?”

“Because if you crash one of his precious Spits, Karel, he can get another one – the RAF will send him one for free.  All he has to do is make out a report complaining about you, how careless you were, letting it fall out of the sky like that, and they’ll say tut-tut, be more careful next time, and bob’s your uncle.  Whereas my car cost me six month’s pay, old man, as you well know – and if anything happens to it it’ll be another six months before I can afford a new one.  Not to mention the petrol-coupons.  That’s a bloody long way you’re going:  you owe me.”

“All right, all right.  Look, I’ve finished my tea.  Now can I have the keys?”

Sláma looked out at the fog.  It curled along the ground in swirling tatters like scarves.  There was no sign of the sky;  the sun was nothing but a faint whitish shimmering glare.  “You’ll hit the first car on the road,” he said.

“No I won’t,” cried Karel, exultantly, “who else would be out on a day like this, anyway?”

Sláma sighed.  “Some other love-sick fool like you,” he said, handing-over the keys.

Karel leapt over the benches to get out of the mess-hall.

Sláma finished his tea, thoughtfully.  The tea Sarah had served was much, much better;  they let this stuff stew in the big aluminium tea-vats till it was bitter enough to bite you back.  The steward maintained it wasn’t proper tea unless you could stand the spoon up in it, but with sugar being rationed it was hard to make it sweet enough to get past the corrosive flavour.  Still, it was hot and reviving.  He thought about Karel, sitting at her kitchen-table and drinking a proper mug of tea, good tea, and felt jealous.  Not just about that, either, though he wouldn’t let his thoughts go any further that way;  there was no point, and he’d only end-up feeling frustrated too.  He didn’t think she’d go to bed with him again, though.  Still, it would be good for the boy just to visit, play with the children, feel at home somewhere besides the functional dreariness of the base. 

Sláma hadn’t been inside too many English homes;  it had felt special, to be there.  It reflected her, he thought, the creamy warmth of the paint over the old textured wallpaper, the framed prints on the walls;  the willow-pattern platters like his mother had, the rolling-pin on the dresser.  A place where food was prepared and served with love;  where tea meant more than just tea, a certain graciousness, a kind of hospitality that stood for something.  Hitler couldn’t spoil that, it said;  he can drop all the bombs he wants, but we’ll have a nice cup of tea together anyway.

He remembered the story that had made the rounds after a particularly bad night in the East End, about a woman with a scarf on her head standing on her shattered doorstep – all that remained of her house.  She had hailed the newspaper reporter from down the street.  He’d gone up to her, ready to hear about that bastard Hitler and her splintered home, her ruined furniture.  “You ain’t seen my bleedin’ milkman, ’ave you?” she asked him.

Sláma shook his head.  God love these English people.  He still didn’t know if they could do it, hold out together long enough to turn the tide, but if he was going to die anywhere it might as well be here, defending this place where people still refused to give in.

He stood, his chair scraping backwards, and went outside to see if Karel had left already.  He had, of course;  there’d been no holding him back.  God, to be young and in love again, he thought.  Well — after the war, perhaps.  If that time ever came.  You had to believe it would, though.  He turned to go back to the bunk-house and spend the morning doing laundry; thought he’d do Karel’s for him too, to be kind.  Through the fog towards the gate the sound of a motor and tires on the gravel came to him.  Was it too thick to drive in, then?  Surely Karel hadn’t seen sense?

No.  It was a smaller car, a grey one.  He was about to go on his way when he saw a woman at the wheel. 

It was Sarah Strickland.

 

He ran over to the car, leaned on the open window.  “You’ve just missed him,” he cried, “he left about five minutes ago.  You must have passed him on the road – look, if we hurry we can catch him!”  He went round the other side, got in quickly.  When they caught up with Karel he could just take his own car back, and Karel could still have his day out with Sarah.

She looked at him, didn’t move.  Her expression was odd;  he couldn’t quite read it.

He waited for her to put the car in gear again.  “Do you want me to drive?” he asked, thinking perhaps she was already worn-out from coming all this way in the fog.  Her eyes looked strained, her face too.

“I didn’t come here to see him,” she said slowly.  He had forgotten how the low tone of her voice thrilled him.  “I came to see you… ”

He felt his heart stop and then start itself again.  She was looking at him with pain in her face.  “I can’t sleep,” she said in a rush, “ – the children talk to me and I don’t hear them —!”

She dropped her head then, biting her lip, and he pulled it to his shoulder with his throat squeezed closed.  She was wearing some sort of cloak with a hood and it had half-fallen back and her hair tickled his neck.  He felt it sharply in his groin;  also her trembling, the scent of her skin, the fact that she’d come all the way here in the fog — to see not Karel, but him.  He’d been fighting it this past month, the thought of her, but it wouldn’t go away.  Now, faced with her presence, it flared-up painfully:  his body and feelings both.

Words came to him, with difficulty:  “He’s my friend… ” he said, helplessly.

“I know,” she said.

“It’s not possible,” he said.  He felt her slump;  recover a little.  Her breathing grew more unsteady.  This was already difficult for her – excruciatingly so, god!  How brave of her, to come and see him like this and tell the truth about all she felt.  “I can’t – I couldn’t do that to him,” he added, the words piercing him as he said them.

She nodded, slowly.  He felt her head moving, her chin against his shoulder.  It hurt her and he could feel it.  He had hurt her.  Oh god, couldn’t she see he didn’t want to say these things?  It was killing him to turn her down, she must know that.

“But.. you do want to – ?”  she asked, her voice trembling more than ever.

All the air went out of his lungs.  When he got a scrap back, he said, “Of course  —!”

She cried.  Not loudly, but bitter little sobs that wrenched his gut and made his cock ache.

“God, Sarah,” he said, not knowing how to comfort her.  “If it wasn’t so — believe me, I’d… ”

“I’ve made a fool of myself,” she said flatly, taking the handkerchief he held out to her and  blowing her nose.

“Ne,” he said, “no, no, you haven’t, please — don’t say that, don’t think it – prosím, Sarah, please!”

“Of course I have,” she said.  “I’ve come all this way and told you I’m losing my mind thinking about you and you’re being very sweet and you’re sending me home.   I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have come.”

“Yes, you should – ”  he said, the truth, before he could stop the words from coming-out.

“Why?”

“Because you’re a brave woman,” he said, “brave, and honest – and you want to tell the truth – don’t you?”

She looked at him.  He wanted to enter her and see those grey eyes widen, the pupils dilate, just like that only more so.  But he couldn’t;  he wouldn’t.  He wasn’t going to.  Because Karel was in love with her, and it wouldn’t be fair.  It wouldn’t be right.

Yes it would, god, he wanted to so much it was breaking him, almost:  it would be the rightest thing that had happened in years… but not right to Karel.

“You understand, then,” she said,  “ – about that, I mean.  Why I had to come.”  A tear rolled down her nose.  He took it on his fingertip, brought it to his lips.  She shivered.  I shouldn’t have done that, he thought.  But I couldn’t help it. And she knows I couldn’t, now.

“Come and have a cup of tea,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I can’t.  I shouldn’t stay.  Not here.  Not now.”

He wanted to argue with her, but she was right.  If he wasn’t going to do this thing, kiss her, talk with her, get to know her and laugh with her, make love with this woman that was Karel’s sweetheart, then she shouldn’t stay.  It would only be more difficult, more painful.  Besides, Karel would know, then.  People would see her, see them together, and it would get back to Karel anyway, even if he hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her, let alone nailed her to his bed the way he wanted to.  The way she wanted him to.

“God,” he said.

“God  is right,” she said.

“You must believe me,” he said, his voice coming-out past the lump in his throat in a croak.  “Truly, honest to god, I am sorry.  More than I can say.  If —  ”  He didn’t know how to finish.  Lost for words, he pulled her head down to his shoulder again, kissed the top of it.  She put her arms round his chest and clung to him.  He held her close, awkwardly, the hand-brake and the gear-lever between them.  He knew he was shaking and that she had to know it, too.

He tried again, looking for something to restore her dignity that she had stripped away to come to him like this.  “Don’t feel — god, what’s the word?”

“Humiliated?” she supplied, bitterly.

“Yes, humiliated – you mustn’t feel that way.  Please.”

“How can I help it?  Don’t be ridiculous, Franta!”

“It’s more than an honour for me,” he told her, wanting her to know just how deeply her gesture had moved him.  “Please don’t tell yourself you were wrong that you have come – that you have told me… ”

She shuddered.  “You felt it too – didn’t you?”

“You know I did,” he said.

She brought his hand to her lips – the palm, not the knuckles.  He cupped her face in his fingers and she snuggled her cheek into them briefly.  He wanted to touch the rest of her, all the beautiful self that she’d come all this way to offer him.  Oh, she hadn’t said it;  she hadn’t needed to.  They both knew that was really what she meant, what she was asking for,  what he was refusing.

“Go home,” he said, “please… before I can’t bear it.”

“You won’t change your mind,” she said.  It was a statement, not a question.

“I can’t,” he said, “ – on my honour.”

“God,” she said.

 

He felt her shaking, thought about the strain in her eyes.  It wouldn’t be right to send her off like this, not all that way back.  But she’d refused his invitation to come inside.  “Look,” he said, “you’re too upset to drive.  Look at you.  Come into the village with me, there’s a tea-shop — you can catch your breath, we can talk a bit — ”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“Shall I drive?”

“No, I can get that far,” she said.  She gave him a little smile then and he felt it somewhere below the diaphragm, the place you’re not supposed to hit someone.

It was a short drive into the village, and he was glad he’d made the suggestion.  She seemed to recover herself, just knowing she didn’t have to leave quite yet.  He tried to imagine how she must be feeling, and his heart went out to her all over again.

There wasn’t much of a selection, what with the fact that there was a war on, but they ordered a pot of coffee and a plate of biscuits.  He pulled-out his cigarette-case, offered her one.

“No, thanks,” she said, “but you go ahead, please.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t need it.  Not now.  I thought only that you might.”

“No,” she said, “though god, if I did smoke, then I’m sure I would.  Need one now. But I don’t, I never cared to.”

“That’s good,” he said, “don’t start.  It’s better that way.  You won’t cough so much.”

She smiled.  There was a pleasant fug in the shop and he felt himself relax a little, even (after a while) sit back in his chair as they talked.

He asked her about her Navy days before the war, and the refugee children;  she asked about Karel and how they had come to meet:  safe subjects.

“We’ve been married ten years,” she said.  “I’d always hoped for children of my own, but — well, it hasn’t happened.  The doctors said it wouldn’t, not after all that time.”

“That’s a pity,” he said, seeing the sadness come into her eyes again as she said it. “You would be an excellent mother, I think.  I know.”

“And you,” she said, smiling through it, “you’d be a wonderful father, Franta… ”

“I hope, one day,” he said.  “After the war.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You could adopt, can’t you?” he asked her, thinking surely it couldn’t all be over for her so soon, at her age.

“They only give to couples,” she said with a sigh.

“Well,” he said, “it’s sad to say it but there will be more orphans, now, so perhaps they can’t be so particular.  You may yet, you’ll see.”

“Perhaps,”  she said.

The coffee was weak and sour, but it made a change from tea.  “I prefer your tea,” he said.  “But this is better than nothing.  My mother’s coffee,” – he smiled, then – “it’s also better.  I miss it – I’m sorry it’s not so good, this.”  She made him tell about Eva Sláma, about the things she cooked, how long she had been widowed, what her hopes for him had been, what sort of person she was to have such a son.

“I’m not so special,” he said, protesting, “I just do what anybody do, in my situation.  We can’t let them take over — can we?  So we do what we must, you do, I do – you take the children, although they are not yours, you feed them, care for them — and I fly, because that’s what I know – how to do.”

She looked at him.  He felt as if she saw past his face to something inside him.

“I’m glad you take this time,” he said. “I wanted to know you better.”

“Me too,” she said. 

It sat between them, unspoken.  “God,” she sighed, “I ought to be ashamed of myself.  I don’t know what I was thinking – ”

“Yes, you do,” he said.  “You were thinking of something that would have been – sweet.  Very nice.  For both of us.  You mustn’t be – what was it – humiliated?”

She leaned forward, not wanting anyone to overhear, but needing to get it out;  it hurt too much not to.  “What must you think of me! … falling into bed with a boy – and then running all over the country after you —!”

He looked at her;  his eyes were kind, regretful.  “Is that what you are doing?”

“Well, aren’t I?”

“No, you aren’t.  You’re not running all over anywhere.  Look – you have come one time to see me, because you want to talk, you want me to know, how you feel — and then you are going home – that’s not wrong.”

“I feel a fool, though.  I should have known better.  I could kick myself.”

“You weren’t wrong,” he said.  “You guessed right.  I told you already.  When we feel so much – not just – to be attracted like every day, you know, she’s pretty, he looks nice, but – every thing that you are feeling now, since… that you don’t sleep – it doesn’t happen by itself.  In a – how-you-say, no air, a vacuum.  It can’t.  You feel because you know I am the same.  Even at your house.  I can’t help for you to know.  What I feel also.  You see it.  At tea.  The way I look at you, the way I don’t look at you, the way you do the same thing.  We’re not children.  Do you think if it wasn’t like this that I had left your house and not asked you to see you again?”

“Would you have?”

“Of course,” he said, “of course!”

“That makes me feel better,” she said.

“It should,” he said.  He felt he owed her more than that, though, after everything she had dared to do and say.  He smiled, took her hand on the table; squeezed it.  “I think you are really brave, to come all this way.  Just to see me.  I wanted to see you again also – very much.  God, I can’t tell you how much.  A lot.  Me also I don’t sleep so well.  But it’s because of Karel, you understand – because he trusts me.  He has bring me to meet you, even.  How can I betray that?  I’m as a father to him almost, not only a friend – and I’m his superior officer also – there is, how you say, layers and layers of obligation that I feel.  Not to take his girl.”

“I’m not his girl, though.”

“No,” he said, “I knew that.  I know it.  But to him you are.  He’s crazy about you.”

“Yes,” she said, sadly.

“I can’t hurt him like that,” he said, thinking about it and wanting her more than ever.  Not just the physical self she was longing to give him, but the caring, the love between a man and a woman:  wanting that with her, to see her face light up to see him, to feel something sweet in his heart again.  To have someone to think about tenderly.  To be special to someone, and to feel the same way… to say ‘yes’ to the special light in her eyes that was for him. 

“No,” she said, “I see, I really do.  Well – thank  you… ”

“You are welcome,” he said, gently.  “You must let me pay.  It’s my treat.”

 

On the way back to the base they talked about the blitz, and Sysel’s nightmares, and Beth and the twins learning to read.  And then it was time for him to get out of the car and his heart was aching all over again.  God, Karel, he thought, and you’ll never know;  you’ll never appreciate what I’ve just done for you.

What did it matter?  They’d probably all be dead in a year anyway.  But it did matter; it mattered how people treated one another, whether they did the right thing;  whether, if they couldn’t, they at least tried to; did their best.  He couldn’t help wanting Karel’s woman – but he could help this.

 

Well, that was that, then.

She pulled-up and set the handbrake and put the car in neutral;  leaned her head on his shoulder one last time.  He put his arm round her, and she made a tiny sound in her throat.  He kissed the top of her head again for goodbye, which made twice now, and she gasped because it was him, Franta Sláma, kissing her hair – and he almost gave in, after everything he’d said;  almost pulled her face to his to kiss her mouth;  almost slipped his hand over her breast as it trembled and yearned to do. 

But he didn’t.  He let her break-off the embrace, though, holding her till she knew it was no use and there was nothing else to do but that.

His body reminded him he hadn’t made love in two years, and he told it to shut up.  She would know by his breathing,  anyway, so there was no need to say anything.

When she did pull away from him, he felt a sharp pang on letting her go.

“Goodbye, then,” she said, her chin quivering slightly.

He straightened, his hand on the car-door-handle but not moving.  “Goodbye, Sarah,” he said.

The sound of her name from his lips was almost too much for her.  He saw her nostrils widen, a new glisten come into her eyes.  “God bless you, Franta,” she said, her voice husky and shaking.

“And you also,” he said.  When he got out of the car he shut the door firmly, carefully.  She put the motor in gear and let out the clutch slowly.  The car pulled off.  She didn’t wave;  neither did he.  He stood there without moving till she had driven away. 

 

 

Back in the bunkhouse, sitting on his bed, he lit a cigarette with shaking hands and took several deep drags, pulling the smoke as deeply into his lungs as it would go.  It didn’t feel deep enough.  If he ever shook like this in the air, he was done for.

But he didn’t, not in combat.  Under fire he was calm, filled with a pure fire of his own that brought everything into sharp focus;  relaxed, even.  It was almost like a game, in a way;  you used all your skill and took each risk from moment to moment, calculating them not in your head – there wasn’t time – but in your gut, your balls even.

It was back on land he felt the lack of solid ground under his feet, felt lost and out-of-control.

But he had managed it, hadn’t he?  Himself, and the situation?  Hadn’t given-away by so much as a shuffle in his seat that his skin was crying-out, his insides hollow with longing to matter to her, his cock standing achingly to attention when he couldn’t drag his mind from her loveliness and the sweet promise of her and what she was really asking him for as they sat in the tea-room and talked of other things, little things? 

Yes, he had.  And sent her away, because he was an honourable man.

 

 

Karel returned that evening, slipping into his seat at a briefing.   “She wasn’t there,” he whispered, “she’d gone to see her brother.  In  London.”

“Oh,” said Sláma, “that’s a pity.  So you didn’t see her, then.”

“No,” said Karel.   “But it was good to get out, anyway.  I walked round the town.. ”

“Ssh,” Sláma reminded him. “Later –!”

Sarah had said to him in the tea-shop, “Look, Franta — don’t tell Karel I came down.  It’ll only make things worse… ” and he’d agreed reluctantly.  She was right, about making things worse, but it felt odd having a constraint between himself and Vojtíšek.   He would rather just have told Karel he’d missed a visit from Sarah, but that would have opened up other cans of worms, or kettles of fish, or whatever unpleasant thing it was in the English saying.

So he said nothing, and felt like a shit.

 

 

 

It was more difficult than ever listening to Karel talk about her now.  He stood it for half-an-hour after lights-out, and then snapped, “Oh, give it a rest!  Do you think I haven’t got any feelings?  You’ve got laid and I haven’t.  So just shut up about it, all right?”

“Oh,” said Karel, stricken, “sorry — I  didn’t think… ”

“I know,” said Sláma, wearily. “That’s why I told you.  So now you do – know –  then give me some peace.  All right?”

“Of course,” said Karel.

He didn’t sleep anyway;  lay there racked with helpless desire, seeing her eyes widen, her mouth tremble, feeling her sobbing against his shoulder – because she wanted the same thing he did, enough to come and beg him for it, and he’d said no to her.

There were a lot of hours he wished he hadn’t;  and then a lot of nights – a lot of cigarettes – a lot of scotch – a lot of anything, everything, except what he wanted;  a lot of nothing.

 

 

They never got much in the way of post, not the Czech boys – why would they?  Who was there to write to them, over here?  Any intrigues any of them had managed to start-up were right here on the base, so that didn’t call for letters.  One came for Karel, though.

It was short:  Dear Karel, please don’t write to me or come to see me any more.  I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you.  Look after your self.  God bless you.  Sarah.

 

Vojtíšek was distraught, of course, ran out of the mess-hall with the envelope in his fingers and out across the airfield, walking up and down by the perimeter fence till he could control his emotions, then came to tell Sláma with his eyes still red from weeping.  Sláma had already guessed.

“Karel,” he said, “look — women are… you can’t control them, you know.  It was a complicated situation – she felt bad about her husband, I’m sure… it wasn’t you, necessarily – don’t feel bad.”

“How am I supposed not to feel bad!” cried the boy, his voice cracking.  “She didn’t say she just wanted to be friends, she said she didn’t want to see me any more – ever!”

“Sometimes that’s better,” said Sláma, meaning it.  “It’s too hard otherwise.  Cheer up.”

“I don’t want to cheer up!”

“Of course you don’t.  Sorry, I shouldn’t have said it.  I meant you’ll feel better, one day.  You don’t think you will, but you will.”

“I want to be in love with her. It’s better than not having anybody.  Even if she doesn’t want to see me any more… ”

Sláma put his arm round Vojtíšek’s shoulder.  He couldn’t think of anything to say, but it didn’t really matter;  it was enough that he was there, that he cared. He knew that.

Poor Karel.

He could see why she’d done it, but it was unkind of her to have been so short.  She could have written a few sweet things, let him down more gently than that.

But she had told the truth;  that she didn’t want to see him or hear from him any more.

She was pulling up the drawbridge, he thought, closing her walls about her.  She must be unhappy.

So that made three of them, then, all miserable.  It was almost funny.

Almost.

 

 

Chapter 4 – Instinct

 

 

He was called into Bennett’s office.

“Ah, Sláma,” said Bennett, looking up from a letter in his hand.  “Sit down.”

Sláma sat, waited for the W/Cdr to play his little I-know-and-you-don’t game.  There were pictures on the walls:  His Majesty, of course, in uniform, looking severe and shy at the same time;  a faded group of chaps in front of a World War One biplane.  Bennett had to be one of them, he couldn’t see which.  Out of the window the usual busy-nesses of base carried on.  He saw Machaty’s girl Janet wheel her bicycle past, the sun glinting on her red hair, talking to the plump blond that Sysel liked but was too tongue-tied to speak to.  Perhaps Janet would put in a word for him.  A fly buzzed inside the pane, down in one corner.

“That business over France the other month,” said Bennett.

“Sir?” asked Sláma.  He wasn’t sure which month, which business;  they flew over France a lot. 

“The Blenheim.  The one you nursed back to Truro.”

Sláma remembered.  He’d wondered if they’d make it, specially after the first Messerschmitt appeared on the scene and then the rest like sharks sniffing after a wounded fish, till he didn’t have enough eyes and arms to keep them all off at once, but somehow he did and they had.  “Is there a problem, sir?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Crew all right, are they?”  He hoped they hadn’t bought it.  But Bennett wouldn’t call him in to tell him if they had, would he?  He wouldn’t even know;  they were Bomber Command, based out of Hampshire somewhere.

“Oh, yes – yes.  Far as I know.”

“That’s good.”

Bennett handed the letter over to him without comment.

He read it.

They were giving him the DFC.

He looked up, said nothing.  What was the appropriate thing to say?  He didn’t know.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” said Bennett.

“Oh, I am, sir — it’s an honour — I haven’t expect it.”

“Didn’t,” said Bennett with a faint smile, “you didn’t expect it.”

Sláma repeated it correctly:  “That’s right, sir, excuse me, I didn’t expect it.”

“Hm. I did,” said Bennett.  “Been waiting to hear.  Good work, Sláma.  Proud of you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your chaps have been getting a few of these, you know.”

“Yes, sir.” 

“But you’re the first of ours – of  mine.”

“Sir.”

Bennett gave him a look that might almost have been called affectionate.  “I wondered, Sláma, I must say — I wondered.  How it was all going to work out.  Still do, sometimes.   But I have to say, in your case – this was deserved.  Absolutely, old chap.  Jolly good.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll be meeting Their Majesties, you know.  Buckingham Palace, and all that.”

He had known, but not really thought about it.  It seemed a long way from Olomouc and the biplane trainers.  It was a distinctive ribbon, one that would not be missed on his tunic:  purple-and-white diagonal stripes.  Quite an honour.  Bennett himself had campaign-ribbons from France, 1914-18, but not the DFC.  “Yes, sir,” he said, and then, feeling something further was called-for, “I was doing my job, sir.”

“Exactly right, Sláma.  Yes.  Don’t lose that modesty – it’s more becoming to a chap than boasting.”

Sláma bristled.  “I hope I don’t do that, sir.”

“No, no – that was what I meant.  Don’t.”

“No, sir.”

“When will I go, sir?”

“They’ll make the arrangements and let us know.”

Sláma nodded.  He was sorry he couldn’t let his mother know.  It would have made her happy.  Well – it would make her happy:  stay with the present and future tense, right?  One day it would, perhaps.  She would like to hear about him meeting the King of England, her Franta.  That would mean something to her.  She had a scrapbook at home, its pages filled with royalty and people in fantastic costumes, on horseback, wearing jeweled crowns.  She had especially liked the Duke of Windsor, was sorry when he got tangled-up with that American and gave up the throne.  He could see her tut-tutting over it at the kitchen-table when he came home to visit.  Well, this was the fellow’s brother, and he was the king now, even if he wasn’t as glamorous.  These were hard times and glamour wasn’t what was needed, anyway;  duty was.  Matka knew about that.  Duty and hard work and sacrifice:  she’d had plenty of those, bringing him and his brothers and sisters up on a war-widow’s pension.  He couldn’t stay there and send her money and marry a nice girl and give her lots of little curly-headed grandchildren, so one day this would do instead.  He’d be sure to have a photograph for her scrapbook.

He recalled himself:  Bennett was looking at him.  “Thank you, sir.  Is that all?”

“When did you last have a day’s leave, Sláma?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir.”  He shrugged.  Leave was an odd commodity;  what did one do with it, anyway?  Go to London for a show and hope you didn’t get blitzed?  It wasn’t as if he knew anybody to go and see.

His heart thumped, then.

He did now.

No.

“Take Sunday.  Go and see about your dress-uniform, make sure your shoes are polished.  Get a new hat.”

“Yes, sir.  Thank you, sir.”

“Very good, Sláma.”

That meant he was dismissed.  It didn’t mean it, of course, not literally, but that was what it meant.  That was the trouble with languages, that you could learn all the words you wanted and sometimes still you wouldn’t know what the hell someone was really saying.  Bennett said his name with a rising intonation at the end of it, that ought to be a question but wasn’t.  It was a little habit he had.  Sláma wondered if he would ever get this English business really right.  He saluted and walked out feeling odd.

The DFC was important.

So was an extra day’s leave.

He told himself he was just going to ask her to write Karel a nicer letter.  It would be nice to sit in her garden again and drink tea and talk.   If it wasn’t raining.  It rained a lot, here, it seemed.

He walked into a WAAF and her bicycle, had to apologize.  He said “Excuse me,” and she said, “Why don’t you look where you’re bloody well going?” and he realized he should have said not excuse me but sorry.

“Sorry,” he called after her, rubbing his shin where he’d caught it a sharp knock on the pedal.  Why were they always pushing those bloody bicycles round the place, anyway?  If they needed them, why didn’t they just get on and pedal, damn them, like any other ordinary person would?

Because they were girls, and liked to talk.

And ‘sorry’ meant you knew it was your fault.

 

 

He drove faster this time, knowing where he was going and not having Karel to make conversation with and point at things out of the car-window.  There was a brief delay going through Oxford where the road had been diverted, he couldn’t see why, and then the fields were unrolling round him again and he was thinking how charming they were, whether seen from above or at ground-level, and trying not to notice the dryness in his mouth.  A pair of land-girls with a team of large plough-horses waved at him, and he waved back.  It wasn’t far now, was it?

What if she wasn’t home?

What was he going to tell Karel?

He’d tried to tell him about Sarah’s visit, not that she’d come to see himself, Franta,  but that she’d stopped by.  It might have taken a bit of the sting out of the letter, knowing she’d at least attempted to visit.  It took a couple of false starts, because the first time he tried Karel was drowning his sorrows after the letter came and wasn’t really listening.  He persisted, though, and got the news across.  “I should have told you,” he said, “but I thought you’d be disappointed to have missed her, and so did she.”

“Oh,” said Karel.  “Well, that’s water under the bridge now, isn’t it.  She was probably coming to drop me in person.”

Sláma had shrugged.  It didn’t seem to mean much to Karel one way or the other, but at least he could stop pretending it hadn’t happened.

But what about this?

He’d ask Sarah to be kinder, and she’d write Karel something a bit longer, explain to him about her missing husband and how complicated everything was and that he shouldn’t take it personally and he really was very sweet and she had liked him a lot.  And he hadn’t done anything wrong, and she still liked him, just couldn’t see him again.  Because.  All that sort of thing.  He’d bring it back with him and —

No;  she’d have to post it.

But still, that was why he was going.  To ask her to do that.  Right?

 

He didn’t know.  He didn’t know anything any more.  He wanted a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke and he didn’t want to arrive smelling of that.  It wouldn’t be considerate, would it?  Well, how close did he mean to stand to her?  Closer than that.

He drove on.

 

 

There was the house, its roof grey above the trees.  He’d found his way back to it like a wild creature seeking its home, some combination of scent and direction and pure magnetism.  When he pulled into the lane, though, he saw several cars in it.  Damn:  he’d forgotten – when they’d talked about the refugees, hadn’t she said something about their parents visiting the first Sunday of the month?  Was that today?

Yes.  Well, he’d come so far, so – might as well say hello, anyway, even if she was too busy to be able to spend any proper time with him.  There were deck-chairs out on the lawn, people in them, and children running everywhere.  He pulled-up next to the garden-hedge and got out.

A woman, not Sarah but someone older, stouter, was digging-over part of the border on the other side of the hedge.  She stood-up straight when Sláma came up;  behind her Sarah was kneeling on the ground, her feet in Wellington boots, her hands full of weeds and a pile of them on the ground next to her. 

“Hello,” said the woman, “can I help you?”

Sarah looked up and saw Sláma in his uniform there.  He waited for her to say hello, but she didn’t.  She blinked and got to her feet too, staring.

He wasn’t sure what to do.  Was he supposed to pretend that he didn’t know her, in front of all these people?  Was that what she wanted?  Had he embarrassed her, by turning-up unannounced like this?  Perhaps he shouldn’t have come.  Perhaps her note to Karel included him, too.

The woman began to frown, because he wasn’t saying anything.  Sláma stepped forward; began, “I’m sorry, I have lost my way.  Can you tell me please where is the road to – to London?”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” said the woman, “you really are lost, aren’t you.  It’s miles back, you’ve come a long way off it.  Go left, look, and keep on going past the village and through the next one, and you can’t miss it.  Just keep going south.”

Sarah came up to the hedge.  She had found her voice again, it seemed.  He met her eyes – they were grey as he remembered, and just now the pupils were very wide for outdoors.  Although it was overcast, not sunny:  but still.  They were wide because of him.  “You could go a different way,” she said, “it’s shorter.  Turn right, and then another right.  But drive slowly, the lanes are bad.  They’re full of potholes.”

Why would she tell him that?  To drive slowly?

“Thank you, yes,” he said, still pretending.  He wasn’t a pretender by nature, quite the opposite, and it was the strangest feeling.  She blinked again:  her expression said sorry, I can’t help this – but do as I say… please…

“Yes,” he said again, “of course.  I will – take care and drive slowly.”  He got back in his car again, let out the brake and clutch, drove off slowly to the right as she had said.

Round the first turn the lane became an avenue of tall trees, elms he thought.  He didn’t take it above second, was crawling along looking in his rear-view mirror for a sight of Sarah coming after him.  It was the oddest feeling;  it reminded him of flying his Spit and keeping half an eye on the mirror above the cockpit for the flash of an enemy plane.

Then suddenly there was a grey blur in front of him and he jammed on the brake;  she’d turned out of a tiny side-road, no more than a farm-track, right under his bumper almost.  She did the same, braking sharply, and the cars stopped inches from one another in a crunch of gravel.

It was starting to drizzle, a thin rain falling out of a curdled sky.  The trees tossed their branches, as if further gusts from the west might bring more very soon.  She got out of the car slowly, like someone in a dream, and he did the same.  None of it felt real, only the hollowness he felt at the thought of seeing her again.  They stared at one another across the car-bonnets, an almost comic moment.  Then he lifted his hands just a little, a shrug more than anything, to say Well –? and she came the rest of the way to him and into his arms.  He couldn’t find any English words, though in his head absurdly he heard himself calling her srdíèko,  sweetheart.  He couldn’t say sweetheart, not that he didn’t know the word, but it wasn’t allowed.  She wasn’t his sweetheart, she was Karel’s.  Wasn’t she?

Her face was inches from his, her eyes grey pools.  It seemed she’d lost her tongue again, too.  What a pair they were.  Well, god, what were two people supposed to say to one another at a moment like this, so fraught with fate that even the trees were flinging their arms about?   They stood perfectly still, as if time did not apply to them.  Small drops of rain fell on his face.  He put his fingers to her cheek and she nestled her jaw there.  He did say it then, said her name softly and then after it, “Srdíèko… ”

Her pupils widened even further.  She might not know what it meant, but she knew from his tone it wasn’t just hello.  “Darling,” she said, her voice trembling.

Her face was tilted up, lips parted.  He could see her top teeth, pretty and even, and the tip of her tongue, just.  All he had to do to kiss her was to bend his head.

If he did, he’d be lost;  lost to honour, to himself;  to decency, to the last strained shred of loyalty he felt to Hanicka;  to Karel and their friendship, whatever that meant;  to everything except now.

Slowly, mouth trembling in the knowledge of it, unable or unwilling to stop himself, he bent his head.

Her mouth was sweet under his, formed itself immediately to his own, kissed him back.  They kissed and kissed, holding one another tightly, the rain falling harder now.  Fresh gusts of wind soughed in the leaves all down the avenue, echoing the sighs he couldn’t help and she neither.  They were both breathless, and yet they couldn’t take their mouths from each other’s, it seemed.  She was slight and warm in his arms and he felt her pressed up against him from thigh to breast.  She was still wearing those ridiculous black rubber boots, and a plain skirt, and a blouse and cardigan.  He kept on kissing her now they had broken this barrier, till he was completely stiff and she wouldn’t be able to help feeling it.  He didn’t care, because that was what she wanted;  her tongue told him that, her hands caressing his back, the nape of his neck, his head.   It had been a long time, though, god, two years?  Yes, at least;  more;  he bit back a groan as it took him sharply.

“Oh,” she said then, at the sound of his voice even if it was just a groan he couldn’t help, “oh, god, Franta… I couldn’t believe it was you – I didn’t know what to say – I couldn’t believe you’d really come… ” Her hands clasped his face now, as if he were precious to her.

“Here I am,” he answered, feeling that little smile on his lips, the one that was a bit diffident, a bit not.  It knew more than he was willing to say.  He shrugged slightly.  “Now what —?”

It started to rain in earnest.  She looked at his car, at the back seat – it made sense, it was foolish to stand here in the rain and get soaked, the two of them, even just to talk, so he opened the door and she got in and so did he.  She opened her arms to him again and he came into them and kissed her some more.  She slipped a hand down to his waist and then towards the fork of his legs and he gasped, held her waist too, his hands under her cardigan.  Then as she turned and wriggled against him her breast was under his palm and he caressed it, because what else was he supposed to do?  It had been two years, for crying-out-loud, his body said, two years, and he was thirty-two years old and aching to touch a woman.  So then they fondled one another as well as kissing, till both were gasping and she too was making sounds in her throat.

He broke apart from her when his hard-on was almost unbearable.  Actually he’d waited too long and it was already unbearable, but that was no-one’s fault but his.  “No, Sarah,” he said, “not like this.  This is ridiculous… ”

“No, it’s not,” she said, “Franta, it’s not… ”

“Yes, it is,” he said, “for God’s sake, Sarah, I didn’t come for this, I don’t have anything, I didn’t bring – how you say – protection, I didn’t intend… we can’t get carried away like this!”

“The doctor said I can’t have children, remember?” she said, her cheeks a deep rose from all the kissing and her eyes over-bright.  “And god only knows when we ever will, if not now – Franta, please – please — !?”

He had never in his life been begged for it.   He had been the one doing the imploring, with Hanicka – oh, not to go all the way, he wouldn’t have pressed Hanicka  for that, but at least to give him some kind of release if she was going to tell him not to stop kissing her in that breathless laughing way she had when he told her no more, Hanicka, no more, and she wanted more.  And then after months and months she’d told him  shyly to go all the way, because they were as good as married, weren’t they, almost?  And he’d said Of course we are, meaning it with all his heart, with every intention of making it the truth as soon as he’d saved enough for a place to live and a wife on that wretched pay – and he had, with her permission.  Tenderly, holding himself back, being so very careful, those first few times at least.  Hanicka was only twenty, had never had anyone else.

But this wasn’t about permission;  nor was it tender.  This was two adults so starved of fulfillment that they were a bonfire of need as soon as they touched.  He thought of the word ‘incendiary.’  “Sarah, no,” he said, “I wanted to do it properly, not like this – this is – what boys do with girls, I want to make love to you better than this…!”

“No, now,” she said, “Franta, this is all the time we’ve got, now – nothing could be better than now, I swear to god, I couldn’t want anything more than I want to feel you now… ”

It was true, and he knew it.  He felt the same way;  he gave in.  It was clumsy on the back seat, there wasn’t enough room and he tore her knickers helping her to pull them off.  They were damp and she was altogether wet inside them, bit her lip knowing he felt that.  She looked vulnerable, lying back there in the corner of the car-seat so desperate for him that she’d say so.  He kissed her again, the same hungry kiss but altogether different now because they were going to make love and they both knew it.  His hand slipped under her blouse, cupped her naked breast, and her hands were busy with his trouser-buttons and then suddenly on his flesh so that he almost ejaculated then and there at her touch.  “Jezishi Christe,”  he said, “ – god, Sarah, wait, don’t do that – it’s too much!  Wait!”  and instead she shifted under him and guided him into her.  Not that he needed any guiding, god, she was drenched and it was easy, despite the awkwardness of their limbs in the cramped space.  She was right under his hips where he needed her to be, and he was between her thighs, where else? – and it was no more difficult to enter her than if they’d been in bed, not the narrow back seat of his car.

He’d always worn a rubber, before:  the difference was shocking, so much so that he almost lost everything with his first thrust.  With effort he clawed himself back down from that pitch of arousal, unable to contain a sharp groan.  She pulled him into her with a tigress’s heat;  holy mother of god, she was as frantic for it as he was.  “Ah!” he said as their bodies joined with urgent motions, “oh — ahh!”  He’d wanted it to be different, to take his time with her if he was going to do this at all, be more of a gentleman, but this (it seemed) was what she wanted from him and he couldn’t help giving it to her, so what did it matter?  Still he gasped, apologetically, “Sarah – I can’t last a long time, not like this, not this time, I’m sorry – ”

“God, Franta,” she said, “all I want is for you to spill inside me, don’t you know that?” — and hearing her say that did it:  made him do so, helplessly. 

Machaty had taught him the English words for it, one day, because (he said) if Franta ever needed them he’d be glad he had, it wasn’t nice according to Janet to use words like ‘ejaculate’, even if it was in the dictionary.  Very nice, he’d thought, filing it away in memory – but when Sarah said it, meaning it, his response was instantaneous:  he lost it in a tide of overwhelm, just at the thought and the sound of her saying it. 

Outside it was pouring down and the windows were all steamed-up and there was condensation running down inside them, the back window too, silver rivulets.  He noticed them even as he spent, the harsh sound of his own groans too and her joyful cries like sobs on hearing them, as soon as she understood that he was and it was now;  and the way her hair clung in damp tendrils to her face, and her eyes had dark specks in the irises, and his hat there on the front passenger seat where he’d left it, as if everything about the moment was to be fixed in his memory for ever now.

She looked altogether radiant, triumphant.  Why did women like that so much, when you lost it completely?

It was so much too much that he trembled afterwards, couldn’t speak for a bit.  He wanted to say I’m sorry, but he wasn’t, or not sorry enough for it to be altogether true.  He wanted to say Miluyi t˘e  to her too, that he loved her, but was that true?  How could you love a woman you’d only known for a few hours altogether?  So he didn’t say anything, tried instead just to catch his breath.  She said his name, Franta, Franta, called him darling, smoothed the wildness of his hair back down.  Her eyes shone, her voice was altogether different:  happy, not shaky any more but deep and husky and fulfilled in some way even though there was no chance she could have reached her own climax, it hadn’t been anything like long and tender enough for that – but still she sounded as if he had just brought her the crown jewels, not a hasty scrambled desperate act in the back of a car, for christ’s sake.

Outside the rain drummed on the roof, the tree-branches creaked, the droplets splashed all around.

“God, Sarah,” he said when he could say anything at all.  “When you sayed that, you finished me off – I couldn’t help it —!”

“Oh, my love,” she whispered, “Franta, my love… ”

“Srdíèko,”  he said back to her, kissing her in-between:  “miláèku…! ”

“Oh god,” she said, “what did you say?  I never heard anything so beautiful… ”

“I said the same as you,” he said, “sweetheart, darling… it came out, I don’t know – I meant it — !”

“Say it again,” she said, and he did, still lying there all squeezed-in like sardines together, his body between her knees that were up round his ears:  sr-djich-ko, he told her, say it:  that’s sweetheart, and mi-la-i-ichku, darling… and she did, she said them back to him, and he felt himself respond because she said them with a tremor in her voice and he hadn’t heard anything like it in two years and she was speaking Czech to him and he was still inside her, even.

He had to shift his weight, then, because he realized most of it was on her, the seat was too narrow for him to take it on his own elbows as he should, and really there wasn’t room for them like that, only in the fiercest moment of their need for one another.  “I can’t stay like this here,” he said, “god I want to, but – if we don’t move we’ll be sore, I think –!”

She smiled, pulled him deeper into her again for a sweet moment;  kissed him one last time while he was still there, and let him go.  He withdrew and they rearranged themselves more normally the way people sit in a back seat, side-by-side, their clothes in complete disarray but what did it matter? — the windows were steamed-up anyway and who was there to see?  But at least this way they could get their breath and not sprain an arm or a leg.  He wondered if it had been ungentlemanly to do that, bang her in the back of his car like that with barely any words between them first, but he knew it was what she’d wanted, all she’d wanted.  So that couldn’t be ungentlemanly, could it?  And where else were they supposed to go, the two of them?  To her house, that was filled with Londoners?  No;  this was the only place they had, right now, because it was pouring with rain and they couldn’t even spread a blanket behind a hedge as he’d done with Hanicka sometimes in that other world that was lost to him now.

So he held her close to his chest, just while he caught his breath enough to finish making love to her,  and she traced it with her fingertips, making him shiver;  and so then he kissed the top of her head where it lay snuggled against him.  From the tenderness between them then and the complete ease he knew it might have been practically awkward, in the car like that, but physically and emotionally it had been exactly what was needed, like summer lightning, as inevitable and as natural, and that he ought not to worry any more about whether it was right.  And he knew when she said ‘love’ again that he was.

She heard herself say it, though, and it must have made her self-conscious:   “Is that  silly, calling you my love?” she asked. “Franta, honestly – it’s what you are!  But – it’s ridiculous – we hardly know each other!”

“Yes, we do,” he said, stroking her hair and feeling the tingle of her flesh on his still all through his balls, his belly, his spine, “don’t you see it?  It’s the war – everything that is important, we know already.  The rest is just – details, no?  I know you are sincere – I know you are also generous, and brave — ”  He brought her hand to his mouth, kissed the palm of it till she shivered and did the same to him.  It made him shiver, too, her sly tongue and little kisses. 

Into his hand she whispered, “Yes… and I  know you’re  funny – and passionate – and tender – and strong, and… ”

“Sssh, that’s enough,” he said, “don’t make me, how-you-say, don’t make me red in face.”

“What do you mean, it’s the war?”

“I mean the same you said, Sarah – it’s the war that makes you see all what’s underneath.  What’s real.  We can’t hide, not now.  We can’t pretend.  Whatever we had before, it’s nothing, it doesn’t count, yes?  Our clothes, our house, our car, our money, it’s nothing.  We are naked.  All we have got is our self.  And even in a moment we could not have that, we don’t know.  So we can’t live for the past, we can’t live for the future, it’s cliché, yes? – if we don’t live for now then we don’t live.  Full-stop, end of story.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“We will get to know more,” he said, “if God is good. I want to discover lots of things about you.   But the most important I know already.  I knew before you came to see me even.  You did also.  We knew the first time at your house.  Everything that was most true about each other.”

She nestled her head to him.  “Su-dich-ko?”

“Sr-djie-chko,” he said.  When she said it, it turned him inside-out, to hear himself called that.  He thought she must feel the same way, and said, “darling…” softly.  He’d been right;  it made her sigh, and he said it again just to hear her.   The thought of making her come now filled him with honey, and he began to caress her breast through her clothes with murmured endearments, English and Czech all mixed together.

“Oh, god,” she gasped, “oh Franta, that’s sweet… surely you couldn’t – not so soon, not again – ”

“No,” he smiled, “Sarah, miláèku, of course I can’t, not yet – not that soon! – I’m not how-you-say, super-human, you know – this is for you, sweetheart… ”

He was thinking as he said it that it wasn’t very likely she’d reached a climax with Karel.  He was sweet, but totally inexperienced;  a first-time lad like that wouldn’t know, not unless she’d shown him how to please her – and the boy had said nothing of the kind in all his blissful ramblings.   So – lovely aching Sarah – how doubly sweet it would be to give her that.  The way she’d kept staring at his hands, that day at tea, left him in little doubt what she’d been thinking – not to mention everything that had led up to this moment, her trip to see him, her unashamed asking for him.

“You don’t need to,” she said.  The confidence with which she’d claimed him was gone, the fierce joy too.  She was behaving as if it was over, their love-making.

“What?” he asked, softly, “do you think I’m not a gentleman, to care about this?”

“No,” she said, “I know you are — but this was enough.  For now.  More than enough.” 

“No, it wasn’t,” he said, making her gasp with his fingertips on her breast.

“Yes, it was — really… ”

“I don’t understand,” he said, not understanding in all truth. “You must let me how-you-say, reciprocate, no?  Sarah, please, for god’s sake, you will permit me?  I want that… believe me, I want it so much as I want what we have just did – more, I think.”

“I’m not sure… ” she whispered.

He must not have made it clear what he meant;  that must be it.   “Ssshhh,” he whispered, “all I do for you is same you do for you, no?  It’s not difficult… I don’t try to make you come same time as me – not complicated – just to come, to have climax, no?  – yes?”   He tried to be straightforward, feeling a flood of tenderness for her, for the panic in her face as he spoke, though it wasn’t easy to explain.  What was she afraid of?  Of failing, not getting there? 

“I don’t know what that is,” she said.  “I mean, people talk about it, but I have no idea.  I never had one.”

Dear god, he thought:  Sarah, Sarah.  No wonder she’d looked at him that way.  Was it possible?  How clumsy, how insensitive could that husband of hers be?  “Then you must let me give you idea,” he said, his throat tight with compassion, trying to imagine a life without sexual release, and failing.  “Come, Sarah, shh – sshh – permit me, I know what I am doing… you deserve it… it’s my pleasure, to do for you –!”   He caressed her further, till she whimpered.  “See — it’s what you want, isn’t it?” he murmured.

“Yes,” she said then, “god, yes —!”

She clung to him and shook.  It wasn’t difficult – god, it was easier than for Hanicka, because it had been his joy to satisfy Hanicka whenever they got the chance, so she didn’t start by needing it so badly.  Sarah was almost raw with need;  everywhere he touched her, kissed her, she was exquisitely sensitive.  Who couldn’t see that?  What kind of idiot wouldn’t offer her this?  In no time at all he had her clutching at his hair, the car almost shaking with her trembling.  “There,” he murmured, “Sarah, there – see… it’s not difficult, you are there almost, I know it – ”  Her petals were soaked with his seed as well as her own wetness, since he hadn’t used anything;  caressing her tenderly was the easiest thing in the world.

When she came he slid two fingers inside her and kissed her neck.  Not her mouth, because she was having enough trouble gasping for breath, but her neck in its tender curve to show her how tender he  felt, how beautiful she was in this moment.  Between the little breaking waves of her release she gasped “Franta – !”  It moved him in his gut, that this first time ever for her had his name all through it like that.

“Sarah,” he whispered back, “there… you see?  There!”

She didn’t sound like Hanicka, and he was glad of that:  he wanted it to be different.  She sounded like herself, only more so;  abandoned, instead of controlled as she usually was.  Her cries were low and sweet to his ears:  nothing dramatic or exaggerated, just a few sobbing breaths and then her hands clinging to him as if she were drowning – he’d have bruises tomorrow, little ones, he thought.

He thought about the way she’d watched his hands tie the hanky knotted around Beth’s arm;  dragged her eyes from him stirring his tea.  It made sense, now.  He wanted her again, but it was just too difficult in the car like this;  they’d break an arm trying, or wrench someone’s back,  if they didn’t watch out.  So he held her, let his responding hard-on ebb away again.

“Franta –!”  she gasped.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but your husband is a fool.  That was easy — easy!  Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, and burst into tears.  Not pretty ones, either, but the kind a woman cries when she is raw.

He knew it wasn’t his fault she was crying, so it was easy to cuddle her till she got over them.  She was still shaking, quite uncontrollably now, from emotion as well as anything he had done.  He didn’t want her to thank him, though – was glad when she didn’t.  It wasn’t something you thank a person for;  it was a mutual gift, like the give-and-take of the sexual act itself.   She said his name again instead. 

“What,” he said, kissing her hair,  “what?  What is it, Sarah?  You liked that, didn’t you?”

“Charles — said I was frigid,” she said in a rush, and cried harder still on the hurtful word.  Ten years’ worth of sobbing filled his arms.  There were a lot of things he could have said – angry things about her oaf of a husband – but he didn’t say any of them except, “But you see – you’re not!  Are you?”

She shook her head.

“That’s why you wanted me, isn’t it?” he murmured.  “Because you see in my eyes I want to make this with you… ”

She nodded.  He held her close to his chest.  “Sshh… sshhh… it’s all right — it’s all right!” he murmured.  “God, you’re not frigid — sh, shh — you’re a beautiful, passionate woman, Sarah… look at you, you’re everything that a man can want –!”

His shirt was soaked with her tears.  When she had finished crying, he dried her face with his hanky.  Her eyes were swollen.  “I don’t believe it – this is ridiculous – I have to go — ” she said, “Franta, help me, I’m supposed to get back and I’m falling apart!”

“Yes you are – look, you’re still shaking,” he pointed-out, smiling at her and smoothing her tangled hair all come loose from its pins.  “How are you going to go back like that?  Look, you’ll have to do your hair again also… ”

“God,” she said, “I must look a sight.”

“Yes,” he said, “ – a beautiful one.  Krásný.  But – you need to tidy-up, before you go back.  Me too.  Look at my tie – ”  It was up under his ear, and he didn’t want to think what Piers was going to say about all the creases and worse on his uniform.  He’d have to sponge it off and press it himself, before Piers got his hands on it.

“My hands are shaking too much,” she said, a hairpin dropping from her fingers even as she said it.  He stretched, rummaged around under the seat for it;  it was almost out of reach.  He found it with a grunt of effort, passed it back to her.  “God,” she said, “look at me, I’m completely useless.”

“There’s no hurry, is there?” he said.

“Yes,” she sighed, “they leave at three, and I ought to say goodbye… besides, look at us, we’re just stopped right here in the middle of the road, both cars!”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I forgot!”

“Sooner or later someone’s going to come this way, and we’ll have to get out and I’ll have to be decent…  god, what am I going to do?  I’m a complete wreck!  Franta, let me have one of your cigarettes – please?”

“But you don’t smoke!” he said in surprise.

“No, but aren’t they supposed to calm your nerves?  God, I need something!  I can’t even do up my buttons, Franta, look what a state I’m in!”

“It’s not a good idea – you won’t like it,” he said, “ – trust me.  Not if this is the first for you.  Don’t you think one first-time is enough, in an afternoon?”

She gave him a look.  It was half-amused and half-desperate.  He saw she wasn’t used to being beside herself like this;  it frightened her.  “Hand it over,” she said, “and don’t be cheeky!”

He did;  lit it for her too.  She took a deep draw right away before he could tell her not to and choked on it, spluttering helplessly as he had known she must.

He didn’t say ‘what did I tell you?’ because that wouldn’t have been kind or helpful, and besides, it was his fault she was shaking like a leaf and couldn’t stop.

“God,” she said, “how can you stand these things?”

“You get used to it,” he smiled, “and then you like it.  And it does calm you down, when you are used to it.  But not the first time.  The first time it’s dreadful.”

“So I see,” she said, handing it to him, “ – here, you finish it.  Before it finishes me.”

He took a couple of drags, grateful once it was in his fingers even though he wouldn’t have dreamed of lighting-up otherwise.  When he turned back to her she was lying with her head tipped back against the seat.  Her face was faintly green, her eyes watering again.  “Sarah,” he said, stricken, “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have let you,” and he wound down the window and threw the remainder out right away.

“I’m all right,” she said, and then she got out of the car very quickly, rumpled half-unbuttoned clothes and all, and vomited in the ditch.  He knelt beside her, put his arm round her shoulders;  gave her his handkerchief, felt guiltier than ever. 

She was barefoot.  “What happened to your boots?” he asked when she took his arm to stand up again.  He’d only just noticed that she wasn’t wearing them, at least consciously, even though it was obvious when he thought about it that there wouldn’t have been room for the boots and the two of them in the back seat.

“I left them outside on the other side,” she said, “I didn’t have a choice, really.”

“Oh,” he said, concerned, “they will be wet!”

“That’s the least of my worries,” she said, and they burst out laughing.

They got back into his car to finish dressing, then, at least to fasten their clothes properly before anyone came along.  He helped her with the little buttons on her blouse, because she really couldn’t manage them.  “I haven’t made too much of a fool of myself, have I?” she asked him.

He looked at her.  “What do you think?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Right,” he said.  “What is it you say? – anything but that.”

“I want you so much… ” she said, her voice trembling still.

“Me also,” he said.  “I can’t wait to do this properly, Sarah – to take time, have a place that is comfortable –!”  They both looked at the cramped little seat and giggled again. “But,” he added quickly, “I wouldn’t have miss this for the world.”

“Me neither,” she said.

“Not tonight, though,” he said, in disappointment, knowing it just wasn’t possible, not if he was to be back at the airfield by six o’clock as he was supposed to.

“No – that’s why I’m glad we did this,” she said, smiling.

“Me also,” he said.  “But I shall be writing your name on my sheets till I see you again, Sarah, that’s the truth –!  What?”

“God,” she said, “I love how you talk about it – you just talk about everything, there’s nothing you won’t say!”

“Not with you,” he said, surprised, “what could I keep from you?”

“Charles is too embarrassed to talk about it,” she said.

“That’s why he’s no good at doing it,” said Franta, which was altogether too true to be funny.  “What for be embarrassed?  We are made this way, we can’t help it –!  It’s beautiful, isn’t it – making love?”

“With you it is,” she said.

“I’m nothing special,” he shrugged, “there are plenty of chaps who know what they are doing, Sarah, even in bed!”

“Maybe in your country,” she said.  “Not here.”

He thought about Janet’s sparkling devotion to Machaty, and wondered whether she was right.  Not that you’d ever ask another fellow if he was good in bed – but from the way Machaty’s fingers lingered on the keys, there wasn’t much doubt…  What did he know about English men?  Perhaps they were often so inhibited.  That would be a shame.  A big price to pay for that stiff upper lip.  That wasn’t the part you wanted to be stiff in bed, not if you wanted to please a woman.  “You realize,” he said, wanting to see her smile again, “also, till I see you again, it’s going to be very difficult thinking about you while I’m in the air.  I’ll have to stop myself.  There’s almost no room for me in there as it is.  Absolutely not for this too!”

He’d pulled her hand there to feel the truth of this statement for herself when the sound of a car pulling-up with its horn blaring made them jump.  He’d left the window open after her difficulties with the cigarette, but the rest were still quite fogged-up and it took them by surprise.  Then he threw his curly head back in helpless laughter for a moment before getting out of the car and calling-out, “Excuse me!  I’m sorry!  We just almost have crash and I hadn’t moved my car yet – permit me – !”

  He climbed back in the driver’s seat, and turned the engine on, pulled over a few yards down the road to give them room to pass.

“Oh, god,” said Sarah, “it’s the Flanagans.  They’ll know my car.”

“Oh,” he said, “well, they didn’t see anything.”

‘No,” she giggled, “just the windows all steamed up… ”

“We were discussing my insurance,” he smiled.  He pronounced it in-surance, the same way he mispronounced other things here and there, like ‘clee-max’ and ‘ay-gayn,’ – though, of course, he had no idea it was charming.

“Come back to the house and have tea,” she said. “I’ll say I met you in the lane, almost ran into you… don’t go yet!  You can’t.  I feel like a silly schoolgirl, throwing-up and everything – come home?”

“All right,” he said. “Anyway, it will be the truth, wouldn’t it?  You did almost ran into me.  And I did ran into you…!   Can you drive with bare feet?”

“’Course,” she said, leaning over and ruffling the curls on top of his head.  “Follow me, this way’s a short-cut – that’s how I knew I’d catch-up to you.”

So he followed her car, and was grateful when they reached her house to see that the woman doing the gardening was leaving, since he didn’t fancy a whole long explanation.

There was an hour or so before he had to get back.  He spent it playing with the twins, whose parents hadn’t come, telling them stories from his own childhood, while at the same time he stuffed dry newspaper into her boots, pulling it out again damp and stuffing more.  He did the best he could with the words he didn’t know.  “It was – what?  That is a sort of a horrible old woman, she’s very bad, and her nose is bigger than mine –!”

“A witch!”

“Yes, that’s right, a witch!  And this witch can make bad things happen, because her heart was as black as her frock!”   The twins giggled.  Sarah looked over at him.  They couldn’t make love again, though he wanted to very badly, but it was enough to catch her eye now and then.  She had a glow to her that she tried to hide and couldn’t, and he knew he had put it there and it made his insides turn-over to think about it.

He did wonder what to do about Karel, now, a subject which had been far from his thoughts in the car.  It didn’t seem the time to ask her to write to him again, not now.  Was it better for him to know?  Or not?  He wanted him to know, because that way it would hurt and be over and done with, straightforwardly, and they could just deal with it and not have to hide anything.  But it would be a cruel blow… would it break his heart?  And they had to fly together, bunk together, the lad wouldn’t be able to get away from Sláma no matter what, even if he wanted to knock his block off.  It would be excruciating for Karel, he could see that.  Was it selfish of him to want to tell, then, salving his own conscience at the expense of his friend’s feelings?

Perhaps.  When Sláma thought about it even the fire he was holding her boots up to seemed to turn dimmer, cooler, and he felt a draught.

The last of the refugee parents left, not long before he had to, and she came to sit with him for a few minutes.  It was sweet, even though they couldn’t say much because of the children.  One of the boys was tearful and she was cuddling him on her lap.  She reached across the table, put her hand on his wrist.  His identity bracelet fell half-out of his sleeve and she traced it with her fingertip.  “How would I know, if – if anything had happened, Franta —  to you — how would I find out?”

He sighed.

“I have to know,” she said, her voice catching, “you understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he answered, “I don’t like to think about it but I know you have to, you deserve it.  It’s only right.  Let me think…  when Karel stayed with you, where has he telephoned?  He rang, in the morning, to the base, where from did he ring?”

“The neighbours, the Watsons,” she said, “they’ve got a telephone.  You couldn’t ring-up to talk to me, I’d hate to bother them, and it’s half a mile down the road, so I couldn’t come to the phone even if you rang, but — I could get a message… ”

“Well then you write down the number for me and I will give to Janet.  She’s Machaty’s girl,” he went on, smiling at her and wanting to pinch the tip of her nose for giving him that look, but not doing it because of the children.  The little boy decided he’d had enough baby-stuff, then, and climbed down to join the others – so Sláma leaned forward.  “You silly, do you think I can handle more than one woman?”  he murmured, too softly for them to hear.  “You’re almost too much for me all by yourself – beside, god, couldn’t you tell I hadn’t had anybody for ever so long?  You must have!”

She went faintly more pink again.  God, he loved that.  “Can she keep a secret?”  she asked.  He wondered if she meant her secret about him, or his from Karel.  It didn’t matter either way;  Janet could keep both, wouldn’t gossip, not if he asked her not to.

“Yes, I think so.  She’s a nice girl.  She’s crazy about him.  Of course, she’d like to marry him, but he can’t, he’s already married.”

“What, back home in Czechoslovakia?”

“Yes, a long time.”  Poor Irma.  She had always been very sweet to him, back in Olomouc.  He saw her looking brave, in that flowered apron she always wore.  She had been a singer, on the stage in Prague, when Machaty met her:  quite a star.  Honza’d been the pianist – it was before he joined the air force.  There’d always been music, around Honzi-ku.

“God, what about his poor wife?  How could she bear to see him go?”

“Oh, he was eating out his heart, yes? and she told him look, you have to, I understand.  She’s older than him, you know, they don’t have children, so she sent him off.  She’s a good woman too.  Machaty only goes for the best.”

She got up to fetch a piece of paper.  The clock struck four and he knew it was time to leave soon.  She gave him her address, too, Franta asking her to print on the envelope if she wrote to him so Karel wouldn’t recognize her writing right away.  When he wrote his name for her he made the little accent on the ‘s’, explaining that Franta was short for František, and Sláma had an accent too, look, like this – “but they all call me Franta,” he said, “so don’t worry.  But you put František on the envelope.  And if I can get away, I’ll come again — ?”

“Do that.  And I will write,” she said.

“You’d better,” he said, “I hope so!  Otherwise I’ll think you’re not happy about today… ”

She just looked at him.

And then it really was time for him to go.

 

 

 

Driving home, Sláma felt quite overwhelmed.  How had he let it happen?  It had to, though, he could see that;  they were aching for one another, had been since the first afternoon.  This just brought the reality into line with their feelings.  They’d come together like a pair of magnets, opposite poles pulled by a force they couldn’t resist.

After that he thought about her probably-dead sailor husband, and wanted to smash his face in anyway, dead or not, for being so stupid.  Then he felt sorry for the man, to have had Sarah in his arms and his bed for all those years and just not get it at all, what she was.

He got back in time, with a few minutes to spare even.  That was just as well, it turned out, because it gave him time to check the floor of the car and under the seats.  He thought it would be better if Sarah hadn’t managed to leave any hairpins down there, and he reached underneath where he couldn’t see and came up with something much more damning than a hairpin.  The bottom fell out of his stomach again, when the cool silk touched his fingers.

They still smelt of her.  He put his nose there and let himself have that, pulling it into his lungs like a man starved for oxygen, her scent and all he felt.

Then he put them in his pocket, folded carefully, and went in to supper.

 

* * * * * * * *

 

My darling Franta,

God I can’t wait to see you again!  Neither can the children – what a sweetheart you are!  But my reasons are different – I’m sure you can imagine?  It’s all I can think about.  Oh I want more time than that, to be somewhere comfortable with you and take all the time we want —!  Enough time to talk afterwards and have dinner together and walk and hold hands and laugh and be normal, like people do when there isn’t a stupid bloody war on….  I knew you’d be wonderful, Franta, but I had no idea how much.  I think about your hands and your mouth and I start to shake again.  God I miss you – I ache for you – I think about you night and day.  Up in your Spit, looking down at the ground, up at the clouds.  Asleep in the middle of the night.  I want to hold you while you sleep.  I want to wake up beside you and feel the stubble on your chin.  I want to hear you talk, watch you with the children again, listen to your stories, hear more about your home and your mother and your brothers and sisters and what it was like when you were growing-up.   I want to know all about the base, what you are doing at different times of day, so whenever I think of you I can imagine you doing this or that.

Is that too much?  Am I too greedy for you?  I’m sorry if I am.  You’re the only lover I’ve ever had, Franta.  I’m knocked for six – that’s out of the field altogether, you know, when you have to go running after the ball in all the long grass and across the road and into somebody’s garden and it’s just lost, you hit it so hard.  That’s your fault.  I don’t even know when or where I’m going to find myself again.  But – I hope, anyway – in your arms?  Soon??  God let it be soon, Franta, I’m dying for you.  Do you mind hearing that?

I love how you talk about everything, how English isn’t even your own language and you find the words anyway.  How you’re not embarrassed to make love.  How you do the things you do – the way the pen moves in your hand to form the letters, ‘František Sláma’ here on this scrap of paper.  How precise you are, how careful in everything you do.  And then you smile and it’s like a boy with wild dark curly hair looking out of a man’s face, your eyes are so joyful and full of life.  I love all the expressions you have.  You make everyone else look so expressionless.  I love the way you notice things.   The way you make me feel when you look at me.

Come back soon, Franta, for heaven’s sake, before I starve.  I’m holding my breath till you do.  Look after yourself darling – oh for god’s sake take care, my love.  Always, Sarah.  PS – what do your sheets say?  Does it start with an S like you said?

 

 

Sláma sat down in a corner of the officers’ lounge outside drinking-hours, when it was still and smelt of stale beer and cigarettes, and no-one was there.  Machaty’s ashtray gleamed on top of the piano;  daylight streamed in through the streaked windows.  Outside the Spits stood in a row on the tarmac, the aircrew bustling round them.  Karel was off playing football with the lads, so he ought to be able to get a half-hour undisturbed.  He wiped the table with his handkerchief to be sure the rings on it weren’t wet still, and set the worn dictionary down beside his paper.  Then he stared into space, seeing Sarah and hearing her cry, feeling her climax, aching to feel it with another part of himself.  How sweet it would be to sit and have tea afterwards, feeling fulfilled and easy together.

He wondered what to write;  why not that?  He started: 

Darling Sarah,

I have got your letter and you can imagine how it has make me feel.  Wanting you very much as if I didn’t allready.  But in a good sense.  Me too I can’t wait to see you again.  We just have start to be lovers, god there is so much more Sarah and I want it with you very badly.  I like that you wrote about that and didn’t only say you miss my conversation.   But I like also that you miss that too, not just to make-love.  Me also.  I like specially that you are honest about what you feel.  When we have so little time we have to be honest always, no?  It’s not wrong to feel so strongly I think.  It’s a gift.  Is for me anyway.  I like everything about you. 

Do you know what you left for me?  Didn’t you miss them?  When did you know that you didn’t have them on any more?  Can you imagine my surprise when I have found them?  And then immediately how happy I am to have such a memento?  Men like these things Sarah, you must know this, that we are creatures of our senses, we can’t help it.  And so this makes me happy to have and think of you.  Your scent is more faint now but still it gets me hard just to put by my face in the middle of the night when I can feel alone.  It pains but I do it because I like to think of you and remember how it was with you.

I am touch you write down all these things you like about me.  I can’t imagine you notice so much.  But I see same about you so I should not be surprise.  I think besides making love also I should like to have you make me food.  I want to sit in your kitchen and be given to eat.  I want to come to you in the night and be the same also.  You fill my dreams.  I am hopeing I can come to you next week perhaps.  But don’t hold your breath, allready I have seen you go blue in the face – actually it was green – just keep breatheing normaly my darling.  I told you you are everything anybody can ever want.  I want.  I want very badly.  About your question, yes it starts with an S and all the other letters too.  Underlining also.  And a ! at the end.  I kiss you Sarah.  Me also I don’t have breath.  Always your Franta.

 

 

Chapter 5 – Giddy

 

 

 

Apparently the Powers-That-Be had changed the date of the appointment at the Palace;  brought it forward by a month.  The royal schedule had to be rearranged, it seemed, and HM was insistent he would make the awards in person before going wherever it was he was going.  They were losing pilots at an alarming rate;  Churchill had shared the figures with him.  God forbid any one of them shouldn’t get his decoration for gallantry.  W/Cdr Bennett had called Sláma into his office again, given him twenty-four hours’ notice of the change.  “Just as well really,” he said, “give you less time to get nervous!”

“Sir,” said Sláma.

“Uniform clean?  Shoes brighter than the mid-day sun?”

“I won’t let you down, sir,” said Sláma, a small smile playing in the dimples of his cheeks.

“No, I’m sure you won’t.  Make us proud, Sláma.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good.”

 

 

 

TELEGRAM:  MRS. SARAH STRICKLAND, PARK LODGE, NEAR WOLFENDEN PARVA, WOODSTOCK, OXON.   CAN YOU KEEP URGENT APPOINTMENT LONDON STOP.  FOR BREATHING PROBLEMS STOP.  JULY 10, MEETING AFTERNOON TRAINS ST. PANCRAS STOP.  LEAVE MESSAGE IF NOT STOP.  TELEPHONE FOWLMERE 859 STOP.

 

 

 

Afterwards they both remembered it as the closest thing to heaven they had ever known — almost all of it, anyway.  She begged and bribed Mrs. Brewster in to watch the children, packed an overnight-bag, drove herself to the station;  watched the countryside go by out of the train-window as if it was a film rolling past.  Nothing seemed real but the prospect of what lay ahead, so close she could feel it in the pit of her stomach, dragging her to London without any help needed from the locomotive.  She didn’t know why, or even where – just that he could be there, and he’d asked her to come, said he’d meet her.  Wasn’t that enough?

Yes.

She stepped off the train, walked down the platform.  It wasn’t as busy as before the war, of course, and half the people were in uniform.  If he was there he’d see her, wouldn’t he?

Then he was standing in front of her, suddenly real and his chest hard and his arms fierce and she’d dropped her little valise and they were kissing shamelessly in the middle of the station, in-between the crowds of people milling this way and that all round them.

Wartime made people tolerant;  before there might have been stares and tut-tuts, but these days everybody understood how it was, and the only glances they got were kind ones.  He was in his good uniform, hat and wings and all, looking brave and drop-dead handsome too – who could wish them anything but well?  Not a Londoner there who hadn’t seen the boys overhead in their little fighters, all through the Blitz, doing their best, bless them, trying to beat off the worst of the Nazis.

They kissed in the back of the taxi;  they kissed when they got out, while the driver was getting her bag.  She was wearing her wedding-ring still, so it was nobody else’s business whose wife she actually was when he brought her up to the room reserved for Flight Lt. & Mrs. Sláma.  He had booked one of the best rooms, with its own gleaming white-tiled bathroom as well as a lovely bedroom, and even with the War on it was clean and the sheets were crisp and white and the bed was wide enough for two if not more, and of course they kissed and more, all afternoon and all evening till it got dark and still after that, too.

It was everything she’d ever longed for it to be, only more wonderful than that because she hadn’t imagined the sheer fun, the playfulness, the lingering tendernesses, the wonder, the revelations of their bodies and scents and the miracle of all the ways they could be together besides the passion and the raging need – though that was heaven itself too.  They kissed till her mouth was buzzing and bruised from it all and still she couldn’t bear to stop.  They even telephoned down to have tea sent up, and Sláma put on his dressing-gown to open the door, tipped the old man generously and thanked him;  took it off again to pour the tea and brought her cup to her in bed, standing there naked and smiling at her with the cup-and-saucer rattling ever so slightly in his hands.  “You don’t take sugar, do you,” he said.

“Only you,” she said, reaching up for it, and he gave it to her, his eyes following the sheet as it slipped from round her breasts;  gazed at her frankly and without embarrassment as she drank it.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’ll have mine in a minute,” he said, “I can’t take my eyes from you right now to go and pour another.  I’m not in hurry.  This is better.”

He’d brought rubbers, but she told him not to be so silly and that she hated them, wanted to feel him like before only more so.  He was going to argue, but she could see in his face how much he wanted the same thing and it wasn’t too hard to persuade him.    Watching his face when he was inside her was the most beautiful thing she thought she had ever seen.  That she could be or do anything that was a revelation to him thrilled her beyond words.    She pushed aside the idea that she was taking a risk, that she and Charles had never determined which of them it was that couldn’t have children;  Franta was in her arms and whatever happened because of it was welcome to her.

He shared himself with an animal physicality that made her heart turn-over, made love to her with his hands and mouth and a skill that left her reeling.  He was funny, he was candid, he was sensual, he was overjoyed;  he brought her his arousal as if it were something just for her.  They fell asleep together some time in the evening, exhausted and entwined;  woke and made love again.   Somewhere in the night she lost count of all the times it had been, even though each one had seemed unforgettable in the moment;  was it possible that she could have had enough of him that every second wasn’t something to clutch-at any more? 

She lay there then almost in fear, as if she might lose something priceless, and remembered each one again till she had them all straight, not wanting to lose a moment or a sigh of his;  not the time he pulled her on top of him and caressed her breasts the whole time, nor the time he had his mouth on hers right as he spurted and his groans resonated inside her own head – or the time he had whispered ‘Tell me again to come, I love for you to tell me… ’ and she had, in heartfelt ecstatic words that made him jolt and then afterwards smile and kiss her on the nose, call her a poet.   Then she went-over the conversations and tendernesses in-between, everything she knew about him now from his childhood on:  the names of his brothers and sisters (he was the middle of five), his favourite foods (his matka’s beef-paprikash and dumplings);  the worst moment of his life – no surprise, that was the day the Nazis had come to the airfield at Olomouc and he’d had to carry-on and surrender to them because his chief was too ill to get off the couch…  he’d trembled talking about this, and she’d seen a glitter in his eye that he’d blinked away fiercely, swallowing… his favourite teacher and subjects at school, art and science, especially physics;  the sports he’d played, the books he’d read, the music he liked, his favourite things about England besides her – oh that was easy, it was the way the fields looked from the air, the dazzling Dover cliffs, the places where white horses were carved, the little woods and copses and hedges and stone walls, so tidy-looking… also the old churches, he liked to go inside and cross himself and kneel to pray, he hoped they wouldn’t mind, would they? – the things he didn’t like (Wing Cdr. Bennett’s way of treating them like clever children, those bloody carrots every day, shepherd’s pie with minced old shepherd in it he was sure because it was all grey gristle;  words that didn’t mean what they were supposed to… )

What were his failings?  He couldn’t be as perfect as he seemed, and he’d better confess them now before she found them out.  Oh, he’d laughed, you’d better believe it.  I have a bad temper, I shout sometimes.  I try not, but it gets me the better.   And I’m a bully, I keep the boys into line hard because they don’t understand here how we are different.  So they tell me, anyway, I’m a bastard and a son-of-a-bitch of a section-leader.  I make them speak English, and I bang their heads together when they’re idiots.  And I don’t like cats.

What about dogs?

Barcha…    again his voice held something beyond its usual lightness.

What was it like to fly?

Cold, she’d better believe it.  Your feet froze, it didn’t matter what you did.  You could wear six pairs of socks and still they’d be blocks of ice when you landed.  What, she’d put them where?  God, there?  Well, that would warm them up pretty well all right…   

What else?

What, she hadn’t flown?  Of course not, why would she?  Well, imagine, how it all fell away below like a map, a map of itself, the rivers silver and the fields all like that blanket on a bed, you know, different colours – yes, a quilt, thankyou – the shapes of the hills, the way the rivers came together and you could see the roads and the patterns of the towns because of the geologie, of course, it was the same word, yes?  – what of course?  Well, from up there it was obvious…   why things were where they were, the different shapes of the land: mountain, forest, bay, harbour – shallow water, deep water, tidal flats – cliffs, valleys…  marshes and windmills, straight canals and winding rivers, it wasn’t by accident.

And also of course, very important, there was the pleasure of flying your machine, of making it go exactly where you wanted, of putting it in that precise place in the middle of three dimensions of space that you intended.  Knowing how far exactly you could push it, what its limits were, taking it to them.  Counting on that, once you knew it.  And – now there was a war on – doing it better than the other chap.  Because that was how it was you that stayed up, and not him.  Well, that was a big part of it, anyway, and the only part you could control:  the rest was luck.

What else?  Well, the clouds of course, all the colours of the sky, thunderstorms you had to fly round, snow and fog you’d better not get lost in.  What?  The way when you couldn’t see anything – in a cloud, on a dark night over the sea – that your body fooled you, yes?  Your senses lied, so you thought it was the right way up and you could swear it on your mother’s grave, but it wasn’t;  how he’d take his boys into a cloud and show them, in the old biplane trainers, lose the horizon and ask them all right, now are we straight?  And when they asked him the instruments couldn’t be right, could they, he told them all right then, go ahead, correct a little.  A little!  And then he’d say Take your hands off the controls, now, and let me fly this thing out of the cloud, the way you have us – and he’d show them, how wrong they were, before they got too far into trouble.  See, if you don’t believe the instruments you’ll correct and correct a bit more because of your balls and your stomach, the way you’re pressed into the seat, it’s false gravity, an illusion, and when you fly out of the cloud you’ll be upside-down, if you’re lucky, or in pieces…  the forces, he said, you don't play with them:  when you lose your bearings and go into a spin, they can rip your machine apart.  So you must believe the instruments… even if your body is screaming at you not to.

She shivered.

They have to know, he said,  it’s the hardest thing to believe, you are so sure…  it killed more pilots, before the war, than anything —

Before the war, when there weren’t any bullets or shells up there…  Still, it’s dangerous, he said, and they have enough dangers without that too.  It’s a bad mistake…

He’d run his hand all up and down her side, then, caressing her bottom and sighing to himself.  What about her, he’d talked too much, come on, what were her bad things?

I never would have said this, she said, but – I wonder if I ought to have married Charles?

That was a mistake, he said.  I think.  Because he’s a good man perhaps, but it’s like giving a paintbox to a blind man – or a how-you-say, you play it, make music, it’s beautiful, made of wood, this shape like your waist and your bottom right here and it sings, yes, a violin – giving a violin to a deaf one.  I’m sorry but it is.  And I don’t mean only in bed.  Not the way you look at me when I just talk, even.  How you listen like I feed you what you are starving to eat.  Does he talk to you?  Well, did he?

Not really…  not like this.  About politics, and the garden, and what was for dinner… the weather, of course —

The weather!  Yes, he could believe that.

What was he afraid of?   Fire, that wouldn’t be so good, or to be crippled, helpless.  He’d prefer to be dead.  To be a prisoner-of-war, please no.  He couldn’t take being locked-up.  That was why he flew, to be up there and free as a bird.  He needed the air in his lungs, always had.  But you risked it, because.  He shrugged.

What was she afraid of?  Besides that, of course, they didn’t need to talk about it, he’d given the telephone number to Janet just like he’d promised.  Heights?  Well, edges, she said, I’ve always wanted to fly, but I don’t like being on top of things like church towers, I always wonder about throwing myself off…

That’s not good, he said, you mustn’t think that.

Don’t you ever think about things you can’t help?  she asked, stung.

All the time, he said, everyone did.  He thought about her, too much in that month before they made love, it drove him crazy.  And afterwards, too, even more… Yes, of course it was better now.

What?  She thought she wasn’t pretty enough?  What kind of an idiot was she?  Why?  Because these were too small?  Jezishi Christe, they were perfect, didn’t she know that?  Perfect, perfect, krásný, krásný, look what they could do to him just to brush them with his nose even, yes now when he had made love only an hour ago and an hour before that and still…

 

She went over it all, lying there in the soft sweet dark, the slow rise-and-fall of his chest beside her, the moonlight silver on the jutting prow of his nose, the tender creases of his eyelids, the tendons and veins and fine dark hairs on the back of his hand.  She loved the way his hair sprang back from his forehead, the places at each temple where it was starting to recede further.  It was enough to watch him sleep for a while, just to believe in him.

He stirred, mumbled something.  It was in Czech, though she thought she heard her name, pronounced ‘Sah-rah.’

She kissed his side where it was closest to her mouth, the satin of his skin, and he drew her head to him, nuzzled against her.   His belly rumbled.  “Are you hungry?” he asked, “we forgot to have supper!”

“A bit,” she said.

“Let’s go out,” he said.

“But it’s after midnight!”

“We’ll find a bar, won’t we?  Or a club?  Or something?  Isn’t this supposed to be the West End, how was it, the liveliest part of London?”

“I don’t think so, Franta, really!  I brought sandwiches for the train, and then I was too nervous to eat them – I’ll get them for you!”

“Why were you nervous?”

“Don’t be silly!  You know why — ”

“No, really, Sarah.  You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“No, of course not.  I don’t know what I was afraid of.  I think I was afraid of – how much I feel with you.”

“I want you to,” he said.  “I want you to feel so much.  You should.  What kind of sandwiches?”

“Egg,” she said,  “and ham.  Why should I?”

“Because it’s good what you feel.  It tells that you are alive.  It tells me also I am alive, that you feel it, I’m a lover after all not just a pilot, because you are nervous when you think about me.  And somebody down there cares if I am all right.   I prefer ham, do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.  I want you to have them.  Have them all.  Really.”

“But what about you?”

“The tea was enough for me.  Anyway, there’s a biscuit left on the plate.  I want to watch you eat the sandwiches.  Honestly.”

“I’m not a – how-you-say – that thing in a circus?  Yes, sideshow.”

“I want to,” she said, and the fierceness of her tone persuaded him, and he took them all to please her.  She watched him eat, ravenous as a schoolboy.  He ate the egg sandwiches first.  “These are all right too,” he said, “the way you make them is good.  But I like ham, we don’t get so much any more.  Mm, what did you put?  Mustard?  It’s hot!  I like it this way… ”

They held one another afterwards, without making love, just cuddling and talking again;  then at his suggestion they closed the blackout curtains and switched the light on in the bathroom and took a bath together.  It was a wonderful deep old-fashioned bath, with claw feet – of course it had the line painted round it, you weren’t supposed to use more than five inches of hot water, but they were sharing it so they ran a bit more and then with both of them in it was deeper, too…  it was bliss, heaven on earth all over again, to keep their voices to whispers and soap each other, rinse and play, pick up feet and kiss toes and rinse some more, look, it wasn’t finished yet, not a proper job, not good enough for the Royal Air Force… 

Let me dry you, he said when the hot water had gone too cold to want to stay in any more;  and you dry me, it’s more entertaining so — yes, don’t be shy, you have to dry in there too, or I’ll be sore, only you must be gentle…  ah, srdíèko… yes, they like you just like he does, they are all brothers down there…

She had been married ten years, never touched and gazed on a man like that.  Charles kept his private parts private, except when he came to her already aroused.  Franta smiled, let her explore.  “That tickles!” he gasped, laughing, “do like this instead, not so light, look… yes – sweet Jesus, yes. ”

They dressed, eventually, and went out for a walk just as it got light.  They went down to the Embankment and strolled arm-in-arm along the Thames, grateful it had been a night free of air-raids despite the moon.  “I don’t know why he decided to give us a rest,” he said, “but they are saying he’s going after Russia now… well, he is, we know that.  May it break him, like Napoleon –!”

“Franta, why do you think he didn’t invade?”

“What, here?”

“Yes.”

“I think he is proud.  Too proud.  He leaves us alone for a bit, to go after bigger fish and he thinks he can come back and mop-up, yes?  But we don’t permit it.”

“Do you think he will?”

“I don’t know.  He had a lot of troops all ready in the North of France and then he didn’t use them.  A night like last night, you know, you can see the Thames like a silver road all the way from the coast, it’s so easy… ”  He pronounced it Temss.  She shuddered, and he held her close.  “But we had our pleasure, for the whole night, without interruption, because he’s busy in Russia,” he smiled then, kissing the tip of her nose.  “God bless the Russians.”

“Franta, what are we doing in London?  Why are you here?  Was it just to meet me?”

“No, I have appointment today.”  They stood under a plane-tree, looking across the river.  It was so different, now, of course;  the gaps in the skyline, the lack of lights, the shapes of the buildings coming blue-grey against the dove-coloured sky.

“Oh, what?  You’re not ill, are you?  That was just a joke in your telegram?”

“Of course it was joke.  And true also.  Aren’t you breathing better now?”

“God, yes!”

He kissed her, tenderly at first and then – since almost no-one was about – lingeringly.  “They are giving me a gong,” he said, when they finally drew apart a little.  His dimple danced.

“What?  Who is?  What are you talking about?  Franta, do you mean to tell me you’re getting a medal?”

“Yes,” he said, simply, now she had asked.

“Which one!”

“The Distinguished Flying Cross,” he said, “I didn’t deserve it so much, but they want to give it to a Czech pilot, I think.”

She clutched at him.  “That can’t be true!”

“’Course it can.”

“Where are you going today?  What time’s the appointment?”

“Ten o’clock,” he said, “but I must be there early, because it’s the Palace.  It’s rude to be late for the king, I think.  So you can’t keep me in bed, Sarah, not this time.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said, and clung to his shoulders.  He put his arms round her again and held her while she shuddered to think what it might have been for.  “Are you going to tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, “I do these things every day.  We do, all of us.  It’s what we do.  I don’t know why they pick this one for gong.  It was a bomber, that’s all, they were hit and I was nanny back to home.”

“Nanny?”

“Yes, nanny, isn’t that how you say?  Old woman takes care of children, and then you know when the bad boys come to attack the hurt planes we hit with umbrella, to protect our charges, yes?”

“That’s what you did?”

“Yes, I hit them with handbag and umbrella and took off my shoes and throw them too.  Everything I have.  Got back home safe, even with no ammunition almost.  Got them on the ground.  They were brave boys.  It was in bad shape, the plane.”

“God, Franta,” she said.

“I wish for you could come, but you are not my wife, so I can’t ask.  I wish you was — were.”

“Do you?”

“Of course!” he said, as if it was obvious, “don’t you?  You think I just like you in bed?”

“I didn’t know,” she said.

He squeezed the breath out of her lungs.  “Know it,” he said, more fiercely than anything she had heard him say, “I don’t sleep around, Sarah.  I don’t go to bed with women for nothing.  Don’t you understand that?”

“What about Hanicka?”  She had to ask.

“She is like your Charles, Sarah, she is in the past and god only knows what can ever be now.  I have left her long time and she doesn’t know if I am alive or dead.  She has other boyfriend wants to marry her, Kanka, he won’t wait.  We were engaged but I left her.  I left.  So it’s my fault if she’s not mine.  I don’t know if I will see her again, or how.  She is in Czechoslovakia and Hitler is there.  She will think I am dead, I am sure — is better so, she can live her life.”

“You sound sad.”

“I am not a man that likes to make love with a woman and leave her, Sarah.  It’s not right, to do that.”

She wanted to ask, ‘so you won’t leave me, then?’ but she knew you didn’t ask questions like that, not if you wanted someone to come back of his own free will.  Instead she asked, “Why did you come back, that day?”

“Because I couldn’t stand it.  Thinking about you.  I tell myself don’t get woman over here, it’s too complicated, it will just hurt again.  But I can’t say no.  Not to you.”

“I’m so glad you did.  I almost peed in my knickers when I saw you standing there.”

He laughed.  “Really.  I believe you.  I almost peed in my drawers when I am deciding to visit you again.  I am afraid of what it will be.  That and something else.”

“Why do we feel like that?”

“Because it’s fate.  You and me.  There’s a book and it’s written down, Franta and Sarah, those two it has to be together.  They don’t have choice.  Come on, it’s getting late already – don’t you want to have breakfast?”

 

 

 

After breakfast they went back up to the room and she watched him get ready to meet the King.  Watching him shave left her short of breath.  She took his shiny black shoes and rubbed them some more with her best lace-trimmed handkerchief.  “Franta, can we have the room again afterwards?   What time do you have to be back?”

“Midnight,” he said, “and you?”

“Whenever,” she said, “Mrs. Brewster will stay till I get back.”

“So we’ll keep the room, then,” he said, “even if we don’t sleep tonight.”

“Can you afford it?  It’s such a nice place, it must be costing a fortune!”

“What else do I have to spend money on?” he asked.  “It’s our honeymoon, isn’t it?”  He didn’t have to say and every time might be the last time.

 “Thank you,” she said.  “For making it so perfect.  Such a lovely hotel.  Such a pretty room.”

“We don’t forget,” he said, “it should be nice.”

“I’ll wait for you here?”

“If you want.  Why don’t you go out, walk in the park?  We can go to the Palace together and then I will meet you afterwards… we can make a time, I don’t know how long I will be but let’s say two o’clock and I will come as soon after that as I can, yes?”

“I’ll come back here by two, then.”

“Yes,” he said, “if you’re not tired of me — ”

 

 

He didn’t get back till gone three, almost.  The medal was safely in his pocket, he’d unpinned it for the walk back to the hotel.  She wanted to hear all about it, and he told her what a nice man the king was, a bit shy, there were fifty of them and he took the time to talk a little to each one.  Her Majesty was there also, he said, she is very sweet. Has a beautiful smile. He doesn’t smile, he is very serious.  But I make him laugh.

“What did you say!?”

“He saw I am Czech, of course, it’s on the citation, my name, you can’t mistake for English, and my uniform also, you know on my shoulder we wear the badge for Czechoslovakia – so he says, ‘Ah, Flight Lieutenant Sláma,’ only he says Slammer, ‘I’m sure I have pronounce your name wrong, I do beg your pardon.  I don’t speak a word of Czech, I’m afraid.  But we do appreciate your service in the RAF.’  So I tell him no, sir, your Majesty, you say it very good.  And you do speak a word of Czech, because Sláma it’s straw.  Like you give for horses in their stable.  Dried stuff, you know, from the field.  So he says, slammer, it’s straw?  I say yes, sir, a bit more Sláma, like Slah to begin, rhymes with star, and now you speak Czech.  Sir.  Your Majesty.  He like this a lot.  Said it three times, Sláma, Sláma, excellent!  Sláma…  straw, eh?  Who would have thought it?  He is standing there pinning it on, you understand, and we are talking.  So I said thank you sir, for the medal, and he said no, thank you, Flt Lt. Straw… and later I heard him telling his wife.  He likes that he speaks a little Czech.  Only he says again Slammer, I don’t correct.

She fingered the silver cross, its distinctive ribbon.  “So now you’ll have a little one like this, on your tunic, up here?”

“It goes to the other side, here.  Next to this one.  Can’t put it there, that’s French.  They don’t sit together.  There is an order to them.”

“God,” she said.

“Do you want to make love before or after lunch?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Both,” she said.

“Good,” he said.  “But then we don’t take too long now, I’m hungry also… they didn’t give us to eat, only a drink and little hard biscuits.  If you don’t mind?  Afterwards we take all the time you want.  Mm?  Come here — ”

 

 

It was dinner, not lunch, and they shared a bottle of wine, and there were actually damask tablecloths and candles and flowers on the table.  The chef had done his best with what there was, and it was (Sláma said) much, much better than at the base – even though she could do better, he was sure.  She had packed a nice dress in case they did something like this, a blue one from before the war with a lace collar; he complimented her on it, told her she looked beautiful, and she felt beautiful.  Krásný,  yes, not crazz to rhyme with jazz but krahz, like my name, he said, it’s long, the ‘a’, that’s right.  Why do you watch me eat?

Because I can’t get enough of you, she said.

He shook his head.

 

There was a trio in the corner playing popular melodies, beside a small dance-floor; after dinner Sláma took her hand with a little smile and led her there, held her close with his hand in the small of her back as they circled slowly to the tune of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.’  Afterwards they went back to the hotel and lay without their clothes on once more and held each other, because who knew when they would be able to again?  After all the times they had made love in the past thirty-some hours, there wasn’t such urgency;  but it was sweet and it was all they wanted to do.  He’d offered to take her to a show and she’d said One day, Franta, not now.  He was lying with his head between her breasts when the air-raid siren started-up.

They didn’t take much notice at first, because they went off so regularly;  but he cocked his head to listen.  “We should get dressed,” he said, “you never know.”  Then there was a new note, below the sirens, and he sat up at once.  “Merde,”  he said, “ – sakra.  God damn.  Not now!”

“Oh, god, Franta, can’t we just stay here?”

“You know we can’t,” he said, getting out of bed and pulling on his underwear, passing her knickers, “ – we’re not so stupid as that.  Can you imagine the trouble I am in with Wing Commander Bennett, if they report me bombed dead in a bed with a woman?  Even a pretty one… I’ll never live it down!  Come, Sarah, hurry up.  We have to go down — ”

She knew he was right.

“It’s not the first time I’m here in an air-raid,” he said, urgently, “I come sometimes for the embassy, for papers or something for the boys, and it’s serious.  I mean it.”

She couldn’t find her shoes;  they must have been kicked under the bed.  She went to reach under it to find them.

“I should have tell you look where you put – but now there’s not time,” he said, “Listen, that’s the bombers.  Sarah, now!”

There was a full-throated drone, the same one she’d heard when they flew over high on their way to bomb Coventry and Birmingham and Manchester and Leeds, but much louder;  in the distance there was anti-aircraft fire and then the ‘crump’ of explosions.  The building shook.  She clutched for his hand and he took it, didn’t bother fastening his tunic, just wore it open over his shirt without a tie and pulled hard on her hand to follow him out of the room and down the stairs to the cellar.  He pulled so hard he hurt her wrist, and she bit back a cry and ran to keep up with him.  Other guests were emerging from their rooms too, some in pyjamas even though it wasn’t late, a fat angry woman in a pink satin dressing-gown like a truculent sow and a man in only pyjama-bottoms.   She wasn’t the only one barefoot, she saw.  One woman had one shoe on and not the other.  Sláma had on both, though they weren’t laced.  Because he was Sláma, she thought, and he would put his shoes where he knew where to find them again, even when he took them off to make love.  The sirens were still wailing and bombs were falling all around.  With a louder crash than any yet the lights went out for a second and plaster-dust fell all round them.  The woman in the satin dressing-gown toppled down the stairs towards them, screaming.  Sláma pulled Sarah over to one side, against his chest, but the woman clutched at them as she fell and at the same time another bomb exploded nearby and Sláma lost his grip on the banister.  They all went tumbling together then, almost a whole flight of stairs;  Sláma was holding onto her, and the ceiling was coming down too, and she was on the landing-floor under him and Sarah smelled the woman’s perfume as she crashed on top of them both.

She heard Sláma  swearing, at least that was what it sounded like, and the woman was screaming.  “Yes,” he was telling her, “madam I will help you, but I must get my wife to safety – I will come back for you!”

“Franta, no,” she cried-out, stumbling to her feet and finding she couldn’t stand on one ankle at all.  She was bruised all over and her ribs hurt.  He picked her up like a baby, cursing again in Czech to himself, and then threw her over his shoulder instead, roughly; set-out the rest of the way down to the cellar.  “I’m sorry,” he gasped, in-between breaths that were also groans, “Sarah, have I hurt you?  I can’t carry you other way, come… ”

The lights kept going on and off.  It was another long corridor and another flight of stairs, and she felt his breathing get harder.  “I can manage,” she cried, and he told her sharply, “No you can’t, shut up and hold to me.”  Then he was just coughing from the dust and grunting with effort and she didn’t bother him any more.

There was the door to the shelter, the old hotel wine-cellar, a crowd of white frightened faces looking out at them, and he brought her to a corner and put her down, panting too hard to speak.  He pulled off his tunic then, with some awkwardness she thought, and threw it over her;  turned and stumbled out again. “Franta, no!” she screamed again – but he had promised the fat woman, and he wasn’t that sort of a man, to sit there safely while others were still in danger.

A stick of bombs fell right by them, and the empty wine-racks that lined the walls began to come loose and tumble-over;  dust and smoke shot through the doorway, and a man slammed the door.  It didn’t fit in the frame anymore, came open again.  She could see nothing through it but dust and an orange glow she was terrified was fire.  The air was almost too thick to breathe:  it stank of smoke and plaster and splintered old wood; sewage too.   In a corner someone was retching.

All she could think of was Franta.  God, where was he?  Was he dead?

No;  he half-fell through the doorway, pulling the fat woman behind him.  He was holding one arm awkwardly to his side, bracing it, and dragging her with both hands under her armpits.  She was still screaming like a pig.  She must have weighed twice what he did, and he was gasping.  “Take her,” he yelled, his voice hoarse.  She thought he was going to come in, then, but instead he yelled at a man by the door, “Come, for god’s sake, there’s more!”

The man’s wife clutched at him.  “You stay here, Henry,” she wailed, “don’t you go out there!”

Sláma looked all round the cellar. “Who is coming?” he cried, furious now.  “You fucking bastards, there is women out there!  Two more!  I can’t do it by myself!”

Another man got up, shamed into it, and Sláma took his arm and shoved him out the door;  they ran back up the stairs together.

The stranger got back first, and Sarah thought once more that she’d never see Sláma  alive again.  The other man had brought one of the chambermaids who couldn’t walk, her arm over his shoulders.  From behind them in the dust and darkness came a high-pitched sound, audible thorough all the chaos and the crashes like a dog with a broken leg.  Franta’s voice came then, in a moment of stillness: “Come on, granny,” he was gasping, “You must hold to me, see I can’t hold you so good – don’t let go!” and Sarah rose, ran hobbling to the doorway, in time to catch him almost.  He stumbled in, blood on his face this time, running in his eyes, and over his shoulder was an old woman in a torn nightgown with no shoes and cut feet.   A pathetic scrawny buttock showed through the tear.  She was crying that yelping, helpless sound.  He almost dropped her into the lap of the woman who had told her husband not to go.  “You – help – her,” he said, “I’ve – done – what I can — ” and he collapsed into Sarah’s arms, coughing.  Together they limped back to her corner.

“I’ll – be all right,” he assured her, his head tipped back against the wall.  A single lightbulb swung from the ceiling, casting strange wild shadows.  She could see little cuts all over his face, and splinters of glass in his hair.  She brushed them out and felt one cut her hand;  she didn’t care.  He was gasping, holding one wrist against his chest and rubbing it with the other hand.  “Kurva,”  he said, “I think it’s broken – sakra!”

“You’re bleeding,” she said, “from your head – is it deep?”

“Ne,”  he gasped, “no, the light fell, the lustr – I don’t know the word, lots of little pieces glass, prizmaticky… ”

“God,” she said, “the chandelier fell on you?”

“Chandelier, yes – just a bit, I have dodged it. Only the little pieces has hit me, all the brokens.”

She dabbed at his face with the corner of her skirt, not caring that it was up round her thighs to reach.  “What’s broken?  What did you say?  What’s your sakra?”

He gulped a laugh. “No, that’s not a nice word.  It’s not what’s broken.  It means hell and damnation.  I say it because I think my wrist is broken.”

“God,” she said.

“When we fall down the stairs, I land on it and that lady on top.  God, she’s a big girl… ”

“You carried me with a broken wrist?”

“What I am going to do, drop you?”

There was a louder crash than any of them yet, and the light went out and stayed out.  People screamed.  Sláma pulled her close to him and held her face in to his chest;  there was an awful rending sound from the ceiling, and more screaming, and she felt his body on top of her.  “Stay down,” he was gasping, “keep your head down.  Close your eyes.”

The ceiling collapsed.

A big beam fell on one side of them, crushing the man next to her; he started screaming.  They were not the screams of fright but something more visceral:  agony.  Her teeth were full of grit, her eyes smarted.  She felt Sláma’s arms and legs spreadeagled over her, holding her down;  his face by hers pressed the ground.  “I love you, Sarah,” he said,  “miluji t˘e.  Don’t forget.” 

She lay there, wondered why she would notice at a time like this the way he sometimes emphasized the wrong syllable of words, usually the first, like ‘for-get,’ and how much she loved it when he did.  It reminded her of all the effort he was making to talk to her, she thought, even now:  having to find the words to comfort her in a foreign tongue, and doing so.

It lasted perhaps half an hour like that, no-one knowing if the rest of the building was going to fall in on them and bury everyone all together, or what.  The screaming man was whimpering now.  There wasn’t enough room under the piled-up wreckage any more to go and help anyone else, or even to move.  Now and then there were sounds of the rubble above them creaking and shifting as more collapsed.

Sarah began to shiver uncontrollably. “Ssh,” said Sláma, “it’s all right, Sarah.  They will come for us.  Just wait.  I have you… ”

“What if it all falls in on top of us?  The whole building?”

“We can’t help if it does.  If we move then other things may fall that we don’t see.   It’s not good to struggle right now.  It’s better to wait, let them take-up these broken pieces from on top.  Besides, I think it fell already.”

It was pitch-dark.  The others were crying and moaning, sobbing and begging to be rescued;  calling for help.

“I’ve got you,” he murmured.  “I’m right here on top.  In fact I don’t have choice, I am stuck here, so you had better say it’s all right… ”

“Are you trapped?”

“No, just – what’s the word – there’s things on top.  Heavy.  I think you say I am pinned.   Not hurt.”

Sarah thought the man next to them might have died.  He had gurgled and then gone quiet.  “Franta, do you think he’s dead?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” Sláma replied, “I think so, yes.  Poor bastard.  It was bad luck for him, to be there.”

She thought:  yes, but you weren’t.  You weren’t.  It was a dreadful thing to wish it on anyone, but she thanked god it hadn’t fallen on Franta.

A bit later she found herself growing more and more uncomfortable.  They hadn’t moved, and Sláma’s weight and the weight of the bricks on top of him was crushing her.  It grew harder to breathe, and she was afraid she was on the brink of her bladder failing her.   Sláma stroked her face with his good hand:  “Stay calm,” he said when her breathing got hiccupy and too fast, “breathe slow, it’s better for you.  Like this, feel me – in,  yes, out  – in, yes, out…  that’s it.  Good, Sarah.”

“Franta, I’m going to wet myself — ”

“All right then, so do it,” he whispered, “do you think it matters?”

She shuddered.

“So pee,” he whispered, “I will still love you.”

“Promise?” she asked, trying to laugh about it.

“Proh-mees,” he said.  She couldn’t see his face, but there was a smile in the word.

She did.  It was warm for a brief time and then cold again.

“Better?” he asked her.

“What a honeymoon… ” she said, and started to giggle.  She knew it was from fright and hysteria, and controlled herself.

“You can laugh, it’s all right,” whispered Franta.  “If they don’t get me out of here soon it’s going to be my turn — and I’m on top…!”

“I’ll still love you,” she said.

“That’s good to know,” he said.  “But I will wait as long as I can anyway — ”

 

Fortunately for his uniform, it didn’t come to that.   They started to hear the sounds of the rubble being pulled-away, and voices yelling, “Not to worry!  We know you’re in there — hang about, love, yes you madam, no need to keep yelling yer ’ead orf like that, we’re doin’ our bleedin’ best!”

“I think that’s your other girlfriend,” whispered Sarah, “doing the screaming.  The one in the pink satin… ”

“The one that’s broke my arm?” he laughed, “she’s too much woman for me, srdíèko — I swear I thought I will pass out, dragging her along —!  And then I get her down the next stairs, I don’t know how, God was good to me, bump-bump-bump –  and she tells me I am hurting her!”

“What!”

“I swear it!  And so I tell her Excuse me, I am sorry but you have broke my arm already when you fell on me and now what I can do?  If you can’t walk then I can’t pick you up so it’s this or nothing —!”

“Do you really think it’s broken?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “if it is, then it’s the wrist, yes, not really the arm.  But it hurts like hell.  I hurt it more because I am using it after it’s broken.”

“You’re extraordinary… you can pee on me all you want,” she said, not knowing how else to tell him all she felt towards him.

“I don’t need,” he smiled, “not yet – but thank you anyway… ”

 

 

Then it was over and there was no more collapsing;  the worst of the rubble was being pulled away by a team of at least a dozen rescuers, and except for a half-brick or two and some splintered lath-and-plaster that still covered Sláma, they were in the clear.  Hands helped him up, and then he reached down with them with his good hand for Sarah.

The sky was lit with flames and garish smoke – but she could see it again.

 

 

She’d lost her luggage;  that entire wing of the hotel had collapsed.  Sláma had his wallet in his breast-pocket, though, along with his medal and his clothing-coupons, and he bought her a new train ticket and a navy-blue worsted skirt and white blouse and underwear  and navy lace-up shoes.  “It’s the least,” he said, “I almost got you killed!”

His cuts had washed off, not much worse than scratches, most of them, though they both had painful lumps on the head and bruises here and there from falling down the stairs and the roof-collapse in the cellar.  They’d set Sláma’s wrist in a splint and sling at the local hospital, told him to see the doctor at his base when he got back.  Sarah’s ankle was pronounced sprained;  with a tight crepe bandage to support it she could walk well enough to go home without crutches.   Still, they both looked rather pale at the station, when it came time to see her onto the train and say good-bye.  Sláma had telephoned the Wing Commander in explanation for his lateness, and been excused another morning.  He’d told Sarah firmly he wasn’t going back till he’d put her on the train himself and there was no arguing.

His mouth on hers at the last moment was rough.  After all their tendernesses it made her stomach feel fluttery.  He tried to say something, but no words came.   That wasn’t like him, either, he was so expressive usually.  “Go home,” he said then, “I’ll write you a letter.  Pane bozhe, Jezishi Christe, I love you, Sarah.”

“Sr-jeechko,” she told him, clinging to his tunic for a last second, “Franta, darling –!”

“Go,” he said, his voice rough too, “you will miss your train.”

She climbed into the carriage and he slammed the door.  She held her hand out of the window and he held onto it with his good one, till the train started to move. 

“Goodbye, Franta —!” she called after him.

“I hate this,” he called back, running down the platform, “ – to see you leave.  To say it, that word, goodbye.  Don’t say.”

“Franta!”

“Sarah – !”

“Sr-jich-ko, Franta!”

“Yes, Sarah, yes, srdíèko —!”

He couldn’t run any more, he’d run out of platform.  The train pulled away and he was waving till she couldn’t see him any more.

All she had were the clothes she stood-up in and the train-ticket in her pocket and a five-pound-note and some coins ‘in case.’

And the memory of a one-night honeymoon such as she had never dreamed of in her life, and could hardly believe in now it was true, even;  and a sprained ankle, bruised ribs, a bump on the head.

She made her way to the compartment, found a seat;  sat back and closed her eyes.

 

 

 

* * * * * * * *

 

 

Sláma kept his promise to write.  Sarah unfolded the sheets from the envelope with his careful printing on the front, hoping he was doing the same thing – or would be soon, as soon as the post arrived at the base.  She hoped she hadn’t said too much, given herself away too far, in the outpouring of love and longing she had sent him;  he wouldn’t be put-off, would he, think she had said more than she should, too soon?   Men could be odd like that… but everything she’d seen and felt told her he would welcome it.  Not to mention the charming candour of his first letter, after they’d made love in the car.  

She couldn’t wait to see what he would say to her now.

This was on lined paper neatly cut from an exercise-book.  One corner bore the ring of a tea-cup set down.  His writing was not quite as tidy as before – but then, he hadn’t had a broken wrist before, either.  Still, she could see he had taken pains with it.

She felt a flutter of nervousness – until she read the first five words, and then her anxiety turned to a weak-kneed giddiness, and she had to find a chair before she could read any further:  which turned out to be a good thing, because by the end she would have been on the floor, otherwise. 

 

Sarah God Sarah darling Sarah —

What I can say?  It is everything I think with you but more a thousand times.  So beautifull to be with you, all that I am hope.  I think about us together this time we have and what I think is for me it’s like this first time I have flew.  There is exultation – is that correct word?  I have look in dictionary – and also like a prayer that this is all that I want, please god I need more of this to live, it’s necessary like air.  Without if I can’t have then it’s flat the world, and inside me it’s nothing, only a emptyness.  Same as flying for me.  It makes me only to want more and to live this place that I have find.  The air and now also your arms.  And knowing you. 

I think you feel same, don’t you?  I see your eyes when we are together very very close, I mean making-love, I can write that can’t I?  to you — when I am lost in you, that you have emotion like this for me also – and I feel when we are talk after in soft voice, so easy together. That in me also you find something that you want so much.  When you watch me do ordinary thing, like eat and shave, it’s same as look at painting in museum your eyes.  I think to call you foolish for this but you aren’t, are you.  Because I think my eyes are same.   That we can’t get enough the other.  Even all these times it’s beginning only and this making love is way for body to speak things heart wants to say and there are not words.  All I am feel with you.  Today my English is not good enough.  Not even my Czech.  But you see when your train is leave, don’t you.  All that you are for me.

Have you get home all right?  How is your hurt ankle?  Can you walk?  Is it difficult to do what you need for the childrens because you are hurt?  I am sorry about that my darling.  I hope this grey-hair woman will help you, the same that has stay with the childrens when you are come to me.  I hope in two or three days it will not hurt you more.

My arm it’s not so bad.  This week now I don’t fly.  After that W/Cdr Bennett says we will see.  I miss, I hate to be grounded.  He has plenty for me to do on ground so I can’t even get away to you.  No flying, no Sarah — my other girlfriend has done for me good this week.  Still I hear her say I am hurt her.  This thing they gave me DFC for, I have train and it’s what I do all the time.  It’s more difficult a lot to get Madame down these stairs when her bottom is so wide as steps and already she has broke my arm for me.  I am think I can’t.  And it’s slithering her satin thing she is wear like snake, huge like anaconda, I can’t hold.  Really it’s amusing because with you in bed before I am feel it’s like dying to be in you and to have so violent climax as I have.  It’s so violent like dying because it’s you for true, this woman I have think about and dream about, and you are call me darling and your sweet love and you tell me to come for you with stars your eyes and you want me there where I am.  Then after it’s nightmare, that’s bad dream yes? again I look in dictionary – that really I can die with this lady on the stairs in her negligee that is call me names also and they will dig me out dead with my arms round her and not you.  So then I am happy when roof falls on top us, at least it’s you I am hold again.  If I must die with woman in my arms.  Should be my real girlfriend at least, not this other nightmare.  You my love, I should say, you are more than girlfriend.  Do you understand that?

I can’t wait to see you more, Sarah.  I pretend to be normal same Franta Sláma like before but I’m not.  Before I am alone and now I am more than I was, complete man again.  Because in me there is sweet things for you.  Not in bed just.  Sometimes in flying there is moment when gravity does things that is strange, make your stomach fall inside you.  It’s like this to think about you.  This beautifull woman that is for me, I don’t understand how but she wants.  She is grace and sweet, warm also.  She is lit like candle, it’s for me.  Tears of joy in eyes.  Her face it’s pink when she looks me.  More pink when I kiss.  Her voice tell me she feels.  Can be ordinary words.  Can be about dinner or anything.  Still it’s there that she loves me. And trusts me also.  She brings me her self.  I am thank god to give me this, Sarah, make me this man who is give you to your self.  Another dictionary word, it’s privilege for me.  Like man who is find priceless diamond on ground and nobody has seen.  He is the lucky one.  Or you think you can’t fly but you can of course and I show you.

It’s tired my arm, to hold this paper, if my writing isn’t good please excuse.  I put on corner instead my teacup but now it’s leave mark.  So it’s not pretty this letter I write.  I am sad for that, I want to be pretty like you deserve.  But it’s a bit broke now like your Franta.  You look at me in your face it’s that I am perfect and really I’m not.  Not near.  But I try to deserve, Sarah I try best to be as good man that I can all time. Love me for that, not for perfect, please.  Will you?

Write me a letter soon and tell me how you are and all that you feel.  I want to know I’m not idiot to think it’s important so much with you.  Tell me it’s real what we have be together.  It is, isn’t it?  Is for me.  There was piece of me that was lost and left behind in my country and now I have again.  And other piece that is was missing for you too.  Different piece but important too.  And I think you never have this piece of you before.  Even if you have been married all this time.  Wife you have been but not lover.  F**ked (excuse please) but not make-love to like beloved.  There is in you passion but it’s locked.  Then you give me key and ask me please to open.  Can you imagine how I am feel for this?

So thanks to god you have it now, you are woman like Eve that god has make you to be and there is in you every element that belongs to you.  You are complete, so.  Because we are lovers.  Because we each find other so happy to be together.  So understand and so comfortable.  So easy, so much we share.  This is things that I am think when I am coming back from London.  Is it too proud I think this?  No, I see and hear you.  You are mine, Sarah.  I told you, there’s book.  Has our names together on page.  Me also I’m yours.  Now more than before.  Though even in car I was.  Because I can’t say to you no.  It’s not in me no to you, only yes.  And stars for you like you ask me, a whole universe.  All this milky-way when you ask me it.  It’s too much sweet to me that you want.  This it’s my love that wants to leave me and come to you.  It wants to fill you so deep I make wet even your heart.

There, never I think to write such letter as this.  But it’s extraordinary with you and I don’t know when I see you again so I have to write it.  Because I want you to know what it is mean to me.  In case you are ask yourself, what have I done to go to London and meet this Franta?  This Franta loves you, Sarah, you are to him more than precious and it’s not naughty weekend, it’s consummation.  (if that’s right word?)  It’s for ever what I am feel.  Know this, yes?  Read this letter and see my face and know all what you are.  Now England it’s home for me.  Before, no.  Always I love you, Sarah.  Franta.

 

 

* * * * * *

 

Sláma took the envelope from his pigeonhole and ran his fingertips over her writing.  The lads were in the air, so thank god there was no-one to see him reading it, he thought;  just the way his hands shook to open it would have been a giveaway.  I had better try not to be so transparent, he thought, but how can I help it?   Well, for today he didn’t have to try.  Was he too direct, in what he’d written to her?  He’d used some words from the dictionary and others that were crude, and perhaps it wasn’t a very good love-letter, but it was from the heart.  He was still hollow inside from all that they’d been together in London.  Just the fact that she’d written right away too was like a hand on his chest, telling him it was all right – that he hadn’t imagined it, the bliss, the rightness of their union.

She wrote on blue paper, like before: a pretty hand, tidy like she was, with even, generous loops and round shaped letters like rows of cherry-blossom and cherries.  The words were all he longed to hear, and more.  By the end he could hardly breathe all over again:

 

My darling Franta,

All the way home all I could see in the train window was your face.  Oh my love I’m not the woman who went away, I’m someone different who’s been melted in a crucible and poured out to fit your shape.  Oh Franta even all this time when I was wanting you so much I had no idea what it could be like to be together!  Now I have and it’s shocking.  My feet haven’t touched the ground yet, limp or no limp.  How on earth can I wait to see you again?   Just to think of you makes me stop writing and put my hand to my breast and gasp.  As if I’m holding you there.  Oh Franta.

How is your broken wrist?  What did the doctor say, when he saw you?  You’re not in trouble, are you?  It wasn’t your fault, being bombed!  Were you able to drive back all right even with your arm in a sling?  Are you in a lot of pain?  How do you feel about not being able to fly?  You must hate that!  I know what it means to you, now.  Flying.  A bit, anyway.  I could happily listen to you talk about it for the rest of our lives— the way your face lights up when you do.

I keep stopping what I am doing to think about you and the bottom falls out of my stomach every time.  You are so precious to me it hurts.  I can see every lash of your eyes closed as you sleep, every angle of your face in the moonlight.  And all the expressions you have when you talk and laugh and listen.  And make love.  Those make my heart thump.  When you took my face in your hands and said ‘Sarah Sarah see me, look me the eye,’ remember?  I felt as if I’d never seen anybody before, not really seen them, not like that.  Not the way you wanted me to see you, so naked.  You were asking me to see all of you, body and soul, and know you were giving it to me, weren’t you.  Franta I do see, I do know.  I can’t believe it unless I’ve died and gone to heaven without noticing —!

That was what I saw in you from the start, that I wanted so much.  The way you bring all of yourself to everything you do.  I can’t believe we’ve found each other, that we belong to each other now.

Mrs. Brewster gave me funny looks when I got back, and I just let her.  She’s a bit of a nosy-parker, but I didn’t satisfy her curiosity.  This still feels too new and special to announce.  It’s our private business, in the middle of this awful war, that we’ve found each other. Though I have a feeling it’s written all over my face:  this woman is in love – this woman has just had all she ever dreamed of come true in her arms – this woman is on fire, someone needs to throw water on her. Oh Franta you are so extraordinary, so precious, it takes my breath away to think of you at all.  When will I get it back?  Will I ever get used to you?

It’s late and the children are in bed.  You’re all I can think of.   I feel sad for Karel but you know that was a momentary kindness, not intended to become anything except what it was.  This is so far beyond anything I ever imagined with you that I know it was meant to be.  And that we owe him each other, for bringing us together.  Franta I feel as if I’ve spent my life asleep till now.  And here you are and with you I’m someone I always wanted to be, didn’t know how to find.  Awake and alive and feeling every moment.  Alight with you, Franta.  Bursting into flame wherever you touch me.  And when we’re there – oh Franta! My flying-instructor — !!   I’ve left the earth far behind —  my darling.  Even the rhythm of it’s like flying, with you, sweeping me up like wingbeats ——  I could faint just to think of it …

Write back soon Franta, and oh please come back soon too!  Soon soon soon my love?  I’m dying for you ———

I will write again tomorrow.  I just want to be sure I get this to the postman first thing so you will have it.  I want you to know, Franta. 

So now by turns I’m breathless and then I find I’m singing ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square…’  and I can feel your fingertips in the small of my back and see that little smile playing on your face because we’ve been lovers and we are going to be again as soon as we leave the dance floor — but it’s a private smile, your manners are much too beautiful to be indiscreet, you would never paw me on a hotel dance-floor or make me look cheap.  But I know what you’re thinking because I’m thinking it too.

Oh Franta I am so proud of you — your mother must be — I hope to god she knows one day what a fine brave man you are.  You put everyone to shame in the shelter.  I almost don’t want to write about the air-raid but it was all part of how we were and what happened.  I’ll never forget when we thought we were going to be crushed you said you loved me.  And that might have been your last breath and you knew it.  Franta Sláma.  My Franta.

In case you’re worried about my ankle, don’t be, it’s perfectly all right.  A bit wobbly but much better already.  Tell me darling, why is it that I leave every encounter with you without the knickers I arrived in — ?  We’d better not keep that up.  Have you still got my other pair?  I don’t suppose I could have them back — ?

Oh love, come soon so we can have tea and everything else.  And I definitely need more help with the breathing still, that London appointment wasn’t enough.  My darling, I am kissing you with this letter and in my dreams and my thoughts till I see you again — ruffling your hair.  Thank you for ever, for the lovely time we had.  For the hotel and everything.  For inviting me.  For rescuing me.  I owe you my life – I owe you my self – Franta thank you.  Come soon so I can show you how much — ?  Breathlessly still —  Sarah.

 

 

* * * * * *

 

 

A postcard came for Sarah:

 

Briefing in five minutes, excuse.  Have only this postcard to send you.  Yes, I still have.  No, sorry, no return.  It’s Finders Keepers, like the childrens say.  That is also true for everything I have lost or leave with you.  Franta he’s lost too, I can’t find.  I knock his head but he’s not home. Think I know where I have left him.  Hope he is safe here?  Will write letter tonight — F. 

 

PS  I have to look up what is crucible in dictionary.  I think it’s same as krucifix but I see no, it’s tyglik, that’s fire for metal.  You teach me a lot English too.

 

* * * * * *