Fleming looked down at his feet, trying to picture the awful scene. The rocket fighter’s 30 mm cannon must have sliced up through the bomber and evaporated Liebowitz’s turret. Marello was faced with a gaping gash where once there had been a manned defensive position.
“The two waist gunners, they were dead too… but it was the thought of Lieb stuck there in his turret… He just never stood a chance.”
When Fleming glanced up from the floor Marello had started to sob softly. The morphia was wearing off. Fleming looked around for the duty nurse, but she was nowhere in sight. Marello had begun to moan. The low wailing sound
grew as the man relived over and over again the last moments of his ship. Fleming moved from his chair to the bed and took Marello in his arms, holding him tightly while the spasms brought on by the memory twisted and contorted his body.
Fleming held the gunner as Penny had held him, night after night. Later, when the pain left him and the nightmares began she still cradled him, until morning broke and he wasn’t in the burning cockpit of the Spitfire, but between the sweat-soaked sheets of their bed in the cottage.
Penny watched him stripped of his dignity, layer by layer. In the end, there was nothing left of the boy with the public school bravado with whom she had first fallen in love. He had become a pathetic creature, at times unable to perform even the most basic bodily functions. That was when the rage began. God knows how he had summoned the strength for such emotion. He hated her for witnessing what he had become.
Fleming held Marello tighter and felt the gunner give.
He had never watched a man die. He had been surrounded by death on the squadron, but it never touched him physically, like this. When he had been stationed in Italy, an aircraft or two failed to return some days. That night, the survivors would get drunk and the next day ops continued. There hadn’t been much time for mourning.
Marello would die a long way from home with no one by his side. Fleming shuddered. He had been a whole lot luckier.
His urge to hold Marello had been instinctive, just as hers had been with him. Yet he had thrown it all back in her face. He had wanted to retreat, to run away from his image of what he had become. He knew now that if he had been in the American’s place, frightened and alone, he would never have found the will to live.
Fleming bit his lip as the panic rose again. All along he thought it had been his own efforts that had pulled him through. That somehow he had reached into himself and tapped a deep reservoir of strength which had enabled him to claw his way back.
His marriage had been the price of that selfishness.
When he found her, crying in their bedroom one day, his anger had exploded. She had no right to feel sorry for herself. No bloody right at all. He remembered the quarrelling. Voices raised. He remembered hitting her, hard. Watched as she recoiled, put her hand to her face, then stared wide-eyed at the blood on her fingers. He tried to shut out the picture, but it was no good.
A few days later he started work at the Bunker. Three months ago. It seemed longer.
With him in London and Penny commuting between her job at the fighter control station and the cottage, they had seen each other a handful of times since.
Marello convulsed again and Fleming squeezed him gently. It seemed hours before the nurse returned with a syringe to administer another shot of oblivion.
CHAPTER FOUR
The boozy, smoke-filled atmosphere of the Trocadero Hotel’s Almond Bar hit Penny a few moments after the cacophony of animated voices when Kruze opened the door for her.
Kruze led her towards the bar through a maze of uniforms she had never seen before. There were men sporting the shoulder flashes of the Polish Air Force and the Norwegian Army. She picked out snatches of French from the conversation around her and saw American uniforms brushing against the deep blue tunics of the Royal Air Force. There were girls too, wild and exotic-looking.
To Penny, it seemed as if everyone knew each other, although she knew that could not be so. The party throbbed with a gaiety she had never experienced before. She watched one of the girls detach herself from a group and walk across the room, an empty glass held conspicuously in front of her, as she searched for company and a fresh drink. A Free French officer was the first by her side, much to the annoyance of two British soldiers. The Frenchman caught Penny looking at him over the girl’s shoulder and winked at her mischievously. She smiled and waved back.
Kruze, at last at the bar, turned and saw a different woman from the one he had knocked to the ground on the Ministry steps barely an hour before.
“You like this place?”
A song had started up in the corner so she moved closer to him.
“You like this place?” He was almost shouting in her ear.
She nodded vigorously. “I love it. How on earth did you find it? I thought I knew Shaftesbury Avenue, but I’ve never heard of the Almond Bar, let alone the Trocadero Hotel.”
“Word of mouth stuff. Unfortunately the jungle telegraph works a little too well. Last time there were just a few forty-eight-hour passers and some Windmill girls. Now look at it.”
“Windmill girls?”
Kruze nodded to the woman in the clinging, expensive-looking, evening dress, who now had one arm round the Frenchman and a new drink in her other hand.
“They’re chorus girls from the Windmill Theatre round the corner,” he said. “Help to liven the place up a bit. What are you going to drink? They’ve got just about everything.”
“I’ll have a whisky — a small one; lots of water.”
They made their way over to a corner where it was quieter. Kruze was about to raise his glass in a toast, but somehow the gesture seemed wrong. Instead he gazed past her through the window, watching passers-by scuttle out of the wind and the rain in the approaching darkness.
“Suddenly worried that somebody on the squadron might see us here?”
He was surprised at the ease with which she had guessed his thoughts.
“Not for the reason you think.”
“And what might that be?”
“I couldn’t give a light if one of the boys were to round the corner and see me with you. It’s not as if talking is against the law. I was thinking of Robert. And this place. Somehow the two don’t go together. Perhaps it was wrong to bring you here.”
“It’s all right,” she smiled. “Just because Robert might prefer his club, there’s no need for you to feel guilty.”
“How is he?” The words came before he could stop them. He didn’t want to talk about her husband, but the picture of him running from his Spitfire at Farnborough suddenly filled his mind.
“I don’t know. To be honest, Piet, Robert and I see very little of each other these days.”
He sensed her awkwardness.
“Staverton’s a tough old bird,” Kruze said, trying to fill the void. “He works Robert to the bone. I expect it must be difficult for him to get away.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said softly.
He looked her in the eyes. “I didn’t think it was. I was merely trying to…”
“I know, thank you.” She looked back into her glass. “I don’t think he cares too much about us anymore.” She shook herself slightly. “Anyway, enough of that.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t much like your husband, but he’s damn good at his job, even if he is sometimes a pig to deal with. But please don’t think I’m trying to stick my nose into things that don’t concern me. Domestic rows aren’t any of my business.”