Then, almost a year later, Zoë turned up at Kindrick. She never explained why, and Silk didn’t ask. Meeting her was a pleasant surprise and falling into bed seemed very natural. Those were two small and happy facts. Against them stood the large fact of the war. Silk knew that his future was never a problem, because he had no future. When Zoë went back to London he could kiss her goodbye and forget her. Ops were his life, not women. It didn’t work.
They met again. She told him that, when Langham died, she had been pregnant. They had told nobody, and without Langham she had no reason to stay in Lincolnshire. Now she had a baby, a girl called Laura. Silk didn’t know what to make of that discovery. He wondered if he had a moral duty to Zoë, as Langham’s best friend, and immediately knew that was bullshit. Maybe he was in love. Would that explain why she refused to get out of his mind? It annoyed him, her persistent presence. He hadn’t planned to fall in love. It was a damn nuisance. This was a ridiculous state of affairs in the middle of a war. He got forty-eight hours leave and went to London to straighten things out.
They were in her Albany apartment, drinking gin. Little Laura was far from the dangers of London, being cared for by her grandmother at her house in the Cotswolds. Langham had wanted a daughter, and Zoë was quite proud of the baby, but motherhood did not dominate her life.
For Silk, it had been a slow and tedious rail trip, and now that he’d arrived he wasn’t at all sure what he wanted to say.
Zoë was bored with the war. “Have you seen the underwear the shops are selling?” she asked Silk. “No, I suppose you haven’t. Quite brutal. Totalitarian. Suitable for Jugoslav lady partisans, I suppose, but personally I’d sooner go naked.”
“It’s the price of victory,” Silk said.
“Too high.”
“What a damned shame. We’d better have a ceasefire, while I ask Air Ministry if they can spare a parachute or two. How many square yards of silk d’you need to gird up your delicate loins?”
She stared, not quite smiling. “Why are you so angry?”
“I’m not angry.” He tried staring back, and couldn’t do it, and drank gin instead. “You’re the one who’s fed-up.”
Zoë went to close the curtains. As she passed behind him, she tickled his neck and saw his shoulders stiffen. “There you go again,” she said. “Always looking for a fight.”
“I don’t like being touched.”
“Yes you do. You’re absolutely itching to be touched.” She sat down and crossed her legs. Since he couldn’t look at her face he looked at her legs. Stupendous was the word that came to mind. They wouldn’t last, of course. Nothing lasted. By the time she was ninety… He couldn’t complete that thought. Zoë was talking.
“I told my gynaecologist about you yesterday. He’s not surprised you’re permanently angry. He says that subconsciously you believe I killed Tony.”
“Bollocks.”
“Yes, he said you’d probably say that. But Tony was your pal, and then I came along, and who else can you blame?”
“For a gynaecologist, he’s a bloody awful trick cyclist.”
“Now you’re angry with him.”
“I don’t give a toss about him. Or Langham. Or you.”
They sat in silence. The only light came from the gas fire. Silk was sprawled on the couch. Well, that’s well and truly buggered everything, he thought.
“He’s really an awfully good gynaecologist,” Zoë said. “What you call my delicate loins are in perfect working condition.”
“Oh, Christ Almighty,” Silk said weakly. He had run out of rage. “Romance. Bloody romance. That’s not fair.”
“Come on, Silko.” She helped him up. “The bed is in the bedroom. Convenient, isn’t it?”
Silk vetoed Lincoln Cathedral and they got married at Marylebone Road Register Office. Freddy the navigator was one witness. Zoë’s gynaecologist was the other. Silk had not liked that choice. “He’ll be there as a friend,” Zoë said. “And if you had any idea how much he charges by the hour, you’d feel flattered.”
“If he so much as smirks at me, I’ll thump him.”
“Goodness, you are touchy. I’ll tell him to look grim and dyspeptic. Will that suit you?”
The ceremony went off smoothly. They left the office and stood in the street, congratulating each other. “Well done, Freddy,” Silk said.
“All I did was bring the ring, old boy.”
“But you did it with such panache,” Zoë said.
The gynaecologist had brought champagne and glasses. “Now,” he said. “Before the gloss goes off the union.” He thumbed the cork off a bottle and it hit a passing major in the Polish army on the left ear. The major got the first glass. He kissed Zoë, and then kissed Silk. He proposed a long Polish toast, and stayed to the last of the champagne. “We could do with you in the rear turret,” Freddy told the gynaecologist.
No honeymoon. Wartime Britain was not the place for that. All the hideaway hotels had been requisitioned by the War Office as headquarters for infantry training exercises. Silk and Zoë went to the same cottage, midway between RAF Kindrick and Lincoln, where she had lived with Langham. It smelt of mould.
“You’d think the landlord would have lit a fire, or something,” Silk said.
“I’m the landlord,” Zoë said. “Didn’t I tell you? After I lost Tony, I didn’t want any squalid strangers living here, so I bought it.”
Silk stared. “Tony bought it. And then you bought it.”
She breathed on a mirror and wiped it with her sleeve. “I hope that was a joke.”
“Sorry. It just slipped out.”
He took their bags upstairs. In the bedroom, on a windowsill, lay the dried remains of a pigeon. Got in somehow, down the chimney perhaps, couldn’t get out. He picked it up by a tiny claw and carried it downstairs. “Dead bird,” he said. “Sort of symbolic, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He went out and tossed the pigeon into some nettles and came back. She was reading a newspaper that was brown with age. “He’s dead, you know,” Silk said. “They don’t come any deader than old Tony. I hope you’re not turning this place into a shrine. I can’t live in a shrine.”
“We must have a party. Tomorrow. A sodding great pisser of a party. Open house for a week.”
“I can’t live in a pub, either.”
“I can. An alcoholic shrine. Like Lourdes, only with gin galore. You’ll love it, darling. Which reminds me: it’s nine hours since we made whoopee.”
“Scandalous. Just when the government keeps nagging us not to waste anything.”
He followed her upstairs, taking off his tie, undoing his collar stud, his shirt buttons, his cuffs. Already his pulse was beginning to race. “You think sex solves everything, don’t you?” he said. He tugged at his laces. One got knotted. He used both hands and dragged the shoe off and threw it into a corner. “Sex doesn’t make the world go round,” he said. “It makes it go slightly elliptical.” She laughed. That was reward enough. And there was so much more to come.
Marriage was a new and delightful experience. Ops were not. Ops continued to be the hard labour of dumping loads of high explosive on German cities, night after night, while flak and nightfighters tried to blow the bombers to bits, preferably before they dropped their loads. Sometimes a nightfighter went down in flames, hit by an air gunner or occasionally by friendly flak. Sometimes a crippled bomber exploded and took another bomber with it. Highflying German aircraft dropped pyrotechnic displays called ‘Scarecrows’ that resembled burning bombers, or so it was said. Other pilots rejected the idea: the night sky over Germany had victims enough without playing the fool with stupid bloody fireworks. That was true. Ops hurt Germany, but the pain had to be paid for.