Later, he walked through the trees to the cricket pitch, moving from one piece of shade to another. There was a white wooden pavilion with a scoreboard. He went inside and at once the cool gloom swamped his senses. Cricket gear lay scattered about, just like school, and that special smell, what was its name? You rubbed it into the bat to preserve the wood. His damn stupid brain knew the word but it was being bloodyminded. He picked up a bat and swung it. Whoops! There was that schooldays smell again, ten times stronger. How idiotic, six thousand miles from home, in Los bloody Angeles, to get ambushed by the smell of cricket!
He dropped the bat and walked back to the cottage. His suitcases were in the bedroom. Somebody had gone to the hotel, packed his clothes and brought them over. Thanks very much. Awfully decent. They wanted him to relax. He hadn’t relaxed in four years. Flying Hampdens, then Wellingtons, then Lancs, it didn’t pay to relax. He put an Artie Shaw record on the gramophone. Relax and you might fly into a stuffed cloud. He looked at his watch. Eight hours’ difference. Back at Kindrick the crews would be getting ready for ops, maybe. Not relaxed, certainly. Guts as tight as fiddlestrings. Artie Shaw was relaxed, music just tumbled out of his clarinet like… He couldn’t think what it was like, until he remembered how a stream of incendiaries looked as they tumbled into a searchlight beam and scattered, pretty as confetti. Artie Shaw seemed to have an endless bombload, his stuff kept tumbling and tumbling. Now Silk felt too tired to stand. This relaxation business was exhausting.
As he stretched out on the bed, the word came to him. Linseed oil. Thank you, brain. About bloody time. He fell asleep.
Drinks by the pool. Ronald Colman welcomed Silk like an old pal who’d been away for a week, said nothing about the bright red rash, just gave him a half-pint tankard. “It’s called Buzzard’s Breath. Don’t ask what’s in it,” Colman said. “The President of Mexico sold me the recipe. State secret, he said.” Silk drank deep. It tasted like liquid moonlight with firecrackers, a bloody silly turn of phrase, very unSilklike, must be caused by his vulnerable condition, so he took another swig to wash it away.
“What d’you think?” Colman asked.
“It’s a far cry from linseed oil,” Silk said.
Colman smiled. “Indisputable,” he said. “Come and meet Ginger.” Who turned out to be Ginger Rogers. She was very easy to talk to. She made Silk realize that he was a very interesting chap. Somebody kept filling up his tankard. Later there was food, delicious food. He made more friends, people with famous names. Ginger walked him back to the cottage, kissed him goodnight. See? That’s what a double DFC gets you. Almost worth the effort.
A week passed, painlessly.
The consulate seemed to have forgotten about him. The war was making steady progress without his help. He slept a lot, swam a bit, played some casual tennis with a man who talked like Charles Boyer and turned out to be Charles Boyer. People were always dropping in at Colman’s and they were nearly all Famous Names. Quite soon, Silk stopped thinking of them as Hollywood stars; they were just Ronald’s friends. A chap who has been kissed goodnight by Ginger Rogers grows up fast. The possibility that they might feel privileged to meet a battle-scarred squadron leader never occurred to him. He didn’t talk about ops and they didn’t ask.
The rash faded a bit and his skin felt slightly less anxious. He could take a shower and walk away intact, provided he was careful with the towel. He had the use of a Cadillac convertible. Joan Fontaine asked him to take her shopping. She picked out a lot of clothes that were just right for him. No money changed hand, no cheques were written, nobody seemed concerned, the stores had people who carried the purchases to the car, and Silk realised he had strayed into the Shangri-la of Hollywood where money didn’t talk because it didn’t speak the language. If you were in, money wasn’t necessary; if you were out, money wouldn’t help. That was how it seemed to Silk; but he wasn’t thinking very hard, he was just letting himself be sucked into the slipstream of Ronald Colman and friends.
They took him to the races, a private box high in the stands; to the movies, a private preview, invitation only; to Romanoffs, dark as a speakeasy, for lunch. He stopped saying thank you. He didn’t feel especially grateful. Not getting blown to buggery by a German night fighter was partly down to luck; well, so was this holiday. Everything in life and death was luck.
One day he stayed in the cottage and wrote to Zoë about his luck. After two pages he stopped and read the letter. What a load of self-important guff. It was stiff and jokey and shapeless; he could imagine her mounting impatience with it. He tore it up and burned the bits. Then he wrote something simple and safe:
Darling Zoë,
A lot has happened since I last wrote from, I think, Kansas. Much of it was the same thing over and over again: another factory, another speech although of course it was always the same old gung-ho speech with local variations. (Gung-ho means bloody good show, keep up the good work. You probably know that.)
Now I’m in California on sick leave with a boring condition which would be total sunburn if I’d been in the sun. As I haven’t, the quacks are baffled. I’m in a sort of rest home for heroes, run by English movie actors, damn good types. God knows when I’ll be ordered home. I’m sure you’re holding the fort brilliantly. Stalin’s troops seem to be hotfooting it after the frightful Huns, no doubt helped enormously by your ladies’ warm socks.
Much love from me and my two gongs, Hanky and Panky. Kiss Laura for me – if you can.
Good enough. The bit about the rest home was a white lie. Was he afraid Zoë might think he was bonking Piper Laurie? That didn’t sound like a happy marriage. What had happened to true love and complete trust and all that cobblers? “Bollocks,” Silk said. He addressed the envelope and set off to the house. Colman would have someone who could stamp it and mail it. On the way he met Barney Knox, and that changed everything.
The man was carrying a butterfly net. When they were still ten yards apart, he said to Silk: “I was playing poker with the Andrews Sisters, they can read each other’s minds, I swear it, they took a week’s pay off me in ten minutes flat, so I told them I was going on a butterfly hunt, and hey, look, the butler gave me this. You’re the squadron leader. I’m Barney Knox.” They shook hands, gently: he could see the rash.
Knox was tall, with close-cropped hair. Some time ago, his nose had been in collision with something hard; faint white surgical scars showed around his cheekbones and forehead. Silk had seen that sort of marking before. It often followed a forced landing, when the instrument panel went backwards and met the pilot coming forwards.
“Our host told me all about you,” Knox said.
“Did he? Very clever of him. He doesn’t know all about me.”
“Right. He told me two things. One is you’re bullshit-proof.”
“Evidently you didn’t believe him.”
“The other’s anger. You’re a very angry man, Mr Silk.”
“More bullshit.”
Silk walked on, and Knox went with him. “Letter to England?” he said. “Give it to me and I’ll get it on a plane tonight. Otherwise it’ll take a month.” Silk stopped. “No bullshit,” Knox said.
“Why should you care? And who the hell are you?”
“I’m a guy who flew B-24s in England, what you call Liberators. I’m flying one this afternoon. Test flight. Want to come along for the ride?”
Silk scratched his head with a corner of the envelope. His scalp flinched, a warning sign; so he stopped. “Not in uniform. I can’t wear uniform.”