“Ah,” I said, the light finally dawning. “Well, I never. Okay, then, let’s dance.”
After “Kalamazoo,” “Stardust” and “April in Paris,” we gathered at the bar and the tall airman who had taken our coats bought us all bourbon, which we took to the table. His name was Billy Joe Farrell. He hailed from Tennessee and worked on the ground crew. He introduced us to his friend, Edgar Konig, whom everyone called PX because on American bases PX meant the quartermaster’s stores, which was exactly what he ran.
PX was a gangly young Iowan with a baby face and his fair hair shaved almost to his skull. He was tall, with Nordic cheekbones, pouting lips and the longest eyelashes over his cornflower-blue eyes. He was also very shy, far too shy to dance with any of us. He never quite made full eye contact with anyone. He was the sort of person who is always around but never really gets noticed, and I think the reason he was so generous to us all was simply that it made him feel needed.
When I look back on that evening now, over twenty-five years ago, especially considering all that has happened since, it seemed to go around in a whirl of dancing and talking and drinking, and it finished before it really began. I still remember the strange accents and the unfamiliar place names and phrases we heard; the young faces; the surprisingly soft feel of a uniform under my palm; the biting, yet sweet, taste of bourbon; the kisses; whispered plans to meet again.
As the four of us walked tipsily back through the woods, arms linked with our gallant escorts, little did we know how, before long, we’d be using words like “lousy,” “bum” and “creep” in our daily conversation, not to mention chewing gum and smoking Luckies. As we walked we sang “Shenandoah” and after good-night kisses agreed to meet them again in Harkside the following week.
It was the first time Banks had been to the Queen’s Arms for lunch in some months. He had been trying to avoid boozing too much during the day, partly because it was sometimes hard to stop, and partly because it seemed too much a part of his old life.
It wasn’t so much that he used to go there with Sandra frequently – though they often dropped in for a quick jar if they’d been in town together to see a film or a play – just that the Queen’s Arms brought back memories of the days when his life and work were in harmony: the days before Jimmy Riddle; the days when he had enjoyed long brain-storming sessions with Gristhorpe, Hatchley, Phil Richmond and Susan Gay over a steak-and-kidney pud and a pint of Theakston’s bitter; the days when Sandra had been happy with their marriage and with her work at the gallery.
Or so he had believed.
Like many things he had believed, it had all been an illusion, only true because he had been gullible enough to believe in it. In reality, it had all been as flimsy and fleeting as an optical illusion; it depended entirely on your point of view. In calendar time, perhaps, those days weren’t so long ago, but in his memory they sometimes seemed as if they had been dreamed by another person in another century.
Even before he bought the cottage, in those days when he had been out on the booze in Eastvale nearly every night, he had avoided the Queen’s Arms. Instead, he had sought out modern, anonymous pubs tucked away on the estates, places where the regulars enjoyed their quiz trivia nights and their karaoke and paid no attention to the sad figure in the corner who bumped against the table a little harder each time he went for a piss.
He got into a fight only once, with a paunchy loudmouth who thought Banks was eyeballing his girlfriend, a pasty-faced scrubber with bad hair. It didn’t matter that Banks didn’t think she was worth fighting over, her boyfriend was ready to rock and roll. Luckily, Banks was never so pissed that he forgot the rules of barroom brawling: get in first and get in nasty. While the boyfriend was still building up steam verbally, Banks punched him in the stomach and brought up his knee to connect with his nose. Blood, snot and vomit spattered his trousers. Everyone went quiet, and no one tried to stop him leaving.
Banks had always had a violent streak; he knew that even when he used to talk about love and peace with Jem. That was one reason he could never fully give himself to the sixties scene in the first place, only hang around the fringes. The music was fine, the pot was okay, the girls were willing, but the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy sucked.
Today, he felt like indulging himself at the Queen’s Arms. Cyril, the landlord, welcomed him back like a long-lost friend, not remarking on his absence, and Glenys, Cyril’s wife, gave him her usual shy smile. He bought a pint and ordered a Yorkie filled with roast beef and onion gravy. The pub was busy with its usual lunchtime mix of tourists, local office workers and shopkeepers on their lunch breaks, but Banks managed to snag a small copper-topped table in the far corner, between the fireplace and the diamond-shaped amber and green windowpanes.
He had brought with him the folder DS Hatchley had just dropped on his desk: information gleaned from the central registry of births, marriages and deaths. With any luck, it would answer a number of his questions. Already that morning, he had phoned army records and asked about Matthew Shackleton’s service history. They said they would verify his identity and call him back. He knew from experience that the military didn’t like people snooping into their affairs, even the police, but he didn’t expect much trouble with this one; after all, Matthew Shackleton was long dead.
Hatchley’s notes confirmed that Gloria was born on September 17, 1921, as she had correctly noted on the St. Bartholomew’s register. Instead of simply giving “London” as her place of birth, the official record listed London Hospital, Mile End. Christ, Banks thought, that was in the thick of the East End, all right, and a real villain’s thoroughfare these days. It would certainly have made her a Cockney, an accent she had worked hard to lose, if Elizabeth Goodall was to be believed.
Her father was Jack Stringer, whose illegible signature appeared in the “Signature, Residence and Description of Informant” column along with the Mile End address. Her mother’s name was Patricia McPhee. The father’s rank or profession was listed as “dock worker.” There was no column on the form to record the mother’s.
Next, Hatchley had checked to see if Gloria’s parents had, indeed, been killed in the Blitz, and had pulled death certificates for the two of them, dated September 15, 1940, listing the same Mile End address and “injuries sustained during bombing” as the cause of death.
A series of black-and-white images passed through Banks’s mind: vast stretches of rubble and craters; acrid smoke drifting through the night air; children’s screams, flames licking soot-blackened walls, the screeching of the bombs before the shattering explosions; houses only half-destroyed, so you could see inside the rooms – the pathetic sticks of furniture, framed photographs askew on the walls, peeling wallpaper; families huddled together under blankets in underground stations, a few valued possessions with them.
The images came mostly from films and documentaries he had seen on the Blitz. His parents had actually lived through it, moving to Peterborough from Hammersmith only after the war. They never spoke about it much, as most people who had been through it didn’t, but his mother had told him a comical story or two about the war days.
Some of the images of the war’s devastation came from Banks’s own experience, when he was a child, even that long after the war. As he had told Annie, wastelands of rubble and half-destroyed buildings remained in some areas for years. He remembered visiting London as a child and being surprised when his father told him that the acres of flattened streets in the East End were there because of the war.
Hatchley had been unable to find a death certificate for Gloria Kathleen Shackleton, but he did find one for Matthew, and the information on it caused Banks almost to choke on his beer.