‘Butcher Harris should be living at this hour,’ Rose said.
Bennett looked from around the corner of the L-shaped room: ‘He is, and not far from here, either.’
‘Let’s drink to him, then.’ Nash held up his mug of gin: ‘Here’s to the best bloody leader anybody ever had.’ There were grumbles from his gunners, who were too drunk to say anything sensible. Wilcox came out in favour of the Sunderland, which beat the U-boats. ‘Britain would have starved to death without it.’
Bull called that he should tell that to the navy.
‘Apart from which’ – Wilcox’s coughing sounded as if his chest was full of inmates trying to get out of a jail that had caught fire – ‘the Sunderland was the most beautiful flying boat that ever was, and a treat to work on, as everybody knows. There was space, and two of each for the crew.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Nash.
‘The lovely old bag was big enough to live in.’ Wilcox said he would make a house out of one, fly to another place when he got browned-off, which would be pretty often, you can bet.
Appleyard staggered out to be sick, and by the time he came back the laughs had turned to jeers at Wilcox’s idea. The black waiter brought a dozen more bottles. Armatage denied the supremacy of the Lancaster, and gave his vote to the Spitfire. There were tears on his cheeks – or was it because his spilt beer had ricocheted from the table? The good old Spitfire saved the best country in the world from the iron heel of Germany. It bloody had – say what you like. If they hadn’t kicked the living shit out of the Messerschmitts at the Battle of Britain, where would we have been today, mate, eh?
Maybe the Spitfire wasn’t the most renowned plane of the war, I said, and that if given time to consider the matter at leisure – as I had while staring at the beer label and sending its words out in morse – I would decide that the Sunderland qualified for that honour. This led us to compare the performance data of the Sunderland with the vital statistics of the Lancaster, and from that point, all things being equal, we went on to correlate the relative sizes of the three planes and, knowing that the Spitfire was the smallest, and the Sunderland the biggest, embarked on a passionate discussion as to how many Spitfires could be parked on the wings of a Sunderland.
Out came pencils and bits of paper. The number increased as more gin was swilled and beer put back. In our cooked brains even the exact wingspan of the Sunderland wasn’t known, never mind the distance from leading edge to aileron. Yet it did not matter, because the Sunderland seemed to grow into the size of the earth itself, and what had peeled off from the original discussion as a technical dispute now became metaphysical. If you folded the wings of Spitfires and packed them close, they would make a platform for other folded Spitfires to be parked on top, and so on, and so on, thus building a tower of aircraft until you reached heaven or the structure capsized and sank without trace.
The sombre picture brought on silence, until in the extended right-turning part of the L-shaped room where Bennett and Rose were having their own pre-flight drink or two, I heard the Skipper say: ‘How do we go, Navigator?’
‘In a straight line, Captain’ – walking between two carpets.
‘There’s no such thing. It’s either a fixed Mercator course, or the shortest distance on a Lambert Conformal. A rhumb line isn’t the shortest distance. A Great Circle is, but can’t be a straight course, now can it, Mr Rose?’
‘Don’t mix me up, Skipper.’
Bennett opened his box of imperfect Partagas cigars and slowly covered a specimen with white cigarette paper. ‘A straight line is the longest distance. A curved line means less miles, but who steers a curved line? And who goes the shortest way? The earth is a funny place when you want to get from point to point. Does your life from cradle to coffin go on a rhumb line or a great circle? Both have advantages. A rhumb line uses more fuel, but a great circle gets you there sooner. A rhumb line is less trouble: you set course and arrive at a certain time, providing there’s no wind, which there always is. On the other hand, a great circle needs more planning, as well as work to make sure you stick to it. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, I’m afraid, because on either system you’re at the mercy of malign tides and tricky winds, and the homely pull of the earth.’
‘I’ll make your course straight enough to do a great circle,’ Rose slurred, ‘which is the best of both systems. Or the best of this one, and that’s a fact – if facts are needed.’
‘They are,’ Bennett said. ‘Believe you me.’
‘I’ll work out the convergency angle, and calculate the different distances.’
‘You’ve been to the right school. The only bogey will be the weather.’ Leaning over the table to unroll his chart, Bennett splashed whisky across the southern half of Madagascar. ‘Whether it’s summertime or not in that land of glaciers and fjords, the weather is the thing. And the compass needle swings fifty degrees out of true.’
Rose turned his face away. ‘The left hand as usual won’t know what the right hand is doing.’
‘Does it ever? It’s immaterial.’ Bennett poured whisky for his navigator, and more for himself. ‘Only the planispherical stars will give anything like true direction, if they can be seen. And only the configurated scratchmarks of land the actual position, providing it can be found.’
‘If only the earth wasn’t round,’ said Rose. ‘How simple life would be! I’d never think about the end, if there was a danger of falling off the edge.’
‘You’re alive as long as you don’t fear dying,’ Bennett told him. ‘Life is full when you aren’t aware of spending your strength freely and yet are doing so. You get the best out of life when you act knowingly, and still don’t know. Being close to revelation is never close enough, though all of us were near it when candle flames burned bright over a city in the process of devastation. In the total trips more than six hundred tons of bombs were unloaded, making nearly a hundred tons for each crew member. The Rubble Churners. The Fire Raisers. The Second Fronters. God’s appointed Wrath.’
‘There is no guilt where I come from,’ said Rose. ‘The Knights of the Apocalypse rode in squadrons of Lancasters to excoriate evildoers. I’ve seen too many perfect knights go down to feel pity for those on the ground.’
‘A thousand Lincolns were being prepared,’ Bennett said, ‘to create a desert from a former empire and call it quits.’
‘What the world’s come to’s no business of mine,’ said Rose. ‘The world made me what I am.’
‘I rather think it was your parents,’ said Bennett. ‘When you begin to scratch, you itch. I’m drunk, Rose, and don’t like it. The life force under the skin crawls and irritates. In the gap between moments you mindlessly scratch, and unwanted words are born. You resent the disturbance that has no name. Where it comes from you neither know nor care, but because you stare and don’t shout doesn’t mean its hooks aren’t there. All in all, I’d like to stick a label on that door that opens onto the maelstrom. I hope the lock’s secure.’
‘So do I,’ said Rose.
Wilcox built up the empties till his tower was a foot from the ceiling. His hand shook on lifting a full glass to drink, but when he set a bottle one stage higher his grip was steady and eye accurate, a liverish tongue pressed into acquiescence by his teeth to stop the coughs breaking.
The structure collapsed, and we each caught an armful without any bottle cracking, though it seemed strange that our laughter didn’t shatter one or two. A clergyman and his wife, a red-faced farmer, and an old English colonel had already evacuated themselves from such aircrew behaviour. Nash remarked that it felt like the pre-ops mood in the worst days at the end of 1943, when kites were dropping out of the sky like coffins. You didn’t even have the heart to go into the bog for a last wank before take-off, superstitious that it might be the last. This over-loud recollection drove the final spectator into the lobby.