‘I obviously can’t tell you that. I’m only peripherally involved, but I do know what I’m talking about. It’s the real thing. There’s going to be an armistice and it’s going to be agreed soon. Perhaps even by next week.’
We had by this time, with unspoken consent, turned our backs on the airfield gate and were walking slowly along the grassy verge. JL offered me one of his cigarettes and we both lit up. I felt a quiet, unexpected surge of sentiment about being a twin again, if only in small things, walking together with my brother, smoking with him.
‘All right, let me suppose for one minute it’s true,’ Jack said. ‘What on earth is the point of me knowing it?’
‘You’ve got to come off operations, JL. Straight away. Couldn’t you apply for some kind of ground job? Every time you go out on a raid you’re in danger. There’s no point getting yourself killed now’
‘A lot of us tend to think there’s not much point being killed at any time.’
‘Why won’t you take me seriously?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Maybe you mean what you say because you have some special knowledge. Maybe you mean what you say anyway. Maybe you only think you mean it.’ I felt a stirring of resentment, a feeling that probably showed in my face. Jack, apparently reacting to it, went on, ‘All right, Joe, perhaps I even wish you meant it. But I can’t wander into my station commander’s office and tell him I don’t feel like flying any more. He’d take me down to the bar, buy me a beer and tell me not to go around with such bloody silly ideas. Anyway, there’s no point even discussing it. I don’t want to stop flying. What about my crew? Can I tell them too? What about the other crews? I can’t walk away from the squadron because my brother tells me a rumour - all right, passes me some information about the war coming to an end. Do I keep it a secret from the others? Then watch them go on putting themselves in danger? Or do you want us all to walk out?’
I heard the sound of aero engines in the background, caught by the wind and carried across the flat landscape, a growling reminder of war.
JL, I simply want you out of danger for a few days. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the cease-fire, but I have to tell you about it because you’re my brother! I didn’t go so far as thinking about how you might work it out with the air force.’
It was the longest conversation Jack and I had had in years. We were standing still again, a few feet away from each other, side by side on the grassy verge of the country road. We kept drawing on our cigarettes, using them like punctuation, for emphasis. We weren’t exactly looking each other in the eye, but we were as close as we had ever been since we grew up. I was trying to take his measure, trying to cut through and eliminate the complicated network of memories, childhood, obsessive sports training, falling out, my marriage to Birgit, all the events that lay unfathomably between us, the subjects we were still touchy about, the arguments we never resolved, a maze of alert responses from which we could bounce off irretrievably in the wrong direction, separating us once again. I felt for a moment it might at last be possible to leave that behind us, simply become brothers once again, adult brothers, joined by our resemblance to each other rather than driven apart by it.
But then he said, ‘You don’t know what the hell the war’s about, do you?’
The moment of possible healing was lost. We both looked up as a black-painted Wellington bomber roared away from the runway behind us, climbing heavily into the air, drowning us with its ferocious noise.
I was shaken into wakefulness. A plane was passing low over the pub, the centre of the town, out there in the night. The engine noise vibrated the window glass and shook the floorboards.
I was not in bed. I had left the bed.
I was standing in my room at the White Hart, wearing my pyjamas, halfway between the bed and the window, one hand resting on the wall for support. I was blinded by the jolt from bright daylight to night-time darkness, the real world, the illogical reality of my life. Lucidity lay only in the mind.
I shook my head in frustration and disappointment, still feeling the daylight presence of my brother. I could taste the tobacco in my mouth and throat, felt I should exhale the cigarette smoke I had sucked in as the plane took off behind us. All that smoking, all that talking, somewhere out there in the mind, somewhere in nowhere at all.
I sat on the edge of the bed, thinking about Jack and what he and I had seemed to be discussing. It was a recapitulation of my own preoccupations, of course.
From time to time more planes flew low across the town.
Finally, feeling cold and isolated in the blacked-out night, aware of the silent town out there beyond the small window, I crawled back under the thin blankets, lay still, tried to feel warm again. I was wide awake, replete with unwelcome thoughts. I tried again and again to calm my mind, turned over in the narrow bed, seeking comfort. Time went by - eventually I must have drifted back to sleep.
I was woken by the landlord, hammering on the door of my bedroom and telling me in an aggrieved voice that I was wanted on the telephone. I rolled out of bed, dull with sleep. I followed him downstairs to the small cubicle at the back of the public bar. I picked up the phone. It was Jack.
As he spoke I was looking around at the empty bar room, remembering. I could hardly concentrate on what Jack was saying. I was thinking, This must be another lucid imagining!
Jack fell silent, apparently waiting for my reply. Then he asked me again: what had I wanted when I left the message at the adjutants office? I stumbled out with the words: I need to meet you, it won’t take long, can it be today? Now?
He sounded surprised but quickly agreed that we should meet straight away. He told me he was about to go on leave for forty-eight hours and was anxious to be on his way.
Once again, therefore, I walked the long road that lay between the flat Lincolnshire fields. I had plenty of time to think, to test the authenticity of what was happening. I made a deliberate attempt to observe what was around me, almost to measure it. 1 looked at the sheep as they grazed in the fields, saw the hedgerows that lined the road, felt the texture of the road surface itself, the sound of the light wind in the trees, testing these mundane impressions as if to find flaws in their reality. I was aware of myself: the feeling of the air temperature around me, a minor discomfort in one of my shoes, the aftermath of the greasy, undercooked breakfast grudgingly provided by the pub landlord, a growing impatience to resolve everything with Jack.
I continued to walk along, but instead of being impelled by the urgent need to see Jack, I was now more concerned with the nature of the world around me, the essential quality of its reality. I was certain I had entered another lucid imagining, but if so it was the first time I understood that fact almost from the start. Although I had experienced lucidly, I had never before thought lucidly too.
Was it a sign that the problem was coming to an end?
I carried on walking, the road between hedgerows, the fields, the unilluminating sky, the distant sound of aero engines.
I arrived at the airfield shortly before ten in the morning. I checked my wristwatch to make sure. Jack was already waiting for me outside the main gate. He was smoking a cigarette and had a newspaper folded under his arm. As soon as I saw him I felt a familiar surge of many of my old feelings about him: love, admiration, envy, resentment, irritation. He was still my brother.
He was looking the other way as I was walking towards him. Finally he glanced across and saw me, then looked away again immediately, with a guilty hunching of his shoulder. He took a drag on his cigarette and tossed it on the ground and crushed it beneath his foot. It looked to me unmistakably like a self-conscious signal of rejection. Months of frustration suddenly boiled up in me without warning.