He found Paxton sprawled beside his overturned chair, staring at the body. “Oh, Christ,” O’Neill said wearily. “Now why did the silly bugger go and do that?”
Paxton tried to stand, but his legs wanted to have nothing to do with it and he fell heavily on his rump. O’Neill gave him both hands and helped him up. “He said…” Paxton began, but even the words felt thick and clumsy and unwilling to be spoken. He took a good grip of the tent pole and looked into O’Neill’s face. As long as he looked at O’Neill he could avoid seeing Foster and the flies buzzing around his head.
“What did he say?” O’Neill asked. Brutus had come back and was licking the spilt whisky.
“He said that… um… nothing’s what it’s cracked up to be,” Paxton said. “And he wanted me to know that.”
“Let’s get out. Fuck off!” O’Neill aimed a kick at Brutus, who had begun sniffing Foster’s head. The dog bolted again.
Paxton put his arm around O’Neill’s shoulders and stumbled out of the tent. “Fidler!” O’Neill shouted. “Fidler, you bastard!” Paxton began to cry. “That’s the stuff,” O’Neill muttered,”have a damn good weep, let it all out. Fidler!” He steered Paxton towards their billet. “Fidler!”
Fidler arrived. O’Neill gave orders: fetch the adjutant, fetch Dando, fetch the Duty NCO. Fidler went. Paxton stopped crying. He felt sick, and said so. O’Neill held him while he threw up. “That’s the stuff,” O’Neill said. “Let it all out.” Paxton, hands on wobbly knees, blinked at the grass, spattered with his vomit.
By the time they reached the billet, Brazier and Dando had reached the tent. “You want to get that lousy taste out of your mouth,” O’Neill said. He poured two glasses of wine and gave Paxton one. O’Neill’s hand did not tremble. “Beats me, too,” he said. They drank.
After a while the adjutant came in and asked some questions. As Paxton answered, the whole incident in the tent seemed to recede until it was as if he were describing something that had happened to somebody else; something he had seen in the pictures, perhaps. He felt much better. Dando came in and listened. Brazier reached the end of his questions and stood, head down, hands in pockets, thinking.
“Look,” Paxton said,”if that’s all you need, it’s time we got off. On patrol.”
Dando checked his pulse, and thumbed an eyelid up so that he could study the eye. “Do this,” he said, and stretched out his hand. Paxton did it. His hand might have been cast in bronze. “Off you go,” Dando said.
Cleve-Cutler was flying when Foster killed himself. The adjutant met him with the news as soon as he landed. “Three gone and it’s only lunchtime,” the CO said. “I don’t feel much like lunch.”
“I’ve sent a couple of men over to the churchyard with spades. A funeral this evening might be advisable.”
“It was damn near four, or five. Come and look at this.” He showed the adjutant the FE’s instrument panel, shattered by a slash of bullets. He showed him where the bullets had hacked a ragged hole in the nose of the nacelle. “Should have gone through Gus Mayo,” he said, “but Gus was standing on his seat, using the top gun.” They climbed down. “So. A funeral for one, this evening. Agreed. What’s the rush?”
“Tomorrow will be a very busy day,” Brazier said.
When the last patrol touched down at 8 p.m. there had been a couple of forced landings; one kill, perhaps two; and many frights and lucky escapes. But the score of dead was still only three.
Cleve-Cutler called a meeting in his office: adjutant, padre, surviving flight commanders, Dando, Paxton, Essex, Ogilvy. “I don’t want to put Frank in his grave without knowing the facts,” he said. “I want to know, and then forget. I want to bury the poor blighter and bury his story too. Let’s start with the letter. Did Stubbs actually write a letter saying Frank was dead?”
“Yes, he did,” the adjutant said.
“Bloody daft thing to do. So when Stubbs snuffed it, Frank went off the deep end. Right?”
“Yes and no. Stubbs wasn’t the only one who wrote that sort of letter for him. Ogilvy wrote one.”
“It was all balls,” Ogilvy said. “He kept on about it. I did it to keep him happy, and it didn’t work. He started on Charlie next.”
The CO looked at Essex. Essex shrugged.
The adjutant was looking at his notes. “Ogilvy, Essex, Mayo, Binns, Goss and several others, all wrote letters for him. I found them in his tent. They were never sent.”
Cleve-Cutler shook his head. “I’m not equipped for this sort of thing.”
“At least we know he wasn’t responsible for his girlfriend’s death,” the padre said. “Her suicide, I mean.”
“Frank never had a girlfriend,” Ogilvy said.
Dando said: “That makes sense. Explains not sending the letters.”
“How d’you know?” Piggott asked Ogilvy. “Maybe he had someone you never knew about.”
“Women terrified him,” Ogilvy said. Piggott sniffed. “Listen, we spent our last leave together,” Ogilvy told him. “Went to the races and got drunk. Every day. I knew Frank better than anyone. We were at Eton, after all, you know. He wouldn’t let a woman get anywhere near him, ever.”
“So as I see it,” Cleve-Cutler said,”he shot himself because Stubbs wrote a letter he never sent to a woman he never knew, who never killed herself. And Stubbs went west.”
“If it hadn’t been Stubbs it would have been somebody else,” Dando said. “He needed a reason.”
“I think there was another reason,” Charlie Essex said. The words came out in a rush, but then he was silent. He looked weary and grim.
“Come on then, cough it up,” Cleve-Cutler said.
“He wasn’t writing to a woman at all, real or imaginary. I should have worked it out long ago, he made it pretty obvious, poor bugger.” Essex rubbed his eyes. “Jenny isn’t Jenny. Jenny is, or was, James. James Edward Norman Yeo.”
“J.E.N.Y.,” Ogilvy said. “Yes. Frank liked James. I suppose the letters must have been a dotty way of being with him. And now he’s gone and joined him, or so he thinks.”
“I never heard such twaddle in all my life. Never mind. It’s done now. Got your speech ready, padre? Let’s go and tuck him away.”
A dozen hurricane lamps lit the grave, reminding Paxton of the Chinese lanterns on the terrace. The entire squadron was there. As often happened, the wind had dropped when the sun went down and the churchyard was silent apart from the endless drumroll of the distant barrage. Paxton, standing in a corner of the crowd, looked around at the lamplit faces, washed empty by fatigue and a little grief, and he didn’t realise that he was searching for O’Neill until he found him. O’Neill saw him looking, and simply looked back. No nod, no shrug, no half-smile. No need.
“Frank Foster wasn’t a bad sort,” the padre said. “He paid his debts, told a few good jokes, and took five wickets for 39 in the Harrow match. I’m not sure I can add a lot to that, but I’ll try.” He tried, but he couldn’t add anything that he thought Foster would have approved of, except perhaps at the end, when he quoted a verse from Proverbs, chapter 25: “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep”.
Chapter 21
Fidler came in with mugs of tea at 4 a.m. and got cursed for his stupidity. “Don’t blame me, sir,” he told O’Neill,”blame Mr. Haig. He’s decided to have a battle.”
‘A’ Flight ate boiled eggs for breakfast and took off at twenty to five. The dawn came up, glowing with goodwill to all men, and German archie spattered the sky like slum kids throwing mud at someone’s washing. The four FEs separated and went looking for troop movements behind the German lines, as briefed, but there was thick mist everywhere. Away to the east, enemy planes could be seen rising from their airfields like hatching flies. ‘A’ Flight landed at ten to six, with little to report to Brazier. “Our guns are still hammering away fifteen to the dozen,” Paxton said. “But of course you can hear that.”