“To drink?” the maid asked.
“Whisky-soda.”
Judy danced, a different maid changed the record, she danced again. The light had faded; she was a pattering shadow, a picture in a fairy story. Paxton drank his whiskysoda and gave himself up to the show. He had the odd and very pleasant sensation he always got when he came to this house: that everything was arranged, that there was no need to think or to decide about anything, and certainly no need to worry. Just relax and make the most of life. Everything would work out fine.
When the music and the dancing finally ended she stood in the middle of the floor, hands on hips. It was too dim to see her face; he could hear faint gasps for breath. She pointed up at him, so he pointed down at her. She walked to the door.
The same maid led him through unfamiliar parts of the house and indicated that he should wait in a long, handsome room. He guessed he must be on the top floor. There was a view of the last of the sunset that made the British bombardment look like children’s fireworks. He relaxed and made the most of it.
“I could murder that composer,” she said. “He makes you do things God never meant you to do… Hell’s bells, David, where’ve you been? Oh!” She saw the empty sleeve. “What a stupid question.” They kissed, awkwardly because of his sling.
“Hospital. I stopped a bullet.”
“But that’s terrible.” She didn’t look as if it was terrible. Her forehead creased and her voice stretched the word thin, but her mouth and eyes smiled happily. They might have been talking about a black eye from playing rugby. Paxton didn’t mind; he didn’t think it was so very terrible; in fact he didn’t give it much thought at all. What he thought was she looked lovelier than ever. She was wearing Turkish-style pyjamas, deep red and silky. They didn’t button at the front, they just hung loosely. Whenever she moved they swung apart slightly and then came together again. He noticed, and she noticed that he noticed, so she deliberately swayed to tease him. “I like to be cool,” she said. “Don’t you?” He got a glimpse of something pink that might perhaps have been a nipple, and turned to look at the dying sunset. His heart was pounding at a rate that couldn’t possibly be doing it any good, and his arm had started to throb. “I shouldn’t be here, really,” he said. “If the MO knew about it he’d raise the roof.”
“I won’t tell him, if you won’t.” She linked their little fingers and took him into the next room. It was the biggest bedroom he had ever seen, with the biggest bed. “Tell me about your great big beautiful war.” They sat on the bed. “Mr. Kent Haffner is in Paris, polishing his little apples.” She kissed his ear, gently, and tickled it with her tongue. He stretched his neck and grinned at the sheer luxury of it all. “Are you an ace yet?” she asked.
“Nearly.”
“Tell me. I want to know all about your kills.”
“Well… there was the Aviatik we scrapped with… It was a lovely sunny morning, I remember, and the Hun looked so pretty, all purple and green, and we were miles high, so everything was blue sky…” Judy Kent Haffner was taking his tunic off, easing it away from the arm in a sling. “He dived on us and I waited until I couldn’t miss and he simply blew up. Nothing left but a wisp of smoke.”
“That must have been such a thrill.” She was undoing his tie, and he saw a flicker of envy in her smile. It made him feel stronger, more confident. He knew how to please her.
“The Halberstadt wasn’t so easy. Two-seater, with a hell of a good gunner…” His tie was off and she kissed his forehead. “There were twenty-three bullet-holes in the bus when we landed, not counting the wings.” She was untying his shoes, “Twenty-three!” she said. “That’s incredible.”
Paxton leaned back and rested on one elbow. He wasn’t sure about the Halberstadt. Maybe that had been the Fokker. The kills got all mixed up in his mind. Who cared? It didn’t matter. She unbuttoned his shirt and said, “Tell me again about the flamer. The one like a flower.”
“Oh, that…” The right side of the shirt had been slit so that it came away easily. “I think I got a fuel tank with an incendiary bullet. It was so sudden. One second the Hun was all there, the latest style in aeroplanes, the next second he’d turned into an enormous ball of flame, all red and yellow. Rather like a dahlia.”
“Dahlia.” She pushed him back on the bed and propped herself above him. Now the pyjamas swung open and stayed open. She kissed him generously on the mouth and his chest tensed at the startling touch of her breasts. “Dahlia,” she murmured.
“Yes, dahlia.” Paxton frowned. He realised he wasn’t at all sure what a dahlia looked like.
“It must be so beautiful. So wonderful.” They stood up. She undid the top of his trousers but he said:”I can do this better.” His voice was flat and empty. He turned his back on her as he stepped out of his trousers. “To tell the truth,” he said,”it might have looked more like a geranium.” He turned. “What does a geranium look like?”
She had lost her pyjamas. “Not like that,” she said. “So who cares?”
They got into bed and, as she had done when they lay on the boulder on the island, she sat astride his legs. At first he was worried about hurting his arm, but the act of sex turned out to be astonishingly easy. She did most of it; he just lay back and helped. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. The end felt like the way the sunset had looked. He was sorry when it was over.
That feeling of sorrow gradually intensified. He closed his eyes. She was humming to herself, contentedly, as she moved about the room, and he resented her contentment because a sense of dejection and regret was beginning to grip him. “You really are an ace,” she said. “You know that?” He said nothing. He wasn’t an ace, and he took no pride in the stories he had told her. His kills were none of her damn business.
“How did you get shot?” she asked.
He levered himself up on the pillows. She was sitting at the bottom of the bed, still naked, brushing her hair. “Listen,” he said. “You don’t want to hear about all that stuff.”
“Oh, but I do. Dahlias, geraniums, the lot.”
“Most of it’s fairly…” For some reason he thought of O’Neill’s face the day O’Neill had said to him It only takes one bullet. Grief sank its tiny claws. “It’s a fairly bloody business.”
“I’m tough, I can take it. Want a sandwich?” There was a tray of food and a bottle of wine on a bedside table.
Paxton took a sandwich and bit into it. It tasted of nothing. He didn’t want to eat her fucking food. He put it back. “This is the closest you ever get to war, I suppose,” he said.
She glanced at him sideways. “I’d get closer if I could.”
Paxton watched her doing things to her hair. He looked down and fiddled with bits of loose bandage poking out of the sling.
“Now what are you brooding about?” she said.
That angered him. “D’you really want to know? All right, I’ll tell you.” Anger swelled, and he didn’t try to hide it. “I’m brooding about a man called Foster. He shot himself. Duncan got his head cut off. Milne flew slap-bang into an enemy machine. Ogilvy got badly burnt. He might be dead, he might not. Is that enough for you?”
Silence, while she looked at herself in a hand mirror.
“It’s no reason to sulk,” she said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, reached out, grabbed the hand mirror from her and threw it across the room. The glass broke. “Here comes your bad luck. Go and look in my lefthand tunic pocket. There’s a couple of photographs. Group photographs. You’ll recognise one of the group.”