Cameo, p.1
Cameo, page 1
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Winston Graham
CAMEO
Contents
Friday Night
Saturday Morning
Saturday Morning – Two
Saturday Evening
Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning – Two
Sunday Afternoon
Sunday Afternoon – Two
Sunday Evening
Sunday Evening – Two
Monday Morning
Monday Afternoon
Monday Evening
Monday Evening – Two
Tuesday Morning
Tuesday Evening
Tuesday Night
Tuesday Night – Two
Wednesday Morning
Thursday Evening
Friday
Friday Night
I
When you find the dead body of a woman in your bedroom on the first night of your leave it is disturbing to the mind and the stomach – even if you are as used to various forms of sudden death as he was.
It had all begun really on the way home, in the small hours, three o’clock in the morning to be exact, on the way home from a night-club called The Bamboo, in Frith Street. The date was Friday 17 April. Perhaps it should have been Friday the 13th.
He had been careful with his car, the way he drove it, careful to keep to the left of centre and pretty skilful in double de-clutching and not grating his gears. That was as it should be: man on leave, with rank, ought to set a good example. He was not, of course, drunk, just careful with his car.
The first day had been a long one, but not bad, considering. Bit of a blow-out tonight, and why not? Witold had got a bar to his DFC. Good man, Witold. Great big chap, noisy, clumsy; you’d not guess to look at him that he’d be so good at the fairly delicate business of flying a fighter plane. Pale, absent-minded eyes and a wide mouth with irregular teeth that his lips closed over reluctantly. Anything but handsome, yet the girls fell for him in a big way. His parents and two sisters had been killed in the siege of Warsaw.
The other Pole, Stephen, his great friend, was quite different; a quiet, pleasant young man, fair-haired, blue-eyed, slight blond moustache; handsome enough and spoke English well. He had lost a brother in the Orzel, and another was serving in a bomber squadron. Titled Cracow family; Stephen had been studying medicine at the outbreak of war.
A day and half the night, first supping at the Savoy, going on after to The Bamboo. Three Scotsmen, two Poles and an Englishman. Fair mix. When the party broke up, the Scotsmen had gone off singing and supporting each other; the Poles had grabbed a prowling taxi, the last heard of them was decreasing decibels of noise as the taxi turned out of Frith Street.
Would they go to their hotel? Seemed unlikely. Too dull. Girls? Probably. He had thought of joining them. Flying Officer Witold Poniatowski, Flight Lieutenant Stephen Radziwill, Squadron Leader Andrew Halford.
Better to have stuck together, at least as far as a bedroom door, but his father, evacuated with his Government department to Bath, had asked him to look in at their house at Northcot, see how it was going on. His mother, after expressing distress that he was not going to spend most of his brief leave with them, had added: ‘I am enclosing a short list of things we weren’t able to bring away when we were over in January, and it would be kind of you, dear, if you would parcel them up. If they won’t go in the boot of your car you could leave them with the Farrants next door and I’ll ask the GWR to call for them.’
So his idea was to pass the night in the house, just to satisfy them both. He knew his father wouldn’t let his mother come up on her own, though what the difference in risk was between London and Bath floored him. But it was Government thinking; no one except those in the flying business had yet come round to the realization that when you were in the air 100 miles hardly counted.
Bloody nuisance all the same, having to come out here. It was why he hadn’t gone girl-chasing with the Poles. Bloody nuisance. Or was it a part excuse? Nothing he’d have liked better than to find a girl he fancied – a nice girl, a friendly girl, a free girl, an oncoming girl; but honest to God he didn’t really fancy tarts. Something wrong with him. That poem he’d read at Keble: ‘Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet.’ Just the trouble: they weren’t. Or not to him. The false ‘darlings’. The phoney expressions of desire. The cries of pleasure. The hard eyes with the soft lips. OK. He would have liked something. But, with all deference to Witold’s and Stephen’s taste, he really needed something a bit different, a bit better. Failing it, he had to make do with nothing.
A black cat streaking across the road made him brake suddenly. And as suddenly, just for a few seconds, he felt himself back in his Spitfire. When you fired all eight Brownings your plane checked, dipped its nose, dropped something like 40 mph in its speed. Then, chances were, if you had aimed right and were near enough, someone else’s boyfriend, some other parents’ son, might not see another dawn. That was the way it was in the air. Jolly but grim. Mortal combat. Quite different from braking a 1½ litre MG to preserve one of a cat’s nine lives. But all part of the scene. You couldn’t change it.
He’d been to No 9 Vernon Avenue early in the afternoon, hurriedly, to dump his kit and to make up a bed, but it would mean messing for himself in the morning. Not that that would be entirely new: in the dark days of last August, with the Battle of Britain raging at its fiercest, the kitchen staff at the airfield, with the encouragement of their unions, had refused to get up early enough to cook breakfast for the dawn patrol.
But there was a bit too much in the echoing house and half acre of garden to remind him of a pre-war life that was really better folded up in lavender and put away for the duration. He wasn’t even sure he wanted it back. Not that life anyway. Peace of a different sort. He’d been reading English Lit, and only in his last year, with Munich imminent, had joined the Air Volunteer Reserve. Lucky old Halford. Just got in in time to be launched unfledged against the Messerschmidts. Somehow it had all worked out, and now at 25 he was a senior officer, a hardened war-horse of fifty fights, long-time member of the Caterpillar Club, a chap a lot of other chaps looked up to. Some of them even saluted.
Nothing much wrong with the house; he’d done a Cook’s tour this afternoon. Three bedroom windows at the rear had gone, and most of the slates of the garage roof. But the windows were boarded up, and there was no car in the garage to come to harm. The garden, once his father’s pride, was a right mess: last year’s rambler shoots straggled and waved across the windows; weeds flourished in the borders and the paths. Odd how quickly nature got back at you for trying to keep it tidy. Nothing in nature was tidy. Everything struggled to live at the expense of everything else. Perhaps that was what war was about …
No, he thought carefully. Maybe last time. Maybe other times. Not this time. It wasn’t just lebensraum that Hitler was after.
Creep through Willesden, take the main Thornwood road. No alerts tonight. There’d been a hell of a blitz last Wednesday, but except for a few stray pencils of light tracing infant markings on the slate of the sky, London showed no special signs of life at the moment. Sky fine and clear, a dusting of misty stars, all free from that fevered flush that had marked it for generations. The city slept – or appeared to. It slept with an ear to the ground and an eye on the skies, really altogether more alert than it had ever been among the clamour and the light.
He laughed suddenly. It bubbled up in him like champagne – maybe it was the champagne – Witold Poniatowski spoke his English as he killed his Germans, untidily. When he was sober you knew just what he meant: when not sober it was comic guesswork. Sometimes, now and then, he misunderstood commands issued to him in the air, usually when it was an order to break off an engagement. A man without anger in the ordinary sense of the word, a man without fear, but also without pity. There were a few subjects Witold never joked about. Twice already he had been fished out of the Channel.
Past Thornwood and turn right at the Green. Two special constables were pacing the empty streets. There were a few craters round here, partly filled in, but they had to be negotiated. Made navigation a bit confusing. There was Beach Avenue, then two more, then Vernon Avenue. He yawned so widely as he turned down it that his jaw cracked. Maybe he should be tired. Two missions yesterday – one a dog fight, but the Jerry, a Messerschmidt Emil, had turned up into the clouds and he’d lost him. Frustrating that, all the tension, all the adrenaline flowing, then nothing to show for it. He always remembered that time when he and Cowley had shot up a Junkers 88, filled it as full of holes as an old bucket and still hadn’t been able to bring it down. It had gone wobbling and wheezing back to France. When they reported to the CO he said: ‘No bad thing. It’s worse for morale if a few of ’em get back with half the crew dead, and blood everywhere. Not just a nice clean ‘‘disappearance’’.’
Draw up at No 9; leave the engine ticking over while you open the gates; run the car into the drive. Not much point in using the garage, with half the roof gaping. Hadn’t seen the Farrants yet: see ’em in the morning. Both of their sons were at sea, one in a minesweeper. Damned dangerous job.
A glint of light from a curtain further down the avenue. Air-raid warden wasn’t doing his job. Touch of late frost in the air; there was a smear of rime on the gates.
Surprising, considering the pasting London had had all through the winter, how few really had left their homes. People were fatalistic, shrugged their shoulders, thought it probably wouldn’t happen to them. Life went on, not merely in the flesh-pots of the West End but in these great sprawling suburbs whose very area made bombing more difficult to invest with frightfulness.
He locked the car and took off the distributor head – an advised precaution in case parachutists should suddenly arrive. (A less likely event it seemed to him since the air battles of last summer.) Open the door and go in. Laughter again – a bubbling gust – because he thought he was going to have difficulty with the key. Surely not as fuddled as all that. He needed another drink now, but maybe coffee was the right bet. As he finally pushed open the door he thought: 6.30 to 3.30, twenty-one hours. It would take longer than that to unwind – properly unwind. Champagne had left him heavy of foot but sharp enough of mind. He wondered if the Poles would find their girls. Wouldn’t be surprised if in the end they thought it wasn’t worth the trouble and turned in like him.
Pleasant house inside, built to a more or less standard model of these avenues. His parents had moved in when his father got his promotion to Whitehall. He was seven then, so it spanned most of his life. Square hall with wide shallow stairs which led up to a landing with a big picture window. This had been a headache when the black-out first came in. At the back were a kitchen and a dining room; to the right a large drawing room; to the left a breakfast room; above, five bedrooms. His mother said the house was too big. When they came here they had expected a larger family. Instead only him. Pity. All their eggs in one Spitfire.
He had made up a bed in his parents’ room, as this faced south. He went in to the room and picked his way across to draw the curtains. He swore as he caught his leg on a chair which unexpectedly got in the way, then was at the window carefully pulling the material over. His mother must have bought new stuff; it didn’t seem long since everyone was combing the shops for black Italian cloth and holding substitutes to the light to see if they made the grade. His mother, whose philosophy in life was never to face the worst until it happened, had been caught out, and every pair of curtains in the house had a different lining. He had been training at Aston Down at the time, and had spent a good bit of his early leaves fitting rods and runners.
Now with safety he could take out his pocket torch and flick it on as he moved across the room to switch on the light. He stopped when he saw that since this afternoon the bed had been moved. Or looked as if it had. Maybe in his haste this afternoon he hadn’t noticed.
He flicked his torch across the bed again, feeling stupid. Then he went to the door and switched on the light. No light.
He’d been in the kitchen specially this afternoon, put down the main switch. And it had worked because he’d made a cup of tea. So what was this? Silly bulb had fused. Try the bedside light. But who had moved the bed?
He rubbed his eyes, swallowed another yawn. Not sleepy now. Not the time to be sleepy. Something very wrong. You didn’t need to be slightly fuddled to know that. But perhaps being fuddled had delayed the signals. Finger-tips, hair, nose, all said something, were saying something he hadn’t quite latched on to. He flashed his tiny light about the room.
Two things clear. First, this wasn’t his parents’ room. Bed at a different angle, chairs of different shape, pictures on the walls. Second, still plainer, still more important. Corner-wise, to the right of the main window, a big dressing-table with three mirrors. In a chair at this dressing-table a woman sat with her head on one side watching him through the middle and largest of the mirrors.
II
Thoughts fly quicker than birds. Confused by the black-out, stop at the wrong house; key sticks; probably front door hadn’t been locked. A woman waits for her husband – Home guard or ARP duty – perhaps been out herself on canteen work, combing her hair in the dark not bothering to draw the curtains; he lumbers in. She’d watched his gropings about the room in frozen silence. Lucky she hasn’t screamed the house down – yet; or cracked him over the head, thinking him a Fifth Columnist.
‘I – I beg your pardon,’ he got out.
Really, he thought, what a drunken clot. Really.
‘This … must be the wrong house. Not number Nine. Desperately sorry …’
You couldn’t decently spot the light directly on her, but he caught the glint of her eyes watching him. She wasn’t wearing much either, a bare shoulder gleamed, the other was covered by dark hair. He turned the light on himself, so that the sight of his uniform might reassure her.
‘Damned black-out. So sorry.’
The sheets of the bed were rumpled, looked as if they’d been slept in.
In the mirror, she still seemed to be watching him, not in the least reassured. Head on one side and scowling at him in fact. Or snarling, like a wild cat caught in the dark. Get out quick. ‘Drunken air-force officer on assault charge.’ Why didn’t she move or say something?
Provoked, he put the light on her, and the light flickered back through the mirror; couldn’t see distinctly. Was it only the light that flickered? Sheet over the wardrobe. Room stuffy. The frost on his fingers outside had turned to dust.
He drew a breath to speak but held it there. He went up to her slowly, sidling up, careful not to frighten her any more. Then he saw she wasn’t afraid of him at all. Her tongue was half out of her mouth and bloody. Even before he touched her hand he knew it would be cold and stiff.
III
There was that German gunner in the Heinkel that had crash-landed, most of his face blown away. And there was Cowley, his old friend Cowley, pulled out from under the wreckage of his Hurricane. And others. Plenty of others. After all, you get involved in a war and lose any number of your friends, some of whom you unfortunately see when they are past their best. But it’s still a new experience to see a dead woman.
A sharp step back, wipe your fingers down the side of your tunic; the torch fell away and the light made a feeble oval on the carpet.
Shaky, believe it or not, he was shaky. Old iron nerves. Was this an air-raid victim from Wednesday? Death from shock or fright. Fright might have done it, as the windows weren’t broken. But those eyes? That tongue? The battery of his torch was running down, the light yellowing. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a petticoat and high-heeled shoes; one had fallen off, lay at an ironic angle to the twisted foot. His finger-tips still tingled from the touch of her ice-cold hand.
Stuffy in the room too. Time to go. Exit gently pursued by a bear.
Time was it? A clock on the dressing-table had stopped at half-past nine. Beside it was a vase of flowers, withered, black, an inch of yellow water at the base of the vase.
Beside the vase a stub of candle; necessary furnishing in these times. Go and leave it all, ring the police. ‘ Pardon me, I’ve just come from No 7 – or perhaps No 11 – Vernon Avenue and found the body of a young woman sitting in a chair.’
He lit the candle from a box of matches he’d picked up at the Savoy. After the usual pause, the light grew, began to show up more of the room. Furniture was much like his parents’ except this was walnut not mahogany; copy of a Van Gogh on the wall, some photographs, another mirror. Clothes on a chair by the bed. Her clothes.
Something creaked. He stopped very still. How to explain yourself, if found? But who would come to find you? Was this the owner, who didn’t change the flowers for a month and then come back to die in a bedroom thick with dust? She was still watching him through the mirror with her bloody, staring eyes.
Must stop her staring. Go over, wipe your finger-tips, set the torch down, put a hand on the dark crisp hair, with the forefinger of the other hand pull down the eyelids. Eyes very bloodshot; dry blood in the ears. Shiver, as you step back. Head was moving; it lolled slowly to one side, then fell forward as far as it could go upon the breast. The body was relaxing.
