Feelings of Fear Read online

  “What the hell—?” he asked her. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  She stayed where she was, with her back turned to him, shivering, saying nothing.

  “Come on, Anne, what the hell is this all about? I can’t hurt you. I love you, if you must know. You can’t expect me to – Jesus, I don’t know.”

  “You love me?” she asked, without looking around. “You really love me?”

  “What do you think, goddamit?”

  With her fingertip, she traced the pattern of one of the brown flowers on the wallpaper. “If you really love me, then you’ll do what I ask you to do.”

  Cliff stood on the threadbare rug beside the bed, wondering what to do. In the end he felt so cold that he pulled on his clothes. “Listen,” he repeated, “I love you.”

  Still she said nothing. He looked at his watched and realized that he should have been back on base over twenty minutes ago. He bent over and kissed her shoulder but she didn’t respond. Her fingertip kept on tracing the pattern of the flower, over and over, as if she were trying to memorize it.

  “Major Browne?” he asked, one hand clamped against his ear to suppress the deafening droning of a taxiing Fort.

  “That’s correct. How can I help you?”

  “I’m not too sure. My name’s Captain Cliff Eager, I’m stationed at Bassingbourn.”

  “American, by the sound of it.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s right. Well, the truth of it is, I met your daughter Anne just before she left for Torquay.”

  “Oh you did, did you?”

  “Yes, sir. We sort of struck up a friendship. But I saw her this afternoon, and I have to tell you that she didn’t look too good. I’m worried about her.”

  There was a lengthy pause. Then, “You say you saw her this afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir. Anything wrong with that?”

  “Well, nothing. Except that she’s still in Torquay.”

  “She couldn’t have come back to see you? I mean, maybe she’s on her way now.”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid. Her contract won’t allow it. You must have made a mistake.”

  “A mistake? What kind of mistake?”

  “Well, you know, mistaken identity. One young English rose looks very much like another, don’t you know?”

  “You’re trying to tell me that I didn’t meet Anne, I met some other girl who just happened to look like her?”

  “It’s the only feasible explanation, old man.”

  “Major Browne, I hate to contradict you, and I hate to shock you, too, but Anne and I were more than just good chums. And we were more than just good chums this afternoon.”

  Another pause. Then, “Look here, Captain Eagle or whatever your name is, what you are describing is not only impossible but scurrilous. I seriously recommend that you forget all about Anne and get back to the business that your government sent you here for. Otherwise I shall have to have strong words with your commanding officer.”

  “But, you listen here, major—”

  “No, captain, you listen to me. Anne has gone to Torquay, and she has not yet returned. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll believe that, too. For her good, if not for your own.”

  Cliff hung up, and sat for a long time staring at the telephone as if it were going to ring, and it would be Anne.

  A week and a half later, it did, and it was.

  Cliff had just returned from a mission over Brunswick and Halberstadt, and he and his crew were so tired that they were hallucinating. Everything had gone wrong. Unexpected easterly winds had slowed them down on their way to the target, and the three-stream bomber force had failed to rendezvous with their fighter escorts as they crossed the Dutch border. Altogether the US Eighth Air Force had lost sixty-five aircraft that night, 650 men, and Cliff had lost so many friends that he couldn’t even count them.

  When the phone rang and he heard her saying, “Eager? Eager, is that you?” he couldn’t believe it at first.

  “Anne? Is that really you? Where are you calling from?”

  “The Dog & Duck, where else? Aren’t you coming to see me?”

  “Your father said you were still in Torquay.”

  “Well, let’s put it this way. I am, and I’m not.”

  “You sound tired,” he told her.

  “Well, my darling, I haven’t been getting much sleep. The people here keep me awake most of the time. They’re very demanding.”

  Cliff smeared his eyes with his hand. He was still trembling from six hours of battling with the Fort’s controls. “Listen … how long are you going to be there? I just finished debriefing. I need to take a shower. I’ve been flying all day and I stink like a polecat’s armpit.”

  “Don’t worry about a shower. I need to see you now.”

  “Anne, honey – can’t it wait until tomorrow morning?”

  “I need to see you now. I have to see you now. If you don’t come to see me now, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Listen,” he said, “why don’t we—” but he heard the click as Anne put down her receiver, and then the endless purring of the dialing tone.

  “Oh, shoot,” he said.

  At that moment McClung came past, and said, “Problems, captain?”

  He had a sudden apocalyptic vision of all the Forts he had seen that afternoon, plunging through the clouds with blazing young men on board them. He wondered what they were thinking about as they fell to earth, 23,000 feet below? Did they pray? Did they think of their mothers? Or did they calmly accept that their lives were over?

  And McClung was asking if he had problems?

  It was already dark by the time he reached The Dog & Duck – windy, and very cold, but dry. It was a real bomber’s sky, eight-tenths cloud, with just enough breaks to see the stars. Across the road, in Poulter’s Farm, a dog was barking.

  There was a darts fixture taking place and the pub was crowded. He asked for a Scotch, paid for it, and tipped it back in one. Tom said, “All back safe?” but Cliff shook his head. There was a roar from the crowd as somebody scored a double top.

  When Tom had his back turned, Cliff went through to the back of the pub and climbed the stairs. It was so dark that he barked his shin on the top step. He cautiously made his way to the back room door, and opened it. He had never realized before how much it creaked.

  Inside, the blackout curtains were drawn tight and he couldn’t see anything at all.

  “Anne?” he said. “Can’t you switch on the light?”

  “Not yet,” she replied. Her voice sounded oddly clogged, as if she had a bad sore throat. “Come in, darling. I’m here on the bed.”

  He groped his way into the room and closed the door behind him.

  “Lock it,” said Anne. “Now come over here, and sit on the bed.”

  Cliff did as he was told. Immediately, she sat up and put her arms around him, and kissed him. She was naked and she was very cold, as if she had been lying there uncovered for hours.

  “You’re freezing,” he said. “Come on, get under the blankets. You’ll catch your death.”

  But she ignored him, and kept on kissing him and kissing him. It was while she was kissing him that he realized how swollen and puffy her lips were. He fumbled for the bedside lamp.

  “No!” she said. “Please don’t! You won’t understand!”

  But he did, and when the light abruptly flooded the room, he couldn’t believe what he saw. Anne’s body was covered in weals and bruises. Both of her eyes were swollen up, so that they looked like scarlet plums. Her lips had been split and the sides of her mouth were crusted in scabs. Whole hanks of her hair had been pulled out, revealing patches of raw scalp. There were criss-cross marks across her thighs, and it looked as if her pubic hair had been actually burned.

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Cliff. He was shaking with shock. “Who did this to you? What the hell bastard could have—”

  She reached out and gripped both of his wrists. “Please, Eager, I’m begging you. Do
n’t be angry.”

  “How can I not be angry? Look at you! I’m going to call the police!”

  She gripped him even more tightly. “No,” she pleaded. “Please, Eager, no.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do? Sit back and allow this lunatic, whoever he is, to beat you to death?”

  “Just be loving, Eager, that’s all I ask. Just tell me you need me.”

  Cliff took a pack of Luckys out of his shirt pocket, shook two out and lit them both with wildly wobbling hands. He passed one to Anne and took a deep, long drag on the other. “You need a doctor,” he told her. “For Christ’s sake, you need two doctors. One for your body and one for your brain. How can you let anybody do this to you?”

  She stroked his cheek. “I love it, when we’re together,” she whispered. “It’s all I have to live for.”

  “This has to stop,” he insisted.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to smile. “And I promise you, Eager, it will.”

  “Promise?”

  “There’s only one more thing I want you to do for me.”

  “I’m not biting you again. Forget it.”

  She took hold of the hand in which he held his lighted cigarette. “I want you to write your name across my breasts. Then I want you to stub it out inside me. You must.”

  He pulled his hand away. “Are you kidding me, Anne? What the hell’s wrong with you? Come on, I can’t take any more of this! You’re going to have to see a doctor, and then I’m going to call for a cop!”

  “Please, Eager,” she begged him. “Please, Eager. I can’t bear it unless it’s you.”

  But he stood up, and when she tried to cling on to him, he pried her fingers away, and she was in too much pain to be able to follow him. Her head fell back on the pillow and he dragged the quilt around her to keep her warm. “I won’t be long,” he told her. “I’m just going to call for a doctor.”

  She watched him go to the door. Her swollen eyes were crowded with tears. “Please,” she whispered, her voice strangled with misery. “Please don’t, Eager. Please.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then he went out and closed the door behind him.

  The doctor puffed up the stairs like a GWR locomotive, every puff smelling of whisky. He wore a bowler hat and a pinstriped trousers and carried a brown Gladstone bag.

  “I don’t know who did this,” Cliff told him, opening the door. “I just want you to understand that it wasn’t me.”

  The doctor didn’t say anything, but looked at him piggy-eyed.

  “All right, then,” said Cliff, and switched on the light.

  The room was empty. The bed was empty. The quilt was smooth and undisturbed. Cliff laid his hand on the pillow and even the pillow was cold.

  “I hope this isn’t some kind of a joke,” said the doctor, taking off his hat. “I was listening to ITMA.”

  Cliff lifted the quilt but even the sheet underneath was chilly. Nobody had been here, not tonight. He stared at the doctor and he didn’t know what to say.

  “She’s not here, then, your lady friend?” the doctor asked him.

  Cliff said something, but what he said was drowned out by the droning of a fully laden Fort taking off south-westward into the prevailing wind.

  He let himself into the house and called out, “Babsy! I’m back!”

  In the living-room, little Pete was sitting cross-legged in front of the television, solemnly watching Howdy Doody. “Hi, son! Howdy-doo to you!”

  He hung up his hat on the hallstand, brushed back his close-cropped hair with both hands, and walked through to the kitchen, where the late-afternoon sun was shining. Babsy was rolling out pastry on the kitchen counter, her blonde hair tied up in a scarf. But she wasn’t alone. A lean, tall white-haired man in an inappropriately wintry suit was sitting at the breakfast table, with a stack of papers in front of him. He stood up as Cliff came in, and Cliff looked at Babsy in surprise.

  “You didn’t say we were expecting visitors.”

  “You weren’t, captain,” said the white-haired man, in a rather faded British accent. “I’m afraid to say that I arrived unannounced. Your good lady was kind enough to allow me to wait for you.”

  Cliff walked around the counter, put his arm around Babsy and gave her a kiss. “Is something wrong?” he wanted to know.

  The white-haired man shook his head. “Quite the opposite. You might just say that I’m laying a ghost to rest. My name is Gerald Browne – Major Gerald Browne. You and I once talked on the telephone, several years ago.”

  Cliff said, in disbelief, “You’re Anne’s father?”

  “Perhaps this is something you’d rather talk about in private.”

  “No, no – I—” Cliff began, but Babsy laid a hand on his arm and said, “Why don’t you take Major Browne into the yard? I have to give little Pete his supper now, anyhow.”

  They went out into the small back yard and sat on the white-painted swing. It was a treacly Memphis evening and the sky was gold. Cliff offered Major Browne a Lucky but Major Browne declined.

  “Anne told you that she was going to Torquay, but in reality she was doing nothing of the sort. She was being flown into France to make contact with the Resistance and to set up a communications system.”

  “She was what? Anne? But she was only just a kid!”

  “I think you forget, Captain Eager, that in those days you were all just ‘kids’. Anne was an SOE wireless operator, very highly trained.”

  “But I saw her, after she left. She came back and I saw her twice.”

  Major Browne’s eyes brimmed with sadness. They were rainwater eyes, just like Anne’s. “Well, captain, I didn’t believe you then, but now I think I do. Although she was very brave, Anne was terrified of being captured and executed. She felt that she hadn’t lived her life to the full. She hadn’t even had a lover. That was why – well, when you met her for the first time that evening, she was so forward. She felt she had to cram a lifetime of experience into just a few hours.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because six weeks ago, the French authorities returned her diary to me, the diary which she kept both before and after she was caught and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Your name comes up again and again. When they tortured her, she always tried to imagine that it was you torturing her, instead of them. She felt that she could bear the pain if it was inflicted with passion, and with love. And she did bear pain – much more than you or I could ever imagine.

  “It was thinking of you that helped her to endure her suffering. In her mind, she says, she wasn’t in Amiens prison, but in your arms. And, by the way, she never gave away any of her codes or any of her comrades, not till the last.”

  Cliff found that he had to wipe his eyes. “I saw her. I held her. I don’t understand it. The last time she came – she was so badly hurt, I couldn’t stand it. I left her and went to call for a doctor. When I came back … the bed was empty. She was gone. I thought she’d just—”

  “Do you remember what date that was?”

  “For sure. It was the day we lost sixty-five Flying Fortresses over Germany, all in one day. October 16, 1943.”

  Major Browne nodded. “That was the same day that Anne was tortured for the last time by the Gestapo. According to the French, they did unspeakable things to her with cigarettes, and burned a swastika on her chest. When she still refused to speak, they shot her.”

  Major Browne handed Cliff the small brown diary with its stained, creased cover. “Here, captain, I think this is yours, more than anybody’s.”

  That night, while Babsy quietly breathed, Cliff stood by the bedroom window staring out at the moonlight. Between finger and thumb he twirled the St Catherine medallion that Anne had given him. St Catherine, broken on the wheel.

  He was about to go back to bed when he was aware of a figure standing in the deep shadows on the far side of the room. Or maybe it wasn’t a figure. Maybe it was nothing more than Babsy’s wrap, hanging on the back of the door.

  “Is
anybody there?” he said, very softly.

  Then, “Anne, is that you?”

  Saving Grace

  “Well, you did your best,” said his grandfather, opening the Rover’s boot-lid and dropping Jack’s kitbag into it. “They were bigger than you, most of them. Don’t know what their games master’s been feeding them on. Six Shredded Wheat every morning, if you ask me.”

  Jack climbed into the car. As he did so, three of his team-mates passed him by and shouted out, “Butterfingers! You couldn’t catch a cold!”

  “He did his best!” his grandfather called back. “Maybe you shouldn’t have let the other forwards get through to the goalmouth so many times!”

  “Grandad,” Jack protested. He was going to get even more teasing now. Can’t stand up for yourself, Matthews? Have to get a hundred-year-old man to do it for you?

  His grandfather slammed his door and started the engine. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? You were practically defending that goal on your own.”

  They drove between the foggy playing fields toward the school’s entrance gates. Several Johnson House boys jeered and cheered as they passed by. Jack felt cold and miserable and exhausted, and now that his ears were warming up they were tingling so much that they hurt.

  Barrons School had lost to Johnson House 3–2 – not the worst defeat in the school’s 109-year history – but if they lost just one more match they would be out of the schools area championship for the first time ever. Normally Jack wouldn’t have played for the first XI at all, but Peter Dunning, their usual goalie, had twisted his ankle. He had told matron that he was playing squash, but the truth was that he had fallen off the roof of the bicycle-shed pretending to be Batman.

  “How about some tea?” Jack’s grandfather asked him. “We could go to that café where they do those meringues.”

  The café was warm, with flowery wallpaper and copper kettles hanging from its dark oak beams. Jack had a Coke and two meringues while his grandfather had a cup of tea and three squashed fly biscuits. His grandfather didn’t come to see him very often, because he hadn’t been very well lately, something to do with his heart, but Jack liked it when he did because he always gave him a giant-sized Toblerone bar and five pounds. And apart from that, he looked so much like his father, if his father had ever grown a white moustache.