The Warning Bell Read online

  I magnified the stylised map until I could read the name of the river. The Vasse. I ran Google Earth, keyed in St Cyriac, and after a couple of tries a jumble of fuzzy pastel cubes filled the screen, irregular blocks of houses beside a gunmetal sea with dull green hills behind. I could make out the foreshortened tower of a church, trees in the churchyard and in the centre of the village an open square with toy cars parked around it.

  There was a quay and against it a miniature harbour. The Vasse, darkened by overhanging trees, opened into a small estuary just to the east of the village centre, and its outflowing water spread a rusty stain on the sea.

  I went back to the Brittany website. The breathless text told me that the village itself was less renowned than the St Cyriac Shoals two kilometres offshore, for centuries a deathtrap to shipping seeking to shelter from the Biscay storms. As a result, the tiny harbour at St Cyriac had never grown beyond a fishing port. I hit the print-out button and sat thinking while the printer whirred.

  The homepage of the RAF Air Sea Rescue and Marine Branch veteran’s association led me to an archive of photographs of launches, pinnaces and tenders. Most of the craft shown had been lovingly restored, and were pictured at sea with smiling enthusiasts aboard.

  I spent some time searching this gallery, until I found the image I wanted. It was in brilliant colour, and showed a boat which looked to me almost identical to 2548. She was on sea trials after restoration, a Type 2 High Speed Launch, 63 feet long, originally built in 1939 at the British Powerboat Company’s yard in Hythe, near Southampton. In those days she had been powered by three V12 Napier Sealion aero-engines, generating 500 horsepower apiece, but these monsters had been replaced long ago by solid General Motors diesels. In the picture, the vessel was moving at speed through a choppy sea, her cutwater slicing the water in a plume of spray, under much the same conditions as 2548 in the old black-and-white shot on my parents’ bookcase.

  I took the French magazine article with its picture of 2548 beached at St Cyriac and stuck it on the wall beside my desk. Then I printed out the new photo and stuck that directly below it. The boats made a poignant contrast, the one vivid and glamorous, the other derelict and all but forgotten. I turned back to the computer and searched the site again. There was a good deal more information about Type 2 launches, but I could find no reference to 2548 or to my father.

  I became aware that the shower was booming in the bathroom down the hall, a comfortable, domestic sound. Almost as soon as I registered it, the sound died away and I heard Chantal in the kitchen. In a moment she came into the study wrapped in a towel and carrying two mugs of coffee. She didn’t speak. She put the mugs down on the desk and stepped behind my chair and put her arms around me. I could feel the weight of her breasts on my back and could smell the steamy warmth of her body.

  I said: ‘Has the Foreign Legion come to rescue me?’

  ‘The camel’s in the car park.’ Her glance fell on the pile of school reports and souvenirs I had put to one side. She hugged me back against her. ‘I’m sorry, my love. I liked your mother. You know I’d have come back if you’d asked.’

  ‘There was nothing you could have done.’

  ‘And Katrine?’

  ‘She’s dealing with it. She was great.’ I reached up to stroke Chantal’s bare arm where lay across my chest. ‘How was Lebanon?’

  ‘OK.’ She sighed. ‘Doesn’t matter now, does it? That’s all history.’ She tapped me in a matronly fashion on the top of the head. ‘You should get some sleep.’

  But she didn’t expect a reply to that, and very soon sat down beside me at the desk, leaving one arm resting across my shoulder. Then she noticed the little collection spread out on the desk before me. I could feel her surprise.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘It was in the briefcase. I started to tell you last night, but I think you went to sleep halfway through.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep.’ She prodded the items on the desk. ‘Only I thought maybe there’d be old love letters in it. You know, brittle envelopes, faintly perfumed. Call me romantic.’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘But newspaper cuttings? Pieces of eight?’

  ‘It’s a sovereign. There’s a map, too. But maybe this is more what you had in mind.’

  I picked up the picture of my parents and handed it to her. She looked closely at it, turning it first one way and then the other.

  She said: ‘He was handsome. They both were.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She put down the photo and touched the other things in turn. She let her finger rest on the magazine cutting with its picture of the beached hull.

  ‘Some RAF museum sent him that,’ I said. ‘It looks as if Mum rescued it from the garbage. It’s dated a couple of months ago.’

  I showed her the compliment slip attached to the cutting. It had a blue letterhead which read ‘Tangmere Military Aviation Museum’ and gave an address near Chichester. There was no message, but someone had scrawled an illegible signature on it in ballpoint. Bickerton, I thought. Or maybe Biddington.

  I said: ‘He disappears for two whole months in Occupied France but he never tells anyone about it. How crazy is that?’

  ‘Pretty crazy.’

  ‘I never knew anything had happened to him in the War. Not anything bad.’

  ‘War’s always bad.’

  ‘But how could I not have known about this?’

  She squeezed my shoulder. ‘You can only know what people tell you, cheri. If he didn’t tell you the truth, you can’t be blamed for making up your own version. Trust me. I’m a journalist. I do it all the time.’

  ‘His boat turns up after sixty years, and he doesn’t want to know?’

  ‘Not everyone wants to remember. Some people try very hard not to.’ She turned the cutting with one fingertip and looked at it. ‘Did she say anything more, your Mum?’

  ‘That my father loved me. That he’d always loved me.’ I kept my eyes on the cutting. ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘Well, then.’ She stroked the back of my head. ‘Well, then.’

  The wind threw rain like buckshot against the window. We sat close together. I pulled the snapshot towards me and stared down at this jaunty pirate, this man I had lost sight of so long ago, and she followed my gaze.

  ‘Chantal, what happened in Brittany in 1944?’

  ‘Iain, my love, I can’t make sense of shiny modern wars, let alone ones that ended six decades ago. But I expect the same madness happened in Brittany as happens everywhere else, in every other crazy fucking war.’ She looked again at the snapshot. ‘When are you going to speak to your father about this?’

  ‘I don’t think I know how.’

  ‘Your mother didn’t give you all this so you could forget about it.’

  ‘No.’ I gathered the items into the folder and closed it. ‘I don’t know how to do that either.’

  I could hear the mournful sounds of Kate’s viola as she began her practice, and I realised it must be gone seven. Chantal moved to perch on the edge of the desk and sipped her coffee, regarding me gravely. I thought she was more lovely than any woman had a right to be at this time in the morning.

  ‘I’ve got to go to this St Cyriac place,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘And I want to see the people at this museum, too. Maybe they can tell me something.’

  ‘You do what you need to do, cheri. We can put off starting the rest of our lives for a few days.’ She leaned forward suddenly and kissed me hard. ‘I’m on your side, Iain. I always have been and I always will be.’ She slid off the desk and left the room without another word, and very soon I heard her in the bedroom, singing to herself as she dressed.

  When Chantal had left for the office I walked out of the study and down the hallway and stood outside Kate’s door, letting her music to flow through me. I tapped softly and she called ‘OK!’ without pausing in her playing. Kate sat with her back to me. She had switched on just one lamp, in the corner of the room
, and the light of it shone on her pale hair and on the glossy curve of the viola’s shoulder. I saw her face reflected in the blue window and realised that she was playing from memory, her eyes closed. The music was something deep and sonorous. I didn’t recognise it, but then I never did.

  She stopped playing, leaving a long bass note vibrating in the air. When I looked again at the reflection I saw her eyes were open and she was calmly regarding me in the glass.

  ‘That was beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘Dad, you’re tone deaf.’ She put the instrument on its stand and turned her stool to face me. ‘You wouldn’t know Brahms from Black Sabbath.’

  ‘Well, it looked beautiful. It felt beautiful.’

  I sat down by the desk, under the lamp, and gave her my most self-deprecating smile. Kate put her bow down on the floor and crossed her arms over her chest.

  ‘You look exactly like a hyena.’

  I didn’t seem to be doing too well. I rearranged my face. I said: ‘I’m out for the day, Kate. I’ll be back this evening.’

  ‘So what was in the case?’ she said.

  ‘Some things I need to check up on. It might delay us a day or two. Getting away. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s cool. I’ll live.’

  I leaned over and kissed her. ‘Maybe we should all go out for a meal tonight, when I get back?’

  She made apologetic eyes. ‘Sorry, Dad. Some of the guys are coming round from College. Kind of a goodbye party for me.’

  ‘They’re coming here?’

  ‘Sure.’ She raised her eyebrows. I had never objected before. ‘That’s OK, isn’t it? I cleared it with Mum.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course it is.’

  I was obscurely disappointed all the same, and I suppose it showed in my face, for Kate said suddenly: ‘Dad, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. Why?’

  ‘Only it must be the pits, losing your Mum.’

  ‘I’m all right, sweetheart.’

  She gave me a long and unconvinced look. ‘But then maybe your Mum isn’t the problem,’ she said.

  6

  I parked the Discovery on the gravel outside Tangmere Military Aviation Museum at a little after eleven. There were no other vehicles in the car park.

  The reception area occupied the low wooden buildings of the old squadron offices and behind them the original airfield stretched away flat and empty, a sea of long grass rippling in the wind. To one side of the entrance stood a green-painted World War 2 Ferret scout car with a mannequin at the wheel sporting a handlebar moustache and dressed in a too-large RAF uniform. On a patch of grass nearby men in overalls were working on a bright red jet aircraft which stood on flat tyres. The engine cowlings were open and someone was saying: ‘Hit the fucking thing, Jock.’

  The severe elderly woman behind the reception desk poked the compliment slip with her fingertip. ‘That’s Billy Billington’s signature, if that’s what you’re asking. Flight Lt Rodney Billington, OBE. But everyone calls him Billy. He handles our correspondence.’ She said this as if I should have known, and added with satisfaction: ‘He doesn’t come in on Mondays.’

  ‘Maybe I could contact him at home?’

  She gave me a steely look. ‘If it’s so important, I suppose I could telephone him.’ She used the phone at the desk, an ancient instrument in black Bakelite with a twisted brown cord, which I had assumed was an exhibit. ‘Billy, my dear? There’s a chap here most insistent to see you. Yes, I’ve told him that, but…’

  I could hear the distant voice down the line, feisty, indignant.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman went on, ‘I told him that too. His name’s Maddocks.’

  ‘Madoc,’ I corrected automatically. ‘Iain Madoc.’

  The squawking voice on the line stopped for long enough for the woman to frown in puzzlement, then it started again, sounding even more animated.

  ‘Oh,’ she said in surprise. ‘Well, only if you feel up to it, Billy. But –’

  I heard the click of the distant receiver as it was replaced.

  She raised her eyebrows and hung up. ‘Apparently he’s coming in after all. You might have quite a wait. He’s very elderly.’

  ‘I’ll have a look around, then, if I may.’

  I turned away and she barked: ‘That’ll be three pounds, thank you very much,’ and moved her shoulders, pleased to have re-established her authority.

  I spent the next half-hour mooching around the museum. It depressed me a little, the chain of dark rooms cluttered with bits of aviation history: a polished wooden propeller, a torn fragment of aluminium with a swastika painted on it, more mannequins in ill-fitting uniforms, German, British, Canadian, Polish. Glass cases crammed with medals and faded ribbons, photographs of carefree young men, long dead. And their pathetic possessions: a pocket compass, a Parker fountain pen, a letter from mother with cursive handwriting on very small sheets of lavender paper. I imagined a vicarage in Norfolk and a woman writing at a garden table in the warm summer of 1940, while the birds sang and a lawnmower churned and the world fell apart.

  ‘The living dead,’ the voice boomed from behind me, making me spin round.

  A bulky old man sat in a wheelchair, looking up keenly at me. His face was dramatically disfigured, like a wax mask half-melted. His eyes were extremely bright, and I realised after a second that this was because he had no eyelids.

  ‘Not bad,’ the old man said. ‘Most people jump a foot in the air. It’s one of the few amusements I have left.’

  ‘Mr Billington?’

  His hand felt odd in mine and it took me a moment to realise that he had fewer than the normal number of fingers.

  ‘You must be George’s boy,’ he told me. ‘I hoped it might be old Georgie himself. Didn’t expect it, but hoped. So what’s he gone and done? Died at last, I suppose. Took him long enough.’

  ‘No. He’s well. Comparatively.’

  ‘Being well is always comparative at our age.’

  ‘What did you mean about the living dead?’

  The old man pinwheeled his chair and propelled it between the cabinets so that I had to step smartly to follow. ‘It’s an African thing,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘The dead stay with us, to help or hinder us, until the last person who remembers anything about them has gone to follow them. Mumbo jumbo, probably, but that’s what you get for reading National Geographic.’ Billington sped down the corridor until he rolled between the tables of the mocked-up NAAFI canteen and out through French doors into the open air. He pivoted to face me. ‘And that’s what we try to do here. Keep the memory alive. Forlorn hope, but some of us old fools feel we owe it to them. This whole place is nothing more than a shrine to ancestor worship when you get right down to it.’

  He propelled the wheelchair away again before I could speak, down a flagged passageway, through a rustic arch and onto a patch of lawn beyond. I followed him into a pleasant garden of rose trellises and young trees. It was cool, but a thin sun had broken through, and I was glad to be under the wide spring sky and to feel the pressure of the open air on my face. Billington wheeled himself over to a bench and parked his chair near it.

  ‘Take a seat, young Mr Madoc.’

  I did. There was a plaque on the back of the bench which read: In memory of members of the Air Sea Rescue and Marine Craft Section of the RAF who died in the Second World War: ‘They gave their lives to save others’

  Billington squinted at me with his glittering hoodless eyes. ‘I must say, you’re not a bit like George. More like your mother. Tall and fair and slender, she was, I remember. I can still see the way she walked, the way she held herself. We were all green with envy.’

  It was strange to hear my mother described in this way. I had seen a certain quiet grace in her – I recognised this even as a child – but I had never thought of her as beautiful. Perhaps if I had not so recently seen that old Box Brownie photograph I would have thought Billington was merely romancing the past, but now I could not forget the way she stood so proudly
in her WREN’s uniform, her fair hair shining in the sun. And my father beside her in his regulation white sweater, raffish and powerful.

  ‘How is your mother?’ Billington demanded.

  ‘She’s dead,’ I said.

  His question had come too suddenly for me to compose a gentler answer. It was difficult to detect any change of expression in the ravaged face, but when he spoke his voice was momentarily stricken.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘What could be so urgent it brings you here at such a grim time?’

  I took the cutting out of my wallet. ‘You sent this to my father.’

  The old man took the paper, handling it with surprising dexterity between his stunted fingers. ‘Certainly I did, and I see he treated it the way I thought he would.’

  ‘But you sent it anyway.’

  ‘I could hardly keep a thing like that from him. Old 2548 turning up the way she did, right there in St Cyriac? I tried phoning him about it, but he wouldn’t take my calls.’ He handed the cutting back. ‘Some anorak spotted her in the river Vasse last year. Some of our chaps went to have a look at her, and the local tourist paper printed the story. I had to send it to George, even though I knew he’d take no notice.’

  I smoothed the article on my knee and stared at it for a while, at the dark curve of the hull rising from the mud, the grinning elderly men in waterproofs waving their little flags in the drizzle. I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket.

  ‘Did you know him well, Mr Billington?’

  ‘George? Of course. I was adjutant of 28 ASRU at Dover. Air Sea Rescue Unit. Shore duties.’ He jabbed one webbed hand at his face. ‘You probably think I got this battling through burning oil to rescue some poor devil of a pilot. Not a bit of it. Car accident in my brother-in-law’s Hillman. Weston-Super-Mare, on the way back from the pub. I never even got to sea. But I knew George all right.’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve never met anyone who knew him in those days,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there you are. Finally I’m first at something.’ He paused. ‘I was sorry he wouldn’t let me speak to him on the phone. I only wanted to thank him, you see. It’s all I did want, really, to thank him before they ring down the curtain on the pair of us. He was kind to me, your father. He was a good man. A gentle man. Rare gift, you know, not just having courage, but to be able to share it. Rare in any man, especially a young one.’