Marking Time (27 page)

‘It’s going to crash,’ Christopher said, as it became obscured by the wood behind the field they were in. They waited, staring at the wood. The engine noise became much louder,
then, suddenly, it reappeared above them – an enormous dull black ungainly monster with garish markings – almost grazing the tops of the large trees. It lurched away to the right of
them and lumbered down the hill towards the house, belching black smoke and licked by scarlet flames.

‘It’s going to crash on the house!’

‘No,’ Christopher said, ‘it won’t do that. It’ll probably get to the bottom of the hill. Come
on
!’ And he began to run fast down the field.
It’s what Dad would do, Polly thought as she ran with him, but she was frightened: Christopher was not Dad.

Christopher tore through the gap in the hedge and jumped down the bank into the lane below and she scrabbled and slithered after him. ‘Don’t try and keep up with me,’ he called
and began really to sprint. She heard the plane crash. ‘It’s in York’s near field,’ Christopher shouted, as he turned left into the track to York’s farm. She had been
determined to keep up and did indeed arrive in time to see three men climbing out of the smoking wreck. Christopher ran towards them, but they, putting up their hands, also motioned him away, ran
themselves and fell onto the ground just as there was a huge explosion from the crater in which the plane lay. Christopher had turned back to shout to her to lie face down just in time as something
sharp and burning hot hit her on the leg. When she looked up she saw that mysteriously other men were in the field: Mr York, a man who worked for him, and Wren. Mr York had a shotgun, and Wren
stood with a pitchfork towering beside him. The airmen got very slowly to their feet as the other men closed in towards them. Nobody said anything, but there was something very frightening about
the silence. Christopher motioned to the airmen to put their hands over their heads. Then he walked up to them and took pistols from two of them; the third man had nothing. They looked dazed, and
their faces were streaked with sweat. Two more farm hands had appeared as though from nowhere; there was another gun, Polly noticed; the other carried a billhook.

Christopher said very slowly and clearly: ‘You are prisoners of war. Keep your hands up. Polly, go and ring up Colonel Forbes. Mr York, tell one of your men to lead the way. We’ll
take them into the church hall and guard them until they are collected.’ There was another very minor explosion from the plane, which then subsided with its broken tail in the air.
Christopher, uncertain for the first time, said, ‘Were there more of you – in there?’, but as one of the prisoners indicated that it was too late, Mr York spoke for the first
time.

‘A good few, I shouldn’t wonder, but they’re roasted, Mr Christopher – roasted to death, they are.’ His tone expressed nothing but satisfaction at the good
riddance.

Christopher turned on Polly. ‘I
told
you to go!’ he said; his face was white. ‘Lead the way, Mr York, if you please.’

She turned and ran to the gate, and as she climbed it, looked back to see that they were following her – a single file with Christopher holding the two pistols. As she ran across the lane
and up the drive she thought of the expression in Mr York’s brandy-snap eyes: Christopher
had
been as good as Dad. It was lucky that he had gone out with Dad last weekend when the
parachutes had come down in the hop field behind Mill Farm. Chris had told her that he had asked Dad how he knew they were English parachutes and Dad had said that he didn’t know, but that if
they weren’t, it was important for them to get there first. Feeling was running very high, he had said – particularly as Mrs Cramp’s nephew had been shot down the week before. All
the same, Christopher had been really brave and cool: he’d said things in just the right way – behaved with such authority that those farmers and even
Wren
had had to fall in
with him. But, from being there, she knew now that they hadn’t wanted to. They had wanted something quite different. She knew that Wren was a bit dotty; ‘not himself’ Mrs Cripps
had been heard to say when it had been discovered that he had been pinching the kitchen knives which he sharpened to a murderous pitch in his hayloft. But the others were like that too.

The Brig’s study was empty, and Dad had pasted the number on the pedestal of the telephone. It was really the headquarters of the local defence volunteers, but since this was in Colonel
Forbes’s house (his gun room had been turned into an office as it contained the only telephone in his establishment) it was always known as ringing Colonel Forbes. Somebody called Brigadier
Anderson answered and Polly gave the message. ‘Good show,’ he said; ‘we’ll be along there right away. Watlington church hall, you said? Good show,’ and he rang off. He
sounds as though it’s all good, clean outdoor
fun
, she thought. Since Christopher had arrived, supposedly for a short holiday and to come and help out with the greatly enlarged
kitchen garden (but really, he had told her, because he had been having such awful rows with his father that he’d had to get away somewhere), they had had several serious conversations about
war. The more she listened to him, the more torn she felt between the extremes of there being absolutely no point in any of it and that being a conscientious objector was the only honourable
course, and the opposite: that Hitler was a kind of evil devil who had to be destroyed at whatever cost.
Plus
there was the fact that the idea of being invaded, now that it was so much
more likely, was something to be resisted in every way. That was what Mr Churchill said. It was said also that the King, who after all was entirely good, was practising with a rifle in the gardens
of Buckingham Palace so that he could die fighting. He hadn’t popped off to Canada like the Dutch royal family. It seemed dreadful not to be sure of what she thought, but she
wasn’t
sure. She had tried asking Miss Milliment who, after listening to her carefully, had said that this kind of indecision could sometimes be a form of sincerity. She had added
later, that principles could be very demanding, but that once adopted, one must be prepared to pay the price however high. There hadn’t seemed to be anyone else to ask: Dad was working so
hard that he looked permanently exhausted; Mummy spent all the time when she wasn’t feeling rotten from her ulcer with Wills or writing letters to Simon at school. She had made two really
pretty dresses for her, but she had been quite snappy to her when they were being tried on. It was ages since she’d had a conversation about anything with Mummy.

Christopher had been an unexpectedly welcome addition to her life. He worked with McAlpine every morning and the Duchy approved of him, saying he was a natural gardener. But in the afternoons
they had taken to going for walks, at first not talking very much, or even sometimes not at all, except that he would show her things – what he called a rabbit’s main-line route through
a hedge, or a nest where a cuckoo had deposited its egg earlier in the spring or elephant hawk moth caterpillars on the poplars the Brig had planted in Coronation year. But gradually, from asking
him questions, he began to tell her other things, to show her his sketchbooks full of pencil drawings that she deeply admired. He could make the single claw of a bird interesting, or the fronds of
different ferns that he found; whenever he found something that he liked, he sat down and drew it. For a long time she didn’t tell him that she had been drawing things like that, because hers
were so much less good, but in the end she showed him one of her best ones and he was really cheering about it. ‘But you must keep doing it,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be a
treat, or a chore, or an unusual thing for you to do. It should be the most
usual
thing in your life.’

The only difficulty about this new friendship was Clary. Clary didn’t want to go for walks; she spent hours in the apple tree reading books that were far too young for her like
Black
Beauty
or
The Wide, Wide World
, and crying all the time she read. After the first, awful evening when the news about Uncle Rupert had come on the telephone when she had cried and
talked and cried all night, she didn’t talk about it at all. Only Polly noticed that she watched for the postman and always went through the letters before they were picked up from the hall
table by their owners, and that every single time the telephone rang she became still – seemed to hold her breath. But so far, there had been no news about his being taken prisoner and it was
nearly six weeks now. It was difficult to know what to do with her, or even what to talk about, but at the same time Clary had become wildly jealous of Christopher, jeered at her about him, and
sulked after Polly came back from drawing afternoons. If Polly tried to include her, she was snubbed; if she tried to suggest something that she and Clary might do together, Clary said things like
nothing would bore her more, or she was sure that Christopher would be much better at
that
. She was awful at lessons: poor Miss Milliment put up with sloppy homework or none done at all;
she had stopped writing her journal because she said it was silly and pointless, and Miss Milliment, who never usually lost her temper, was brought very near it. Polly knew this because Miss
Milliment would start talking more and more slowly and softly to Clary which actually seemed only to irritate Clary more, until only this week she had finally snapped at Clary, saying how dared she
speak to anyone like that. There had been an awful silence while they stared at each other and Polly could see that Miss Milliment was really angry, her small grey eyes glaring behind her thick
glasses. Then Clary had said, ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s no one you could report me to, is there? No one who would really mind.’ She had got up and walked out of the room,
and Polly saw Miss Milliment’s eyes fill with tears. The only person she wasn’t spiky and nasty with was Zoë. She spent time every day with her, helping her with the baby, admiring
its every little windy smile, helping to bath it and learning how to fold and pin its nappies, and fetching and carrying for Zoë with endless patience. The baby – named Juliet –
seemed to keep both of them going and they talked of nothing else. And when Neville came home for the holidays and seemed to have a number of bad nights with asthma, she sat up with him, reading
him Sherlock Holmes stories and making him clean his teeth again if he ate biscuits in bed. Polly knew these things, because she so often went in search of Clary to see if she was all right, and
these were the only times when she was – or seemed to be.

She went now to find Clary to tell her about the prisoners. She was in her tree as usual, reading a fat red book that she recognised as being a Louisa Alcott. ‘Beth has just died;
it’s awfully sad,’ she said. ‘Could you bring a dock leaf up with you? My hanky’s soaked.’

Polly found the best one she could and, using the frayed old rope, she climbed into her position, slightly above Clary and opposite. ‘It’s so awful that they didn’t know about
TB,’ Clary said, wiping her cheekbone with the back of her hand. ‘Thousands of people must have died of it.’

‘Did you see the bomber?’

‘What bomber?’

‘The one that nearly crashed on us.’

‘Oh, that! Well, I heard a fairly loud noise. I didn’t think of it
crashing
on us.’

‘Well, it very nearly did. Christopher said it would try to avoid us. In fact, it crashed in Mr York’s near field.’ After a short silence, she said, ‘Don’t you want
to know what happened?’

Clary put two fingers to mark where she’d got to on her page, and looked up. ‘Well, what?’

‘The plane blew up after it crashed just after three men got out. Mr York and people turned up like they do – from nowhere – but Christopher went up to the men and took their
guns away and made them prisoner. Then he sent me to ring Colonel Forbes and marched the men off to the church hall! He did it all frightfully well.’

‘Seems funny to me. A conscientious objector playing soldiers.’

‘He was saving them! Saving their lives.’

‘I don’t see what you’re so worked up about. They’re
Germans
. Speaking for myself, I couldn’t care less whether they’re alive or dead.’

‘You
must
!’

Polly was so shocked that she felt frightened. But Clary, whose face was not only tear-stained but had greyish green marks from the lichen on her hands, regarded her with a kind of steady
defiance.

‘They’re human beings!’ Polly said at last.

‘I don’t want to think about them like that. I just think about them as Them. A whole great mass of people who are ruining our lives. Everything is going to pot, if you ask me, and
as there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, I don’t see the point in having moral attitudes. The whole world is probably very slowly coming to an end, so you can’t expect me
to care about Germans I haven’t even met.’

‘Why do you mind about Beth dying, then? You haven’t met her.’

‘Beth? I’ve known her for years! And she’s
not
coming to an end. I mean she dies, but she’s still
there
whenever I want her. Generally speaking, I
prefer books to people nowadays, and people
in
books to people anywhere else. On the whole,’ she added after a painful pause during which Polly watched her struggle with the
exception, recognising with a pang as she did so how often during the last weeks she had seen it before; how Clary would continue sulky, intransigent, snubbing, until something disturbed her
preoccupation, hurtling her into the reflexes of curiosity –
where
was he? – until she was slap up against the awful question of was he indeed anywhere? – and then
wearily back to the familiar anguish of at least not knowing, all stuff that she had been through with Polly again and again during the first awful night after he had been reported missing. That
first night they had eventually agreed that it might be better to accept the
idea
of him not coming back. ‘You mean, being dead,’ Clary had said unflinchingly. Then, Polly had
pointed out it would be so wonderful when he did come back, and, if by any chance he didn’t – ‘Because he’d been killed,’ Clary put in – then at least she
– Clary – would have accustomed herself to the idea, up to a point. In the early hours after that sleepless night, this had seemed like an extremely sensible and even comforting
solution, but, of course, it hadn’t been at all, really. It had not been so bad at the beginning, when Clary had expected every telephone call to be her father, had watched the drive for
telegrams, but as the days numbered themselves in weeks it became harder for her to accept anything of the kind; she clung more fiercely to the hope that was slowly becoming submerged by time and
the silence.