Doctor Who_ Last of the Gaderene - Mark Gatiss [1]
The slim and rather beautiful woman watched his approach and a delighted smile lit up her round face. He felt a little thrill of joy dart inside him. Perhaps he’d ask her now.
There was nothing to lose. And so much to gain. In his imagination he’d always seen them walking arm in arm through some sunny glade, not jammed behind a little table in a bar. But the war made everything much more urgent.
The young flyer pushed two of the pints across the table towards his friends and then settled down next to the woman.
She thanked him and took a sip of the foaming beer.
‘Are you sure that’s what you wanted?’ he asked, tugging the pipe from his mouth.
She nodded and pushed a stray strand of long chestnut hair from her eyes.
He rubbed his chin nervously and tried to think of the best way of saying it.
They’d been thrown together by the war – almost literally.
An incendiary bomb had gone off just outside the shelter where he’d been hiding and the young woman had rushed inside just in time. The sweat was standing on her forehead and her eyes were bright and frightened. But, at the sight of him, she had broken into a broad grin.
He looked at the pint of beer on the table in front of him.
‘Well, I suppose if you’re going to be my wife, you’ll have to get used to this grog.’
Her pretty eyes disappeared into half-moons as she smiled.
She sipped at her pint and then almost choked on it. She span round in her seat.
‘What did you say?’
He feigned innocence. ‘When?’
‘Just now.’
‘Oh, he took a great draught of his pint. ‘You mean about marrying you?’
She looked suddenly vulnerable and terribly pretty. He leant over and kissed her.
‘Oh, Alec...’ she mumbled. After a while, she pulled away, grinning happily. ‘OK, mister. I’ll marry you.’
‘Good show,’ laughed the flyer.
‘On one condition.’
He frowned. ‘Oh?’
She cradled his face in her hands and smiled a little sadly.
‘Get through all this alive, won’t you?’
He nodded, beaming, and embraced her. He glanced around the room, taking in the ceiling blackened with smoke where men had burnt their names and squadron numbers into it with candles; the knots of young flyers in their blue uniforms, the fug of smoke and laughter. He thought of the nights he and the girl had spent together since that first meeting in the air-raid shelter. Her funny laugh. The time he had flown his aeroplane over the factory where she worked and looped the loop just to impress her.
He lifted her hand from her knee, squeezed it and then pressed it tenderly to his cheek.
Distantly, there was a low, rumbling drone.
His senses were immediately alert. Whirling round, he looked up at the ceiling, her hand still in his. A few of the airmen had heard it too.
He opened his mouth to speak; to tell the wonderful girl by his side to get down or to run for it. It was a buzz bomb. Had to be. But the sound was different somehow. A stuttering, shattering roar. Then the sound stopped and silence fell.
A moment later, the room exploded into white nothingness.
It was some days later that the young man found himself wandering over the devastated ground where the bar had stood. Soft cotton pads covered the severe burns he had sustained to his cheek, and one arm was painfully supported in a sling. He had been lucky.
The beautiful girl with eyes like Alice Fey; the girl he’d waltzed around the Pally one night; the girl he’d asked to marry him; she had not been lucky.
The young man in the blue officer’s uniform took his cap from his head and tucked it under his uninjured arm. Ahead of him, the ground was little more than a blackened hole. Mud was churned up in a wide crater and fragments of debris –
glass, chair legs, even a girl’s handbag – were scattered around the rim.
The young man looked up as, with a throbbing roar, a squadron of fighter planes