Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [10]
The family on the other side of the nave had a certain look about them, too. David’s father was a lawyer—his permanent frown was a professional affectation and concealed a sunny nature. (He had been a Major in the Army in the last war, and thought all this business about the RAF and war in the air was a fad that would soon pass.) But nobody looked like him, not even his son who stood now at the altar promising to love his wife until death, which might not be far away, God forbid. No, they all looked like David’s mother, who sat beside her husband now, with almost-black hair and dark skin and long, slender limbs.
David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man—his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark, ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, which he was, and sensitive.
The whole thing was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid, comfortably off, backbone-of-England-type families getting married in a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.
When they were pronounced man and wife both the mothers were dry-eyed, and both the fathers cried.
KISSING THE BRIDE was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought, as yet another middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages, when every man in the tribe was allowed to—well, anyway, it was time we got properly civilized and dropped the whole business.
She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well…But it could have been worse. If it had been peacetime Father would have hired the Albert Hall.
So far nine people had said, “May all your troubles be little ones,” and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, “I want to see more than a fence running around your garden.” Lucy had shaken countless hands and pretended not to hear remarks like “I wouldn’t mind being in David’s pajamas tonight.” David had made a speech in which he thanked Lucy’s parents for giving him their daughter, and Lucy’s father actually said that he was not losing a daughter but gaining a son. It was all hopelessly gaga, but one did it for one’s parents.
A distant uncle loomed up from the direction of the bar, swaying slightly, and Lucy repressed a shudder. She introduced him to her husband. “David, this is Uncle Norman.”
Uncle Norman pumped David’s bony hand. “Well, m’boy, when do you take up your commission?”
“Tomorrow, sir.”
“What, no honeymoon?”
“Just twenty-four hours.”
“But you’ve only just finished your training, so I gather.”
“Yes, but I could fly before, you know. I learned at Cambridge. Besides, with all this going on they can’t spare pilots. I expect I shall be in the air tomorrow.”
Lucy said quietly, “David, don’t,” but Uncle Norman persevered.
“What’ll you fly?” Uncle Norman asked with schoolboy enthusiasm.
“Spitfire. I saw her yesterday. She’s a lovely kite.” David had already fallen into the RAF slang—kites and crates and the drink and bandits at two o’clock. “She’s got eight guns, she does three hundred and fifty knots, and she’ll turn around in a shoebox.”
“Marvelous, marvelous. You boys are certainly knocking the stuffing out of the Luftwaffe, what?”
“We got sixty yesterday for eleven of our own,” David said, as proudly as if he had shot them all down himself. “The day before, when they had a go at Yorkshire, we sent the lot back to Norway with their tails between their legs—and we didn’t lose a single kite!”
Uncle Norman gripped David’s shoulder with tipsy fervor. “Never,” he quoted pompously, “was so much owed by so many to so few. Churchill said that the other day.”
David tried