The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [159]
CHAPTER 42
1942
So there was no way to tell Davey I couldn’t be his girl. He still didn’t touch me, apart from a chaste kiss at the end of our evenings. I pretended there was fervour in the way I kissed him back, though it was a relief he didn’t seem to want anything more. I wondered if he was afraid of failing and appearing less than a man. But I’d come to dread hearing the unmistakable misfire of the Baby Austin as it turned the corner into Drove Road–he somehow kept that car alive, but it wasn’t a well machine. I couldn’t bear the hope in his eyes when he climbed out of it and waved to me.
You made your own bed, Frances Robinson, now you get down and lie on it. That’s what Mam would have said, though now she was too tired even for talking. When I visited, she lay watching me with dark eyes that were wells of pain. The doctors–and Dad–talked breezily in front of her of an operation, when she’d found her strength again, but anyone could see that would never happen.
Davey turned up at Drove Road one Saturday morning in June. I was more than four months gone, now, still skinny, with a funny little turn on me, like a peapod that hasn’t yet filled out proper. I’d my set of excuses–hospital food, all stodge, can’t keep the weight off–but I never had to use them. People were too polite or too blind to ask. No forgetting, though: the babba was going to be a kicker, already beginning to flutter its tiny heels against my belly wall five or six times a day. It felt like butterfly wings beating inside me.
‘Too lovely to stay in,’ Davey said. ‘Brought us a picnic. Swapped some cigs for a tin of ham.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, hating myself for killing that hope. ‘You know I see Mam Saturday afternoons.’
His face was near exploding with eagerness. ‘I know. I’ll drive you again. We’ll stop on the way’
So this time we wound up sitting on one of the barrows on Windmill Hill, eating ham sandwiches made with no butter. The wind was rustling the grasses, fat seeds bending their nodding heads. There were flowers all over, blue scabious, pink-veined orchids like stretched skin, trefoils the colour of spilt egg yolk, the edges tinged red. High clouds raced each other across a blue sky.
I reached for another ham sandwich. Lord, I was hungry these days. Davey yawned.
‘Keeping you up again, am I?’ I asked.
‘Have a heart, Fran,’ he said. ‘Night op. Saw sunrise over the Mendips as we came back up the Bristol Channel. Thank God.’
‘You not applied for a transfer yet?’ I said. ‘Davey, I told you, you can’t go on…’
He turned on me with a flash of anger in his eyes. First time he’d ever been so sharp with me. ‘Forget what I told you. You can’t understand.’
‘I understand burned out,’ I said. ‘Don’t think you’re the only one. I see it all the time with they lads on the ward, pushing themselves to go back to operations and crying at night when they think no one hears. It’s no disgrace, Davey.’
He wouldn’t meet my eyes again, and started ripping up roots of grass, one by one, and I knew what it was. He was looking away towards the stone circle and the Manor at Avebury, hidden in the trees. Poor old Davey. Always trying to live up to something, or someone.
‘Last week we lost two crews,’ he said. ‘One came too close behind the bomber they were stalking, and when it blew up, they blew up too. The other crew caught it coming home over Weston-super-Mare. Still dark, moon set, and the bloody ack-ack mistook them for a German fighter. No bale-outs, no survivors.’ He looked down at the blood streaking his fingers where the blades of grass had cut him. There were tears in his eyes.
They was brave boys, the ones like Davey The ones with imagination and brains, who could work out the odds, and picture the end, and still they made themselves climb into those fragile wooden planes night after night. Poor sod. I remembered the sunny day four years ago when I sat up here with my sketchbook, seeing him carefree and driving the motorbike with Mr Keiller on the back, bouncing over the hilltop, before I’d known about Mam being ill, before…
Davey put