Johnny Under Ground Read online

  Barbara turned, with an attractive, vague smile on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, “so many people—I don’t quite…”

  “I’m Emmy Blandish,” said Emmy, too loudly.

  “Blandish—Emmy Blandish. Oh, yes, one of Beau’s little girls. I remember now.” She turned to her husband. “Vere, darling, this is Emmy Blandish.”

  “So it is, by Jove,” said the man heartily. He shook Emmy’s hand vigorously. “Good to see you, Blandish. How are you? Bearing up?”

  “Yes, thank you, Vere,” said Emmy.

  “Feel a bit of a gate-crasher here, y’know,” Vere went on. “There seem to be more Operations Room types than aircrew. Thanks, Price, old man, I’ll have a whisky. Yes, as I was saying, we all know how clannish you plotters and controllers were…”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Vere,” said Emmy. She was beginning to feel better. “You were the chaps who flew the planes, and I’ve always maintained that we weren’t fit to black your boots.” She stopped, surprised at the warmth of remembered emotion. “I suppose I had too much to do with penguins,” she added. “You know, they flap but don’t fly. It was only when I was posted to Dymfield and started working directly with the fighters that I—well…”

  Vere was not listening. “Actually, it was Barbara who insisted on coming along today,” he said. He glanced toward his wife, who had moved away to talk to Jimmy Baggot. “Because of Beau, you know. I thought it was a mistake. Still do. Bloody dull party—present company excepted, of course—and she’ll only get worked up and sentimental about—you know what…”

  “I can understand her wanting to come,” said Emmy steadily. “It’s always better to face things.”

  “It’s not as though he’d been killed in action.” Hildegard St. Vere Prendergast was embarrassed. “De mortuis, of course, and all that, but suicide isn’t a very nice thing, and when the type ditches an expensive kite into the bargain…” Vere’s voice trailed off into uneasy silence.

  Emmy could not for the life of her think of a suitable remark, and she was delighted when Annie came up, embraced Vere warmly, and started talking about dogs and cows.

  Barbara had by now pinioned little Arthur Price in a corner, and was haranguing him with what looked like a mixture of charm and menace. Jimmy Baggot was holding court, the center of an impressed circle. Emmy spotted Lofty Parker drinking by himself, and went over to him.

  “What are you doing now, Lofty?” she asked.

  “Drinking,” said Lofty, shortly.

  “I mean, for a living?” Emmy cursed herself for having started such a tactless conversation. Whatever Lofty was doing for a living, it was patently not a success.

  Lofty knocked back a neat whisky. “I am what you might call a failed odd-job man,” he said. “I have been a small-part actor, a male model, a publisher’s part-time reader and an encyclopedia salesman. About the only thing I haven’t been is a cheerleader in a holiday camp. I have published a small volume of verse which sold fifty copies, and two short stories. If I didn’t have a small income from my father’s estate, I’d have starved several times over. So much for Dymfield’s resident genius. At the moment I am eking out what is laughingly called a living by knocking on people’s front doors to collect sales statistics. ‘Excuse me, madam, would you mind telling me what detergent you normally favor? What furniture polish you use on the elephant’s-foot table? And, if you’ll pardon my frank speaking, what brand of toilet paper currently graces your bijou convenience?’” He stopped speaking and lit a cigarette.

  Emmy said nothing.

  Lofty went on, “I expect you wonder why the hell I came here this evening. Well, I’ll tell you. Call me silly, but I haven’t quite given up all hope of being a writer, and I knew that television’s great James Baggot was going to be here. Would you believe it, as soon as I set eyes on him, I thought, ‘You silly little bastard, you’re just Jimmy Baggot after all,’ and so I had to go and be rude to him. Now he’ll never give me a job in a million years.” Unexpectedly, he grinned.

  Emmy grinned back. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “He’s become pretty insufferable. It’s rather sad.”

  Lofty looked sharply at her. “The sad person here,” he said, “is Barbara Guest—sorry, Mrs. Hildegard St. Vere Prendergast. Did you ever see the like?”

  Emmy hesitated. “She’s still very beautiful,” she said. “And she’s kept her figure marvelously. Not like me.”

  “My dear Blandish, she looks a hundred and two. And as for poor old Vere—well—he never was very bright, but I never thought to see such a case of arrested development. I believe his life stopped at the moment when he climbed out of the cockpit of a Typhoon for the last time—which must be twenty years ago.” He took another drink. “This whole bloody evening was a grave mistake. Old Price’ll never realize it though. I bet you ten pounds to a button that he suggests making it an annual event. He just doesn’t realize that he’s asking for trouble, making people go back…”

  “Lofty,” said Emmy, “You’re drunk.”

  Lofty beamed down at her. “Now that takes me back,” he said. “Prim little Blandish. ‘Beau, you’re drunk.’ I remember coming into the anteroom one evening and hearing you say that in the young, clear, innocent voice you had then. ‘Drunk.’ I don’t suppose you knew what the word meant—probably still don’t. And I thought at the time, ‘That’s a rum old way for a junior officer to speak to the Chief Controller.’ Of course, I didn’t realize then…”

  “Lofty, please…”

  “That can’t have been very long before he did himself in, poor sod. And yet, you know, when I look around here, I wonder whether he wasn’t right. ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left…’”

  “Lofty,” said Emmy quietly, “if you don’t shut up, I shall throw my drink at you, glass and all.”

  “You always were hopelessly sentimental…”

  “I wasn’t, and I’m not…”

  “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t bother to deny it.”

  A voice behind Emmy brayed shrilly. “Lofty! Lofty is the person! The ideal person!”

  Barbara had arrived with Arthur Price in tow. “Explain the idea to him, Pricey.”

  Price was glowing with enthusiasm. “Barbara has come forward with a most intriguing idea,” he said, “most intriguing. She thinks that a history of Dymfield should be written, a portrait of a wartime fighter station, as it were, told from the point of view of the Operations Room.”

  “We’ve had endless epics about ships and regiments and squadrons,” Barbara put in, “but the backroom organization has been a complete Cinderella…”

  “Possibly because it was less interesting than ships and regiments and squadrons,” said Lofty.

  “Nonsense.” Barbara went on. “It would be fascinating and I’m convinced that now is the time, and you are just the person, Lofty darling…”

  “My dear Barbara,” said Lofty, “if you think I can afford the time for the writing, let alone the research, on a project that no publisher in his senses would…”

  Barbara looked a little embarrassed. “I—I’d like to finance the project. As a sort of memorial, you see. To Beau.”

  “Left it a bit late, haven’t you?” said Lofty, but there was a note of interest in his voice.

  “I knew you’d agree,” said Barbara, with a ravishing smile.

  “Here, wait a minute. I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

  “You’re so brilliant,” cooed Barbara. “You could do it in no time. It shouldn’t be very long, you see.”

  “It’s not a question of the writing taking time,” said Lofty. “It’s the research. I have a job to do, be it ever so humble…”

  “But all your expenses would be…”

  “That’s not the point, Barbara. If I give up my job, there’s no guarantee that I’ll get it back again. So unless you are prepared to support me for the rest of my life, if necessary…”

  Barbara bit her lip. “There must be some way,” she s
aid.

  “There is,” said Lofty, and Emmy saw with surprise that he was looking straight at her. “Blandish can do the research and I’ll write up the results.”

  Before Emmy could say a word, Barbara was yapping enthusiasm. “Brilliant! Perfect! You are clever, Lofty!”

  “But,” Emmy began.

  “You were saying,” said Lofty to Emmy, “that you had no children and a busy husband and were thinking of taking a job. This could be it.”

  “But…”

  “Unless, of course,” Lofty added, “little Blandish is too sentimental and squeamish to start digging up the dead past…”

  The obvious thing, of course, would have been to treat the whole idea as a joke—no need to go to the trouble of turning down a suggestion which was clearly never meant to be taken seriously. But Emmy hesitated just too long, and the moment of escape evaded her.

  It was then that she became horribly aware that everybody was looking at her. Lofty with a sardonic smile worthy of goat-footed Pan; Barbara with quick, hard-edged suspicion; and Arthur Price with the benign anticipation of an uncle about to distribute gifts. Beyond Price, Vere Prendergast and James Baggot had interrupted their conversation to turn and stare. Baggot seemed amused, and Vere faintly contemptuous.

  It seemed to Emmy that her tiny hesitation had been as explicit as a public confession, a confession not merely of her feeling for Beau in 1943 but of the fact that those feelings still persisted, that in twenty years little Blandish had apparently not succeeded in growing up. To run away now would be an intolerable betrayal. This was the last chance of preserving dignity and keeping faith. Or so it seemed to Emmy.

  “I don’t see anything to be sentimental about,” she said. “I think it would be very interesting work.” She met Barbara’s eyes steadily. “I can start any time you like.”

  So it was that Emmy Tibbett walked into a trap which was largely of her own making, and slammed the door of it behind her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I SUPPOSE,” SAID HENRY later that evening, “that it could turn out to be a popular success, but…”

  “It hasn’t a hope,” said Emmy.

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious that Barbara isn’t really interested in the story of Dymfield. She simply wants to create a—well—a memorial, as she said herself. To her first husband. A guilty conscience working itself out after all these years, I suppose.”

  “Guilty conscience? Whatever for? Presumably she couldn’t help it if her husband was killed in action…”

  “He wasn’t,” said Emmy shortly. She kicked off her shoes and stretched out her legs.

  Henry looked up, inquiringly.

  Emmy said, “He killed himself. You surely must have heard about it.”

  “If I have, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”

  “Well, Beau was one of the great heroes of the Battle of Britain. He piloted Spitfires, and because his name was Guest, he was nicknamed Beau. Come to think of it, I’ve no idea what his real Christian name was. He was very young then, of course, in 1940. Twenty-two.”

  Henry glanced sharply across the room at his wife. She seemed curiously withdrawn, and was talking to herself rather than to him.

  She went on. “Heaven knows how many German planes he shot down. He won the D.F.C. and a couple of bars, and the miracle was that he survived. He became a sort of legend; he seemed to be indestructible. That was why it was so awful when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “When he crashed. The Battle of Britain was over, and Beau’s squadron had been sent down to a quiet West Country airfield for a rest. He was on a routine patrol when his Spitfire got out of control and crashed into the sea. Beau was lucky to be picked up alive by Air-Sea Rescue—if you call it lucky. The plastic surgeons had to build his face up from a photograph.”

  “Poor devil,” said Henry.

  “He used to laugh about it. Apparently it wasn’t a very good photograph, and by the time he emerged from East Grinstead, he looked more like the picture than—what he was before. Or so he said. Actually, it was difficult to tell what he must have looked like before; his face was badly scarred, you see, although the doctors did all they could. By great good fortune his eyes and teeth and bone structure were all undamaged, so that he wasn’t an invalid in any obvious way. Oddly enough, I think that made it even harder for him to take the news that he could never fly again.”

  “But why couldn’t he?” Henry asked. “If the doctors had made such a good job of him…”

  “Because,” Emmy said, “the accident had somehow upset his sense of balance; I didn’t know the exact medical details, but every so often he used to get dizzy spells. He never talked about it and I wouldn’t have known, only once I accused him of being drunk. And then he told me. You can imagine what a worm I felt. Anyhow, he was grounded and sent off to end his Air Force career as Chief Controller of a fighter station. Not a very heroic role for one of the fabulous few.

  “Dymfield had what was known as a Sector Operations Room. That was where I worked. We controlled the fighters…”

  “When you say ‘control…’”

  “Oh, literally control. We were in radio-telephone communication with the pilots—plain speech, not Morse—and we tracked the hostile bombers and our own fighters and directed the pilots until they were close enough to see the enemy. Our information came from radar stations, of course, and the aircraft tracks were plotted on our Operations Room Table.” Emmy paused. “What made it even worse for Beau was that when he got to Dymfield, he found that one of our pilots was an old—well—a friendly rival, I suppose you’d call him—from the Battle of Britain days. A caricature of an R.A.F. type, handlebar mustache and all. He was called—if you’ll believe it—Hildegard St. Vere Prendergast. Vere had survived unhurt, and he couldn’t help being a continual reminder to Beau of—well—you can imagine.”

  Emmy paused, and lit a cigarette. Then she went on.

  “There was another thing, too. In 1940, Vere and Beau were not only rivals as far as their score of enemy planes was concerned. They were also both crazy about the same girl, a bit-part actress called Barbara Brent. She was very pretty, in a—well—an actressy sort of way. She still is.”

  “I gather,” said Henry, “that this is the same Barbara who is commissioning the book.”

  “Yes,” said Emmy. “Well, in 1940 she turned Vere down and married Beau. Heaven knows whether she did it because she really loved him or simply because he was such a glamorous figure. I dare say she wasn’t very clear about it herself. I don’t know why it’s always assumed that people know their own motives for…” She stopped, and took a pull at her cigarette. “Anyhow, Barbara and Beau were married and apparently were very happy. She gave up the theater and followed him around the country. Then he had this crash.

  “They came to Dymfield, and Barbara took lodgings in the village. Beau had to live at the Mess, of course, but he spent as much time as he could with her and she was always in and out of the station.”

  Henry raised his eyebrows. “A civilian—on an airfield?”

  “Oh, only the Mess, the living quarters. Quite separate from the airfield or the Operations Room. Several miles away. Anyhow, one of the first people Barbara met up with was her old flame, Vere Prendergast.”

  Emmy frowned. “It’s terribly hard to tell you this with any sort of accuracy,” she said. “I don’t like gossip, as you know. But gossip is an integral part of the story. Beau hadn’t been at Dymfield more than a few weeks before the place was buzzing with rumors about Barbara. Her name was linked with practically every man in sight—Vere, Lofty, Sammy Smith, even little Baggot. The story was that she’d never cared a rap for Beau, and that now he was badly burnt and grounded and doing a routine job, she was fed up with him. I’ve no idea whether any of the rumors were true or not. I can only tell you that Beau heard them and they upset him terribly. You see, he loved Barbara. People thought he didn�
�t, but he did. I know.

  “That was the situation in 1943, when Dymfield got its first Typhoons; in those days they were top secret fighters. Naturally, the pilots had to be especially trained in flying them. Vere, as a pioneer on this exciting new aircraft, became even more one-up than ever.

  “The next thing that happened was that hideous Mess party at Dymfield. Everyone was there: Beau and Barbara and Sammy Smith—he was one of our controllers who had been a pilot and had known Beau in the old days. Then there was Annie and Lofty and Arthur Price, Jimmy Baggot, too, and Vere, of course—oh, everybody.

  “Anyhow, it was a pretty lively party. I don’t know how the argument started, but the first I heard, Vere was telling Beau, quite quietly and sensibly, that nobody could fly a Typhoon without a certain amount of training; and Beau was claiming that he could fly any bloody aircraft ever built. Barbara was egging Beau on, and the next thing we knew, he’d flung down his challenge. He would fly a Typhoon and single-handed at that.

  “Vere told him not to be a fool, but Beau had suddenly become very lucid and seemed to have the whole thing worked out. He said he would take Vere’s place on his next routine patrol. He’d pilot the aircraft himself—take-off, landing, acrobatics, and all—and he bet Vere a hundred pounds to a sixpence that he’d give a faultless performance. He knew that he’d be tracked on Dymfield’s Operations Room Table all the time, as well as being in radio-telephone touch, so we’d be able to watch his performance.

  “Vere told him he was crazy, but Barbara kissed him and told him he was marvelous and brave and clever, and, of course, after that nothing on heaven or earth would have stopped him. Vere remonstrated as hard as he could, but Barbara told him he was being a spoil-sport and that all he had to do was turn a blind eye for a few minutes. Vere went off muttering defiance, but they must have talked him around in the end.

  “The fatal day was to be the following Friday. Vere was due to go up on a dusk patrol. All of us in the Operations Room were considerably worked up about it. I was on duty that evening. We all knew that Snowdrop Three-two—that was the call sign of Vere’s aircraft—would in fact be piloted by Beau, and we were all keeping our fingers crossed for him. I certainly was.