A Thing of Beauty
He caught the scent of the last of the wild roses on the warm, dusty breeze. There were already many quite large hips on the bushes that were entangled with the hedgerow, but a few late blooms still lingered in the heat of the dog days. The dog paused momentarily and raised its nose to the sky as if it too was savouring the dregs of this sweetness.
“Rosa canina. Dog roses,” Teddy said to the dog, as if it might appreciate the name. “Dog days,” he added for good measure. The dog had no way of naming things for itself and so Teddy had dutifully taken it upon himself to lexiconize the world for it.
They were two old dogs out for a walk and they both had the hollow look around the eyes that went with age or ordeal. In reality, Teddy had no idea how old the dog might be, but he knew it had experienced a bad time during the Blitz and Teddy, at the age of twenty-nine, was an ancient (“the old man” he had heard himself called, affectionately) compared to the rest of the crew. The dog was called Lucky, which it was. Named by his sister (“an awful cliché, sorry”) after she had rescued it from the streets of beleaguered London. “Thought your squadron might like a mascot,” she said.
The last time he had taken a dog for a walk in the lane was before the war—Harry, the Shawcrosses’ dog. Harry died when Teddy was training in Canada and Nancy had written, “Sorry for the ‘radio silence.’ I couldn’t put pen to paper for a while, just writing the words ‘Harry has died’ made me so sad.” Her letter had arrived the same day as the telegram informing him of Hugh’s death and although it was a lesser grief he nonetheless had space in his heart for sorrow at the news.
Lucky ran ahead and started barking, transfixed by something in the hedgerow—a vole or a shrew, perhaps. Or nothing at all—he was a city dog and the countryside and its inhabitants were a mystery to him. He could be spooked by a low-flying bird but remain indifferent to four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines roaring overhead. They should have had Bristol Hercules engines on the Halifaxes to begin with, that was what they were designed for, and the Merlins had never performed as they should have done. At least the Halifaxes had had their tail-fins modified, thanks in part to good old Cheshire, who had pressed the powers-that-be to change the old triangular tail-fins that could cause you to go into a lethal stall if you had to corkscrew, but unfortunately they still had the Merlins. Teddy supposed that someone—someone like Maurice in the Air Ministry—had made the decision to put the Merlins in. Economy or stupidity or both, as the two usually went hand in hand. The Hercules—
“Oh, please, darling,” Nancy said, “let’s not think about the war. I’m so tired of it. Let’s talk about something more interesting than the mechanics of bombing.”
Teddy was silenced by this remark. He tried to think of something more interesting, and couldn’t. Actually, the Halifax engines had been the prelude to an anecdote that he knew Nancy would want to hear, but now something cantankerous in him decided not to offer it up to her. And of course he wanted to talk about the war and “the mechanics of bombing”—that was his life and was almost certainly going to be his death, but he supposed she couldn’t understand that, locked away as she was in her ivory tower of secrets.
“Well, we can talk about what you do all day long,” he said, rather meanly, and she held his hand tighter and said, “Oh, you know I can’t. Afterwards, I’ll tell you everything. I promise.” How odd it must be, Teddy thought, to believe in an afterwards.
This was a couple of days ago and they had been strolling along a seaside promenade. (“Sea,” he said to an ecstatic Lucky.) If you could manage to ignore the trappings of coastal defence all around them (difficult, admittedly) it might have seemed a normal activity for a couple on a summer’s day. By some miracle Nancy had managed to synchronize her leave with his. “A tryst!” she said. “How romantic!” Teddy had gone straight from debriefing after a raid on Gelsenkirchen—and the customary bacon-and-egg reward for staying alive during an op—to the train station, from whence he had undertaken an interminable journey to King’s Cross. Nancy had met him on the platform and it had seemed romantic, in the way of films and novels anyway (although the first thing that came to mind was Anna Karenina). It was only when he caught sight of her eager face that he realized he had forgotten what she looked like. He had no photo of her, which was something he thought that he really ought to rectify. She had put her arms around him and said, “Darling, I’ve missed you so much. And you have a dog! You never said.”
“Yes, Lucky.” He had had the dog for a while now. He must have forgotten to mention it to her.