Of course, he had seen some pretty gruesome things too, in accidents during training, but they were not topics that you mentioned at the Regency Revival table over stewed chicken.
He ferried the dirty dishes through to the kitchen (“Bridget will do that,” Sylvie said sharply, but Teddy ignored her) and caught sight of the chicken carcass sitting on the kitchen table, denuded of its meat. His stomach heaved, taking him off guard.
At his flying training school in Ontario Teddy had witnessed an Anson coming in for an emergency landing. It had gone out on a cross-country exercise but had returned almost immediately with engine problems. Teddy had watched as it approached the airfield far too fast, wobbling all over the place before pancaking on the runway. Its fuel tanks were still almost full and the impact created a tremendous explosion. Most people had run for some kind of shelter at the sight of it. Teddy had thrown himself behind a hangar.
Everyone on the ground appeared unscathed and the fire engines and blood wagons raced out to the flaming Anson.
It was reported that one member of the crew had escaped the pyre, blown out of the aircraft when it exploded, so Teddy joined in the search with a couple of his fellow trainee pilots. They found the lone, lost soul amongst the lilac trees that bordered the perimeter fence. Later they learned it was the instructor who had been on board, an experienced pilot in the RCAF whom Teddy had flown with only yesterday. Now he presented a ghoulish sight—already a skeleton, his flesh almost entirely stripped off his bones from the force of the explosion. (“Flensed,” Teddy had thought, in one part of his brain.) The instructor’s entrails, still warm, were festooning the lilacs. The lilacs were in full bloom, their scent still discernible beneath the noisome stink of butchery.
One of the men searching with Teddy fled, screaming and cursing blue murder. He washed out as a pilot, never flew again. LMF, it was declared, and he left in disgrace to go who knew where. The other trainee pilot with Teddy, a Welshman, stared at the remains and said simply, “Poor bugger.” Teddy supposed his own reaction fell somewhere in between. Aghast at the macabre nature of the sight, relieved he hadn’t been in that Anson. It was his first experience of the obscenities that could be wreaked upon frail human bodies by the mechanics of war, something he supposed his sister already knew.
“That’s for the stockpot,” Bridget said when she noticed him staring at the chicken carcass, as if he might have been planning on stealing it. She was doing the washing-up, standing at the big stone Belfast sink in the kitchen, elbow-deep in suds. Teddy took a tea-towel from a hook and said, “Let me dry.”
“Go away,” Bridget said, which was, Teddy knew, her way of expressing gratitude. How old was Bridget? He couldn’t even take a guess. In his lifetime she had traversed the best of her own, from naivety and even giddiness (“Fresh off the ferry,” as Sylvie always had it) to a weary resignation. She had “lost her chance” in the last war, she said, and Sylvie scoffed and said, “Lost your chance of what? The drudgery of marriage, the constant worry of children? You have been better off here with us.”
“I’m going home,” she said to Teddy, reluctantly relinquishing a dripping dinner plate to him. “When all this is over.”
“Home?” Teddy said, confused for a moment. She turned and stared at him and he realized that he never really looked at Bridget. Or he looked and never saw her.
“Ireland,” she said as if he was stupid, which he supposed he was. “Go and sit down. I have to fetch the pudding.”
And Nancy? What of Nancy? Where is she, we ask? Plucked suddenly from the arcane world of natural numbers a year ago and tucked away in a secret location. When people asked what she was doing she said she was working for a division of the Board of Trade that had moved from London to rural safety. She made it sound so boring (“rationing of home-produced scarce materials”) that no one asked anything further. Teddy had been expecting to see her but she telephoned at the last minute and said, “I can’t get away, I’m so sorry.”
Nearly eighteen months and she was “sorry”? He felt bruised but he was quick to forgive. “She’s so tight-lipped. I don’t know when I’m going to see her again,” he said to Ursula as they “dawdled” in the lane. (“I love that word, I do so little of it these days,” she said.) They stopped and lit cigarettes before they reached Fox Corner. Sylvie objected to smoking in the house. Ursula inhaled deeply and said, “It’s a filthy habit, but not as filthy as war, I suppose.”
“Her letters are extraordinarily bland,” Teddy said, still pursuing the elusive topic of Nancy. “As if the censor was standing at her elbow while she was writing them. It all seems incredibly hush-hush. What do you suppose she’s really doing?”