James Hawkins - Missing - Presumed Dead

“Well come on, Daphne, you can’t leave me in suspense like this.”

“I think I’ve said enough,” she mumbled, getting up and gathering her cleaning paraphernalia. “When do you want me to take your lady friend to see Doreen?” she added acerbically.

“No. Wait a minute,” he said, grabbing her aerosol of furniture polish and forcing a stand-off. “I want to know.”

She capitulated, slumped back into the chair and started with Hugo, in Paris, near the end of the war.

“Hugo?” he queried vacantly, his mind tied up with dead goats and skeletal Majors.

“Hugo, the French artist,” she reminded him, taking him back to their first evening together: pork chops and treacle pudding with custard; the portrait of a beautiful young woman; the framed O.B.E.; the stuffed goat in her hallway — forget the damn goat, he said to himself as he tried to recollect the picture and the painter. What had she said about him? he asked himself. “I loved Hugo, but he loved his painting.” I wonder what she meant?

“Yes, I remember Hugo,” he said in an encouraging tone.

“I was with him for two years,” she began, pain, pleasure, longing and regret all coalescing into a mien that, if anything, came down on the side of happiness. But then she froze, focusing somewhere into the distance, and her face took a roller coaster ride through her emotions as she thought about what to tell. How she had wandered penniless, lonely and confused into a Parisian bar and fainted from hunger. How she’d woken to the stench of smoke and garlic in Hugo’s studio as he sat, naked to the waist, quietly studying her face while he sketched.

“ Cigarette? ” he had said, offering one of the foul Galloises as she stirred, but she needed food and told him so.

He cut her a hunk of greasy dried sausage and broke a baguette in two, then, with hardly a word, she offered herself in exchange. What did it matter? The Frenchwoman’s baby was dead; the German soldiers she had rained shells upon were all dead; millions more on both sides were dying or dead. Who would know, or care, if two strangers found a few moments relief from the abomination of everyday existence in each other’s bodies.

“In a way it was Rupert Dauntsey’s fault,” she went on, catching Bliss completely off balance.

“Rupert Dauntsey — the Major?” he asked incredulously.

Her eyes went down to the floor as if in search of a memory, but when she looked up they were swelling with tears and her voice was barely audible as she bit back the sobs. “I heard on the grapevine that a Major from Westchester was in a French hospital …” She paused, snivelling loudly into a white handkerchief pulled from her sleeve. “I didn’t know it was Rupert at first, but I desperately needed something to cling on to, anything to wake me from the nightmare and return me to reality … and I thought a friendly face from home …” Her voice failed as the tears welled up and overcame her.

“It’s alright, Daphne,” said Bliss rushing to comfort her, but it wasn’t alright. The horrific memories had not faded with time, nor had they become any easier to bear, and she bit her knuckles furiously as the vivid scenes forged their way to the surface: an American troop truck … six G.I.s on 24 hours R amp;R, and a dozen or so others going on eternal leave.

“Don’t look at the stiffs, Miss,” warned the driver as he stopped to pick her up at the roadside on the outskirts of a bombed town. Clambering in beside him she ignored the warning and turned instinctively, then found herself wondering whether the “stiffs” were the dozen or so corpses on the floor, or the six haggard-faced soldiers staring into the clear blue sky. Following their gaze she found a screeching skylark wheeling above a moon-scaped cornfield and envied it its freedom, but looking back at the men, she realised they had not seen the bird — they were just staring.

For more than an hour decimated villages rumbled by, the ruins still quaking from the distant thunder of canon fire, and stoic-faced Normans turned their backs, burying their dead or staring in disbelief at their wrecked homes.

“Good luck, Miss,” the driver shouted as she dropped down from the cab outside the hospice. “I hope your friend will be O.K.”

“Thanks,” she yelled, giving a friendly wave to the G.I.s as the truck roared away, but none responded — each too busy contemplating the fact that ten years of their life’s movie had ripped through the projector in the past ten days; wondering how much film was left on the spool.

“I couldn’t see Rupert’s face at all,” Daphne mumbled through the tears. “Just bandages with a couple of holes to breathe through, and another with a feeding tube in what was left of his mouth.”

“This is Major Dauntsey,” the nurse had said, more by way of identification than introduction and Daphne’s heart had sunk.

“He couldn’t see me and couldn’t talk,” she continued, omitting to mention that the crushing disappointment had forced her to her knees. “He didn’t even have a hand that I could squeeze to comfort him.” Her one hope of finding someone or something to stabilise her thoughts had been dashed. For the two days it had taken to reach him she had pushed the pain of dead babies and massacred soldiers to the back of her mind, while searching for images of streets, pubs, shops and people they would have in common, fully expecting that, within seconds, they would find themselves chatting as amiably as long forgotten schoolfriends; perhaps sealing their bond with a kiss, maybe something more if he was capable — after all, it wasn’t as if he were a complete stranger. And it wasn’t as though Doreen was the sort who’d be too concerned, even if she found out — not that she would.

“I’m ashamed to admit this, but I screamed and ran,” she confessed to Bliss, adding, “If something that horrible could happen to the shy little boy who lived up the road …” The words failed as she sobbed in the handkerchief, then she tried again. “I think it was because I had known him. All the others, even the baby, were strangers.”

“But you said that whatever happened to you had been Rupert Dauntsey’s fault,” Bliss reminded her. “What did you mean.”

“I don’t expect you to believe this,” she started, looking him carefully in the eye, “but it was as if I’d somehow got on the wrong planet and didn’t know how to get back to Earth. I think in some silly way I was expecting Rupert to lead me. You see, I’d done my job — killed all the people I was supposed to kill. Now what? They never told us at the training school and we never asked. I suppose we all knew, deep down, that we wouldn’t survive, so it was tempting fate to even consider what to do afterwards. But, because I survived, I was lost — not physically. I was lost because my mind had already accepted the certainty of death and had made no plans for the future.”

Samantha’s words still buzzed in his mind from the previous night and took on a greater relevance. “You’ve got to have a plan, Dave,” she had said and he glanced at the wall clock: 7.35 am. Superintendent Donaldson would be in at 8.00 with his sights on a chocolate digestive.

“You were telling me about Hugo,” he pressed Daphne, knowing that by 8.05 Donaldson would be informed about the goat, if someone hadn’t already snitched, and by 8.10 he’d feed an empty biscuit packet in the shredder and call the chief. By 8.15 the phone on Bliss’s desk would ring and his career would be over. London’s Grand Metropolitan Police Force wouldn’t take him back and the Chief Constable of Hampshire would be happy to see him go. “We want it to be your decision, Dave,” someone would tell him with a compassionate hand on his shoulder, thereby avoiding any suggestion he was being pressurised. “Of course — you could always go back to the safe house … ” they’d say, somehow leaving the sentence hanging, unfinished. Or I could do myself in and save everybody the trouble, he smiled to himself sardonically.