Christopher Priest - The Separation

‘Would this be something to do with Birgit, by any chance?’ he said.

His question surprised me. ‘Birgit?’

‘The baby must be due soon. There isn’t anything going wrong, is there?’

‘No, it’s not about Birgit. Why should you think that?’

‘Are there any problems?’

‘Everything’s fine. We aren’t expecting the baby for at least another five weeks. At the end of next month.’

‘You’ve come away and left Birgit alone at home? In the last weeks of her pregnancy? How could you do that?’

I suppose that I too might have allowed a look of guilt to cross my face.

‘Look, JL, Birgit’s doing fine,’ I said. I could not rid my voice of a defensive note. ‘She’s a healthy girl and a neighbour’s keeping an eye on her while I’m away. I wouldn’t have left her if there was any risk. Anyway, I’m going home tomorrow’

‘So if it isn’t Birgit, what’s the important news that can’t wait?’

‘Can we find somewhere a bit less public to talk?’ We were a few yards away from the guardhouse at the airfield entrance, with several airmen in view. At least two or three of them were within hearing distance. With an inclination of my head I tried to make a wordless signal to Jack that I wanted to move away a little, but stubbornly he would not shift.

I moved closer to him, sensing his resistance to me. Speaking softly, I said, ‘I’m sticking my neck out to tell you this, JL. It’s as secret as anything can be. But I have information that the war is about to come to an end. Maybe in a week, two weeks. There’s going to be a cease-fire.’

Jack laughed sardonically, drew on the last of his cigarette, inhaled, and tossed the glowing end into a puddle.

‘You’ve come all the way here to tell me that?’

‘It’s absolutely true.’

‘So are the other rumours that go around a place like this every week.’

JL, this one isn’t a rumour. I know what I’m talking about.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true!’

‘A cease-fire is never going to happen,’ he said. ‘Even if it’s not a rumour. Even if there are some people who want one. Wars don’t suddenly end because somebody decides it’s time to stop. They go on being fought until one side or the other comes out on top.’

‘The last war ended with an armistice.’

‘That was different. In effect the Germans surrendered. No one’s going to start negotiating for peace now, on our side or theirs. The war has at last begun to go our way and we’re in too deep. We’ve gone beyond the point of no return and we have to see it through to the end.’

‘You sound like Churchill.’

‘Maybe I do. Is he suing for peace?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said, realizing how much I was blurting out from the store of confidential information with which I had been entrusted. ‘But it’s the real thing, I swear it. I’ve already said too much, but for various reasons Hitler wants to negotiate a cease-fire with Britain. Obviously something inside Germany is about to change, although I don’t know what. Whatever the reason, Hitler wants to make a separate peace with Britain.’

‘Since you mention Churchill, he would never stand for it.’

‘Churchill’s already talking.’

‘Talking? Churchill is talking to Hitler?’

‘Not directly. There are secret peace negotiations going on through intermediaries. This is why it’s dangerous for me to tell you. I’ve already let out more than I should.’

‘Your secret’s safe with me, Joe. Even if Churchill went mad and said he wanted to negotiate, the country wouldn’t let him. Not now, not after Dunkirk, not after the Blitz, not after the other sacrifices.’

‘It’s about to happen, whatever you say.’

‘How do you happen to know this, anyway?’

‘I obviously can’t tell you that. I’m only peripherally involved, but I do know what I’m talking about. It’s the real thing. There’s going to be an armistice and it’s going to be agreed soon. Perhaps even by next week.’

We had by this time, with unspoken consent, turned our backs on the airfield gate and were walking slowly along the grassy verge. JL offered me one of his cigarettes and we both lit up. I felt a quiet, unexpected surge of sentiment about being a twin again, if only in small things, walking together with my brother, smoking with him.

‘All right, let me suppose for one minute it’s true,’ Jack said. ‘What on earth is the point of me knowing it?’

‘You’ve got to come off operations, JL. Straight away. Couldn’t you apply for some kind of ground job? Every time you go out on a raid you’re in danger. There’s no point getting yourself killed now’

‘A lot of us tend to think there’s not much point being killed at any time.’

‘Why won’t you take me seriously?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Maybe you mean what you say because you have some special knowledge. Maybe you mean what you say anyway. Maybe you only think you mean it.’ I felt a stirring of resentment, a feeling that probably showed in my face. Jack, apparently reacting to it, went on, ‘All right, Joe, perhaps I even wish you meant it. But I can’t wander into my station commander’s office and tell him I don’t feel like flying any more. He’d take me down to the bar, buy me a beer and tell me not to go around with such bloody silly ideas. Anyway, there’s no point even discussing it. I don’t want to stop flying. What about my crew? Can I tell them too? What about the other crews? I can’t walk away from the squadron because my brother tells me a rumour - all right, passes me some information about the war coming to an end. Do I keep it a secret from the others? Then watch them go on putting themselves in danger? Or do you want us all to walk out?’

I heard the sound of aero engines in the background, caught by the wind and carried across the flat landscape, a growling reminder of war.

JL, I simply want you out of danger for a few days. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the cease-fire, but I have to tell you about it because you’re my brother! I didn’t go so far as thinking about how you might work it out with the air force.’

It was the longest conversation Jack and I had had in years. We were standing still again, a few feet away from each other, side by side on the grassy verge of the country road. We kept drawing on our cigarettes, using them like punctuation, for emphasis. We weren’t exactly looking each other in the eye, but we were as close as we had ever been since we grew up. I was trying to take his measure, trying to cut through and eliminate the complicated network of memories, childhood, obsessive sports training, falling out, my marriage to Birgit, all the events that lay unfathomably between us, the subjects we were still touchy about, the arguments we never resolved, a maze of alert responses from which we could bounce off irretrievably in the wrong direction, separating us once again. I felt for a moment it might at last be possible to leave that behind us, simply become brothers once again, adult brothers, joined by our resemblance to each other rather than driven apart by it.

But then he said, ‘You don’t know what the hell the war’s about, do you?’

The moment of possible healing was lost. We both looked up as a black-painted Wellington bomber roared away from the runway behind us, climbing heavily into the air, drowning us with its ferocious noise.

I was shaken into wakefulness. A plane was passing low over the pub, the centre of the town, out there in the night. The engine noise vibrated the window glass and shook the floorboards.

I was not in bed. I had left the bed.

I was standing in my room at the White Hart, wearing my pyjamas, halfway between the bed and the window, one hand resting on the wall for support. I was blinded by the jolt from bright daylight to night-time darkness, the real world, the illogical reality of my life. Lucidity lay only in the mind.