Jon Cleary - The Climate of Courage

Jack looked down at him from his full height, past the bristling moustache that stuck out like the horns of an angry bull. “Just step aside, mister, and allow me to escort Miss Bendixter through to join her mother.”

The lieutenant stepped back, his mouth open but empty of words, and Jack and Silver moved on across the room. “You would have hit him, wouldn’t you?” Silver said. “Or thrown him down the lift well.”

“Certainly. Don’t you think he asked for it?”

“I suppose so. But here ! Do you always choose such crowded places for your assassinations? And when you’re with your lady friends? I felt a little like some floosie from Paddington”

He stopped and looked down at her. “For that last remark, I should drop you down the lift well. I don’t know why, but one thing I hadn’t expected from you was snobbishness.”

She said nothing for a moment, and he thought she was going to walk away from him. Then she put her hand in his and suddenly he was aware of a new intimacy between them. It was as if they were old lovers who had patched up a quarrel, and there was none of the awkwardness that would have been natural in view of their short acquaintance. “I’m sorry, Jack. That was something I should never have allowed myself even to think. My apologies to the girls in Paddington.”

Then a grey-haired handsome woman, better dressed than anyone else in the place, came steaming towards them. “Silver! My God, I thought you were never going to arrive!” She looked up at Jack. “So this is our war hero! So big and handsome, too! We should sell a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of bonds to-night. I wish all our heroes were like you. What did you win?”

“The Melbourne Cup,” said Jack. “Only man ever to do it. It’s always been won by a horse before.”

Silver patted her mother’s arm. “This is not the war hero, darling. This is Jack Savanna.”

“Oh, he’s with you?” said Mrs. Bendixter, and it was a long time since Jack felt he had been so neatly dropped over-board. Mrs. Bendixter looked about her. “Then where is he ? You’d think he’d be on time, even if he is a hero. Have you seen Smithy?”

A small pony-faced woman materialised out of nowhere. She wore an expression of dedicated enthusiasm: the war had been the first cause big enough in which to lose herself. When peace came she would need rehabilitating as much as the men who had fought on the battle fronts.

“You wanted me, Mrs. Bendixter?” Even her voice was enthusiastic, a thin reedy trumpet blowing the national anthem. “Such a crowd! We should sell enough bonds tonight to buy at least one bomber!”

“All we need,” said Jack. “One more bomber, and the war is won.”

He felt Silver kick his leg and when he looked down at her she was frowning severely at him. But Miss Smith’s attention had been hauled in by Mrs. Bendixter.

“Where’s this war hero, Smithy? We must get started soon. We have to go on to a bridge party after this for the war widows——”

“Orphans,” said Miss Smith, glowing with charity. “And it’s not a bridge party, it’s a musicale.”

“A musicale? Well, that’s good. I can doze off. My God, I’m so tired!” Mrs. Bendixter put a hand to her forehead, suffering from war fatigue. “Well, where is this man? Hasn’t he turned up yet?”

“He’s here, Mrs. Bendixter! You’ve already met him. Sergeant Morley, the thin dark boy——”

“The boy with those lovely teeth! Why didn’t someone say so? My God, if I wasn’t here to organise things, they’d never get started!” Mrs. Bendixter turned round as a newspaper photographer came up. “Hallo, you’re from the Sunday Telegraph, aren’t you? Take me full face this time. Last week I was in profile and I looked like General MacArthur.”

Then Greg Morley came back, dragging a pretty girl with honey-coloured hair after him. “You remember Sarah, Jack! Look after her, will you? I’ve got to go up and do my act now.”

Then he had gone plunging away, surrounded by his bodyguard, the whole group moving towards a platform at the end of the hall, headed by Mrs. Bendixter with Miss Smith in close tow.

“Looks like Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort,” said Jack. “Is there no band?” Then he took Silver’s arm. “Sarah Morley, this is Silver Bendixter.”

Sarah smiled and shook her head in wonder. “Your mother puts up with this sort of bedlam often?”

“Every day,” said Silver. “She loves it.”

“So does your husband,” Jack said to Sarah. “Look at him up there. Clark Gable never felt more at home.”

Greg was up on the platform, beaming round at the thousand or more girls below him. Mrs. Bendixter was speaking, reading from a typescript that Miss Smith had shoved into her hands, but she was standing too close to the microphone and her voice was just wave after wave of almost unintelligible blasts. Nobody minded, because nobody had come to listen to Miss Bendixter anyway. And Jack somehow felt sure that Greg at the microphone would be as practised as any crooner.

“His life is complete,” Sarah Morley said. “He’s waited all his life for these past few days.”

“I suppose you’ve been besieged by the newspapers?” said Silver.

“And radio, and the newsreels, and the magazines, and war loan committees. It’s like being married to a public property, a new statue or something.” There was no spite or rancour in Sarah’s voice it was as if she had succeeded in detaching herself completely from the whole business. She looked at Jack. “The surprising thing is, he’s terribly modest with me about it all. He hasn’t told me a thing about what he did to get the V.C All I know is what I read in the papers. Was he really as brave as they said?”

“He was.” There was no mockery now in Jack’s voice: he had seen the incident and he knew Greg deserved the honour he had got. “We’d been held up for an hour by these two machine-gun posts. They had us as nicely taped as I ever hoped to be taped. We were stuck behind some rocks on the bank of the Litani River.” As he spoke the whole rocky sunbaked Syrian countryside came back to him, and he felt suddenly nostalgic. The campaign had been tougher and more important than the outside world, for some political reason, had been told. The Vichy French had fought with the same whole-hearted hatred as the Germans had in the Western Desert. But after the armistice, camped among the olive groves in the shadow of the sharp-ridged mountains, bathing in the warm Mediterranean, loving the dark-eyed Lebanese beauties, when one could get them away from their hawk-eyed parents. Syria had become the first piece of territory worth fighting for that they had so far met. Jack had liked Syria and one day hoped to go back. “I didn’t see Greg start out, I don’t think any of us did, but the next thing we knew he was across the river and going up the opposite bank. He took those two machine-gun posts on his own. He threw in grenades and then went in and used his bayonet. We were still on the other side of the river and it was like sitting in the dress circle watching a film, the sort of film that excites you but that you don’t believe in. When he’d finished he stood up, grinning all over his face just like he is now, and yelled back at us, ‘Righto, what are you bastards waiting for?’ It’s the first and only time I’ve ever heard a man cheered while we were in action. Yes, Sarah, he was really brave.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “It makes me feel better for him.”

“What do you mean?” said Silver.

“Nothing,” Sarah smiled, her grey eyes looking a little tired. “It’s been all a little confusing these past few days, married to Public Hero Number One.”