Derek Robinson - Piece of Cake

Patterson climbed back onto the tractor. “Home for breakfast, chaps!” he said. But this time the tractor refused to start. They took turns winding the starting-handle; nothing came out of the engine but soft grunts and feeble puffs of black smoke. “Buggeration,” Patterson said.

“Come on, let’s walk,” Mother Cox urged. He was growing more and more nervous as the sun rose.

They set off. Stickwell and Cattermole began a serious conversation about the significance of becoming twenty-one; the day before had been Pip Patterson’s twenty-first birthday. “It’s a definite milestone,” Stickwell said. “Right to vote, for a start. And you can get married. Take out hire-purchase debts. Go bankrupt. Get a mortgage.”

“Who cares about all that junk?” said Moggy Cattermole, who was only twenty. “I’m not interested in any of it. Are you, Pip?”

“Not much.” Patterson was beginning to worry about the broken tractor and its battered trailer.

“The big danger, as I see it, is women,” said Stickwell. “Once they know you’re twenty-one and therefore legally available, they’ll do absolutely anything to get your bags off.” Patterson looked interested. “Pure and innocent they may appear,” Stickwell warned, “but you can’t trust ’em in a dark corner on a hot night. That’s my experience.”

“You don’t say?” Patterson was intrigued.

“My father once told me that all women are natural predators,” Cattermole remarked. “He said they’d strip you naked and suck your blood and then send you the bill.”

“There you are, then,” Stickwell said.

“Mind you, he had five sisters and three daughters. And two wives.”

“Outnumbered from the bally start, poor devil,” Stickwell said.

“What d’you mean, Sticky: they’ll do anything to get a chap’s bags off?” Patterson asked.

“I think we’re going the wrong way,” Cox said. Patterson looked at him with dislike. “Well, it’s no good us walking away from Kingsmere, is it?” Cox demanded. “I think we ought to find someone and ask.”

They stopped walking.

“What a bore you are, Mother,” Cattermole said. “I certainly shan’t invite you to my twenty-first party.”

Heavy trampling sounds came from the other side of a hedge, and two large horses looked at them. “Hello!” Stickwell exclaimed. One of the horses blew smoke through its nostrils.

“I think they’re trying to tell us something,” Patterson said.

Hector Ramsay couldn’t wait. He had never had the gift of patience.

When he was a boy his restlessness had been quite endearing, sometimes; at boarding school, or at home in Hampshire, during the school holidays, young Hector had always been the leader of the gang, not interested in explaining or persuading but so brimful of energetic ideas that he usually got his own way by sheer thrustfulness. Or, looking at it another way, obstinacy.

As a young man he went on attacking life with a sledgehammer, as if it were some gigantic clam to be forced open. This was less attractive than his boyish gusto; it showed a relentless determination to succeed that most people found praiseworthy at first, a bit grim after a while, and frankly bloody tedious before long. If it was theoretically admirable for a seventeen-year-old to know so precisely what he wanted—he wanted to be the youngest-ever wing commander in RAF Fighter Command—in practice Hector Ramsay’s single-minded ambition was a bore. Even his father (by then retired from the Royal Navy) found him wearing, and his mother had long ago given him up, ever since the time he refused to attend his eldest brother’s wedding because it clashed with Open Day at the local RAF station. There had been the most enormous family bust-up over that. In the end Hector had gone with them to the church, slouching and silently contemptuous of the whole silly ritual; but he walked out halfway through the ceremony. He got into one of the hired cars and had himself driven to the airfield, where he spent the rest of the day happily climbing in and out of cockpits. There was an even louder family bust-up when he got home, although his mother admitted to herself that she was wasting her breath.

Hector knew what he wanted, and he couldn’t wait to get it. She sometimes wondered why he was so impatient. Because he was the youngest son? Because both his brothers had already done well in the Navy? Was that why Hector chose the RAF? Was he self-centered because he wanted to be a fighter pilot, or did he want to be a fighter pilot because that satisfied his self-centered nature? It depressed her that he was so intensely narrow, and sometimes she even wondered about his brain. His had been a difficult birth, late and awkward and full of pain. Hector hadn’t seemed to want to come into the world at all, he’d been dragged into it; and ever since he discovered what it was like, all his energies had been spent on getting far away from it. In a fighter plane. Alone.

So everyone was relieved when Hector Ramsay won a scholarship to the RAF College at Cranwell. He did well, got his commission, got his wings, got his posting to a fighter squadron. The family relaxed and began to treat him like a normal human being. There was even a spell when it almost looked as if Hector might get engaged.

He was flying Gloster Gauntlets—fixed-undercarriage biplanes with twin machine-guns, pure Dawn Patrol stuff—from an airfield in Cambridgeshire. She was Australian, a diplomat’s daughter, studying at one of the art schools on the fringe of the University. Her name was Kit and she had a freckled candor—together with legs like a dancer’s and breasts like grapefruit—that surprised and captivated him. She took him to bed (in her rented cottage at Grantchester) on his third visit, and that experience made him eager to return. What on earth did she see in him? Well, he wasn’t bad-looking, he had a kind of unblinking concentration that amused her, and he was in a different class from those flannelled undergraduates, all books and bats and bicycles, who jostled for her attention: at least Hector Ramsay did something; sometimes she could even smell the engine-oil on him when he came straight from flying. But what attracted her most was his enormous need. Here was a man so isolated that he could not reach out. Kit gave him her love, or so she believed, as an act of lifesaving. He was irresistible. For a few weeks they were like a nut and a bolt: gratifying when together, useless when apart. It wasn’t even necessary for them to say very much; they knew what they thought and they knew what they wanted. Once, when they were getting into bed, she paused and sat back on her heels and said, “Presumably you’re in love.” Hector crouched with his chin on his knees and hugged his bare legs, while he thought about it. “Presumably,” he said. They looked at each other. He was thinking: Am I? How do I know? How can I tell? She saw the act of thought crease his forehead like wind ruffling water, and she laughed. He raised his eyebrows. “Tell you later,” she said. But she never did.

The trouble began when he realized he was becoming addicted to her. If they didn’t make love at least every other night, he developed a craving for sex that obsessed him until it was satisfied. Then the craving started all over again. Sex obliterated his interest in food, duty, news, smalltalk, even flying. He could be in the cockpit running-up his engine, getting ready for takeoff, and in all the shudder and roar he sat brooding over a vision of Kit seen in the spinning arc of the propeller, naked and ready, while his limbs twitched and went slack and his mouth accumulated saliva. Eventually, reluctantly, he had to straighten up and swallow, forgo his lovely vision, concentrate on getting this throbbing machine up in the air.