Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

She opened the volume to King Lear. Before I knew it, we were taking turns, she as Cordelia and I as Lear, she as Goneril and I as Edmund. There we were in a cave in the countryside east of London, dividing up ancient England over the mistaken response of a daughter who loved her father. We felt as if France and Albany were standing in the nooks of our cave, listening in as we unwisely divided the kingdom; our anger at Goneril and Regan was as great in those moments as it was for the Messerschmitt pilots over London. The pages of that edition were all very clean, not a mark on any one of them.

A near the end of act 2, Glynnis returned to us. She told her mother we would be back, that we’d come see her when we had a leave.

“We,” she said.

“Poxl and me,” Glynnis said.

“Upon your return, we will find our way into act 3, my boy,” Mrs. Goldring said.

Kerosene light danced on the ceiling ten yards above our heads, about the deep-lined face of Glynnis’s mother. She looked right at me for the first time.

“I could do with that,” Mrs. Goldring said.

On our long walk back to the train, Glynnis asked what had allowed her mother to seem so lucid at some moments after weeks and months of decrepitude. I told her I didn’t know. I’d only just met this woman and wouldn’t purport to know.

“But we read King Lear together the whole time you were gone,” I said.

I suspected there might eventually be more to say on the matter, but I left it at that.

12.

In the months ahead, when we were granted weekend leave, Glynnis and I went to see her mother. While Glynnis went off to procure whatever her mother needed, I stayed and read. First we read Lear, and then the rest, from Timon of Athens to Titus Andronicus, from All’s Well That Ends Well all the way to The Merchant of Venice , where we paused as Shylock asks, so pained, If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

When Glynnis grew tired and returned, I would survey the cave myself, while Glynnis and her mother talked, or read from the plays as well, though having grown up with them, Glynnis surely didn’t have the same patience for her mother’s proclivities that I did. I wouldn’t say I came to know its every recess, but the cave itself came to be a kind of holiday home for us.

And without our quite knowing when it had happened so fully, Glynnis and I had taken to each other. We made love quietly on weeknights when we could. While her face bore that constellation of freckles, when her shirt came off, I found that every inch of her skin not touched by the sun was wholly white. I liked to turn on a lamp in the corner of her small room near the hospital when we undressed. In the quiet after we’d disentangled I heard about her childhood. She’d grown up on a dairy farm, her family one of modest means. After watching her parents’ husbandry of their cattle—“I’d seen more pink bleating calves pulled from their mothers by the age of ten than one should see in a lifetime,” Glynnis said — she came to decide that medicine attracted her. Not just medicine but also the birthing process. She began her training as a midwife soon after leaving her parents’ home. But then the war threatened, and now she was a handful of years into working as a nurse.

“It’s a funny transition, innit?” Glynnis said. I told her I didn’t follow her meaning. “I wanted to be in a hospital helping to bring new life into the world. Here were are in London watching it taken.”

“You’re doing exactly what you should be doing now,” I said. “The war will end one day, and you’ll go back to it.”

“I suppose. And you, Poxl West? What will you do when the war you’re so certain will end does end?”

I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t know, so I gave her an answer somewhere in between.

“ Before this war is over, Glynnis Goldring, I will fly for the RAF.” It wasn’t the first she’d heard of this desire, but I suppose it was the most clearly she’d heard it.

“And what will become of me while you’re off flying?” she said.

“The same thing that becomes of you now. Or you’ll come with me, come work for the Women’s Auxiliary.”

“I don’t want to leave here,” Glynnis said. And for a time we left it at that. We stopped speaking and held each other tight. After hours on Mrs. Goldring’s pallet there was something almost too ordered about Glynnis’s bed — there was no sense of being thrown off by the gravity of the shifting world, no feeling of the disruption that a dim cave can bring.

So more often than not we found ourselves back in that cave on every weekend pass we could procure. I liked to carry a lamp with us on those weekends when we went to see Mrs. Goldring and observe every cave room there was. I learned after the war that as many as eight thousand Britons had set up camp there, and by springtime they’d moved beyond a dining room and sleeping areas. Deep in the paths water had borne through the rock over many thousands of years, through a passageway so tight one felt one might be stuck until one starved to death, a ballroom had been constructed. Some boy small enough to pass through the crevice along with a small chandelier had brought tools as well, and near the top of the cave ceiling, he had installed that glimmering glass. An old Victrola was powered by a hand crank in a far corner of the room.

It took some convincing to get Glynnis in there with me. She wasn’t much of a dancer and neither was I, but when Glen Miller came on I took her hand and we did the best we could.

One night for a fast dance someone put on one of those old Decca Records recordings of Bill and Charlie Monroe doing “You Won’t Be Satisfied That Way.” For just a second I hesitated when Glynnis came to me, my mind thrust away from that place, but I did my best to regain myself. Glynnis took my hands, and she and I danced hard to it. I had her hands gripped in mine, and I didn’t let go. The low-slung rock of the cave’s ceiling seemed to push down toward my head, and as if against my desire, constructed images of Françoise stuck under the beams of a bomb-imploded house entered my mind. I didn’t picture Rotterdam: I pictured that building in Gough Square where Glynnis and I had first met, only now Françoise was there. I can only guess that as I held her there, Glynnis thought I was simply a young man in love — with her. And that wasn’t inaccurate. But there was more on my mind. My palms grew sweaty as I considered that this empathy for Glynnis, considering her thoughts, was more move to empathy than I’d given Françoise even after I left her, even after I arrived in London.

Something must have crossed my face. Glynnis said, “Poxl, what is it? I’ve never seen you look so sad. Or happy. I don’t know which.”

“I don’t either,” I said. I’d never spoken to her of Françoise before, and I wasn’t going to start. “But let’s forget it.” Presently the song changed, and it was past, and we went back to dancing slowly. I’m sure my behavior seemed odd, but neither of us made mention of it again. The cave was so broad and wide most of the sound was lost in the room anyway, or it echoed so that it was as if you were hearing both what was being played and what had been played seconds before, the two lines crossing until it was no longer clear which was which: past or present.

Glynnis’s hands were in mine. We were dancing slowly. I had to say something, even as the melancholy of my thoughts sat as a residue on my mind.

“I’m glad you brought me to this place,” I told Glynnis.

“My mother’s taken to you.”

“It’s a wise child who knows her mother,” I said, and she held me close.