William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘ Ah, finalement ,’ he said. ‘ Suivez-moi, mademoiselle. ’

We walked across the farmyard and through a gap between the barn and the stables. The land sloped down to a large apple orchard, an acre or so in extent. It was now September and the leaves were turning yellow and the ground between the trees was lumpy with windfalls. We made our way down through the orchard towards its end. Halfway through our progress I began to see the smashed trees, some snapped cleanly in half, and there, like some sort of bizarre tilted metallic ruin, was Xan’s Typhoon. The great boss of the propeller was buried deep in the turf, the blades shattered, the plane’s back broken. The Perspex canopy had been pushed open and the seat and the instrument panel already looked mossy and mouldy and I saw a spider’s web strung from the joystick to the cockpit fairing. One wing was fifty yards away, ripped off by the impact; the other wing was lifted crazily, near-vertical, showing the empty rail mountings where the rockets had been slung.

Strangely, the Typhoon, smashed and broken up like this, seemed even bigger and heftier in the orchard than it had when parked by the runway at RAF Cawston. Maybe it was the size of the apple trees, mature yet stunted and broad as apple trees are, that caused this delusion of scale, making the crashed plane seem even more surreally out of place in this orchard than it already was.

Arnaud was complaining and I understood enough to know that he was asking why this wreck that had been in his orchard for over two months now had not been cleared away.

‘ Bientôt ,’ I said, confidently. ‘ Très bientôt ,’ as if I had some power to effect its removal. I walked around the Typhoon, taking photographs, thinking about Xan’s last flight. I had used my journalistic connections with the air ministry, and then his squadron, to piece together as much information as was available.

Xan had flown a sortie at the end of June, the target a chateau in the Argentan area that was believed to be an army-group headquarters. He and the three other Typhoons in the flight had released their rockets in the face of only light anti-aircraft fire and had substantially damaged the chateau. It was therefore bad luck that Xan’s plane was hit, I was told, as it was observed peeling away after the first pass and trailing smoke and was then seen to crash in an apple orchard a few miles away. Apparently Xan had survived the crash and was standing waiting by his plane when he was shot dead by the first panicked German troops that arrived. A week later when Canadian forces overran the sector they were led by the local priest to Xan’s body, lying in a crypt in the church.

These were the few facts I had and as I walked around the plane I tried not to let my mind fill in the gaps and failed. Xan’s relief at surviving the crash, climbing stiffly out of the cockpit — maybe he lit a cigarette. . Then hearing shouts, seeing the German soldiers running through the trees towards him, resigning himself to becoming a prisoner, raising his hands in surrender. Then the shots. .

I turned to Arnaud.

‘ Le pilote. Il était là ?’ I pointed to the ground beside the plane. ‘ Ou plus loin? ’

Arnaud shrugged. He didn’t know. There were a lot of German troops hiding in the village from the air attacks. They had seen the plane crash and had come running. He stayed back.

‘ Il a été abattu, le pilote. Vous savez? ’

‘Yes. He was my brother,’ I said without thinking, then, seeing his uncomprehending face, translated it into French. ‘ Il était mon frère. ’ It sounded so different in French, so final, somehow, and it proved too much for me. I began to cry and the old man took my hand and led me carefully out of the orchard.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I still think about Xan, all these years later, thirty or so years on, and still curse myself for not having had any film in my camera that day at RAF Cawston. Why does it bother me? I’ve plenty of photographs of Xan — as a boy, as a young man — he’s stopped in time forever. But somehow I feel it would have been good to have snapped him by his plane, his Typhoon that became his coffin. Stupid mistake. Another mistake.

I was thinking about the mistakes we all make — or rather the concept of a ‘mistake’. It’s something that can only be realised in hindsight — big mistake or a small one. It was a mistake to marry him. It was a mistake to go to Brighton on a bank holiday. It was a mistake to write that letter in red ink. It was a mistake to have left home without an umbrella. We don’t sense mistakes coming, there’s this crucial unforeseen factor to them. So I found myself asking the question: what is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn’t a word, in fact, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can’t set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen — there’s nothing we can do about them.

I walked along the beach on my little bay thinking of Xan. He was only twenty-seven. Almost 100,000 RAF airmen died during the Second World War, I read somewhere. The fact that Xan was one unit in that huge number makes it all the more terrible. One butcher’s bill for one family amongst the myriad served up by that conflict.

*

But it was Xan’s death that sent me to Paris. I felt I had to leave London, do something, and after the liberation of Paris in August I sent a teleprint to Cleve saying that we should set up a GPW office in Paris. ‘ New York Times and Chicago Tribune have reopened their Paris offices,’ I wrote. ‘We will be left trailing behind.’ A week later the go-ahead came with one caveat: I was to be joined as co-bureau chief by one R. J. Fielding, a seasoned journalist and foreign correspondent who had just been let go by the Washington Post , for some obscure reason, and promptly hired by Cleve. I didn’t mind — I didn’t care — I only had this overwhelming desire to go to France and find out where Xan had died.

R. J. Fielding — ‘Jay’ — was a lean, tall fifty-year-old who had covered the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. He had his grey hair shaved in a severe crew cut and wore rimless spectacles that made him look like a sporty professor. He was a widower and had a wry, unperturbed view of the human predicament. I became very fond of him and I’m sure, following on the death of my father, I saw him as a handy paternal substitute.

Paris in 1944 was a beautiful illusion. If you kept your eyes half open the city seemed unchanged and as perfect as ever, even after four years of war. If you opened your eyes wider the changes forced on it became apparent. Little things: the clatter of wooden-soled shoes, not leather; a very erratic electricity supply; no hot water; a main course of tinned peas and nothing else served without apology at a fancy restaurant. But the mood, despite these privations, was buoyant and intoxicating — liberation was liberating — somehow these minor inconveniences were not going to be allowed to undermine Paris’s spirit of place.

The new GPW office was in the deuxiéme arrondissement — a top-floor flat in an apartment block in the rue Louis-le-Grand, just a couple of blocks away from the Hotel Scribe, the journalistic headquarters for all newspapers, radio stations and press agencies covering the Allies’ push towards the German border. In rue Louis-le-Grand we had converted the sitting room into our office (we had no telephones) with desks for Jay Fielding and myself. One bedroom was for our rather grand secretary, Corisande de Villerville, a pale moon-faced young woman, almost terminally polite, who spoke perfect English and was happy to work all hours for our limited wages. I had a room in the Scribe but I often slept in the apartment’s spare bedroom — something about the crazed bustle of the Scribe put me off — rather too many people playing at being war correspondents, intoxicated and self-important at being in liberated Paris. All communications were at the Scribe and the military censors, also, vetting copy and photographs, and so I was obliged to spend much of the day there. It was a relief to leave and go back to the calm and solitude of the apartment. Jay Fielding had a room at the Lancaster — I suspected he was independently wealthy — and of course I had Charbonneau.