The Moment of Truth Read online

  THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

  BY

  STORM JAMESON

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chepter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter One

  A Gull’s view, as it turned and beat in towards the land, would show, in the clear air, rocks—black seals’ heads in the foam below the cliffs, then, the face of the cliffs, the rank grass at their edge, the sheds and runways of the small airfield, the two or three stunted pines bowed to the east, and—in June at their true distance—the hills.

  The wooden building, two low storeys, at the farther side of the airfield, had in two years lived fifty, so cruelly had it shrunk into itself to endure the sea winds and the sharp salt of the air. A door open on to the field led directly into the room in use as lounge, office, waiting-room for passengers, the only room it was possible to heat properly in winter. At the moment, door and windows were widely open: a light, a very light flying lick of wind from the sea skimmed across airfield and room, the first breath of the long brilliant northern summer evening.

  There were three people in the room, two young men, a pilot-officer and a sergeant-pilot of the R.A.F., and a girl; the girl was wearing a uniform at first glance identical with theirs—that of a pilot in the W.R.A.F. Elbow pressing the desk, the young officer listened on the telephone, using the least possible effort—it was easier to lean his head sideways than to lift the instrument: he had a curiously narrow ear, flattened against a long head, now rigid and attentive, the attentive point in a long thin lounging body. Lines sketched in below his eyes marked the first anxieties that were not those of a child.

  The others listened. They were able to fill in most of the gaps from a stock of common living: they saw the airfield through a single pair of eyes, and, under the immense sky, moved about in it as one body.

  “… Henderson … due back to-day … yes, sir, in the Anson … four of us—Sergeant-Pilot Marriot, L.A.C. Smith, Flight-Officer Hugh-Brown, myself … she came back Monday … no, sir … oh, quite … well, I’m sorry, sir, it didn’t work out that way …”

  Tilting his head a little so that he could look at the girl, Andrew Kent kept his eyes on her—without speech in them—simply looking, as if to carry over to her the voice she could not hear of the man at the other end of the wire. His own voice had become flat and quietly stubborn.

  “… afraid I didn’t get that … sorry, sir, what did you say? … yes … no … very good, sir …”

  His voice changed again, becoming easier: he dropped a pencil he was balancing on his right palm and had gripped; his shoulders relaxed.

  “… yes, down to the last typist—papers, laboratory equipment, everything. All the stuff we couldn’t send over in the aircraft has been destroyed … yes … oh, by the way, one chap committed suicide, one of the scientists … not the faintest—unless he didn’t like the idea of America … a very neat job—he poisoned himself … not at all … right … very good, sir … yes … no … yes. …”

  Laying the receiver down, he came back, slowly, to the neglected untidy room, seeing nakedly for a moment its leather armchairs, ill-used and sagging, the litter of old newspapers and magazines covering the table, the faded posters, silly voices from the first weeks of the war, nailed casually to the walls, the harsh blistered wood, the dust. The girl during this moment was only her dark eyebrows and the stillness of her head, Marriot was his left arm, its shrunken and nearly useless fingers laid on his knee. He asked,

  “Well? What’d he say?”

  “Friendly little fellow, D.8,” Kent answered. “His last remark was: You’ll hear from me again. Kind of him. You wouldn’t think I’d been hearing from him every mortal day for at least a month.”

  Without moving, the girl asked,

  “What was he saying about me?”

  Kent looked at her with a flicker of irony.

  “Why hadn’t you been sent off to America days ago? With the other lassies.”

  She said nothing to this.

  “Any news,” asked Marriot.

  “Nothing fresh.” He stretched his arms. After a moment he added, “I shouldn’t think there’s much left to go. What hasn’t gone, won’t.”

  “We’ll be four of ten thousand people who got away on the last plane,” Marriot said.

  The girl stood up. She was thin, and moved with a natural elegance. Her head of curled fine hair was shaped like Kent’s: the effect of the lines of neck and cheek, of greenish-grey eyes set in wide sockets, was oddly that of a sculpture in polished wood. Hurrying towards beauty, she had not yet—she was very young—caught up with it.

  “If there is a last aeroplane,” she said. “If Jock Henderson comes back for us.”

  Kent smiled at her briefly.

  “Why shouldn’t he come?”

  “Oh,” she answered lightly, “it’s a little like one of those dreams where someone is going to murder you and you try to get the door unlocked and can’t.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Browny, we should have packed you off last week,” Marriot said. He laughed at her. “You’re morbid.”

  “Thanks. I don’t feel in the least morbid. You’re both so sure Jock will get back—but it would be much easier for them to write us off. Wouldn’t it?”

  “He’ll be here this evening,” Kent said.

  Marriot yawned.

  “We hope.”

  Kent turned to him.

  “By the way, Davy—I remembered it when D.8 was babbling—what was it you pinched, that last time we were at Garra House?”

  Marriot did not answer immediately. Taking his stiffened left arm by its sleeve, he lifted and set it on the padded arm of his chair, looking at it a little stupidly, as if it were someone he ought to recognise.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You took a paper of some sort from one of the cases when the chap was nailing it down. I meant to ask you about it afterwards. I forgot.”

  A year younger than Kent—twenty-two—Marriot was much less the unfinished sketch; face and body were already organised, distinctly and with a nervous tension. He was small, pale, with quick dark eyes, and finely rounded forehead. To these eyes, and to a mouth so formed that it was already smiling, he owed his look of intelligence and a serious charm.

  “I didn’t,” he said gently, “know you were watching me.”

  Kent lifted his eyebrows.

  “I wasn’t watching.”

  “All right, but it wouldn’t interest you at all. It just happened to be about the thing I was working on in London—before the war. It caught my eye. I was curious about it. That’s all. It wasn’t anything important. D’you want to look at it?” He took a notebook from his pocket. “It’s here.”

  “Good God, no.”

  In an amused voice, the girl asked,

  “I never knew what you took a degree in, Davy—what sort of a terrible scientist are you?”

  “Would you know one sort of physicist from any other?” Kent mocked her.

  “No.” She looked at Marriot again: “Tell me what you would have been doing, if we hadn’t had this war.”

  “Research, Browny, applied physics.”

  “Now you know, my child,” Kent said.

  She turned away and walked across the room to the window. Without following her glance, the two young men saw airfield, cliff-edge, the steep wall of the sea sending out its bright darts. They saw as well the sky, unwrinkled and vacant.

  “I’m certain Jock won’t be here this evening,” she said lightly.

  “Well, to-morrow, then,” Marriot said.

  He got up, looked round hi
m for the tunic he had thrown on the table, thrust his sound arm into a sleeve, and tried to jerk the rest of the garment round his shoulders. Without haste, Kent reached over and pulled it on for him.

  “After supper I’ll have another go at your arm,” he said. “I hope to God that not having it treated all this time hasn’t ruined it.”

  “Why should it?”

  Kent lifted the hand: it lay across his long fingers like the claw of an animal; he examined it for a moment, touching it with an infinite gentleness, almost love.

  “You damned idiot—you could be in New York with it now.”

  Marriot smiled quickly.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  Picking up a newspaper—since none of them was less than three or four weeks old, it scarcely mattered which he took—he sauntered out with it on to the airfield.

  “Cordelia,” Kent said gently.

  She turned from the window, and came, quickly, smiling, to rest her hands on his shoulders. They kissed, and Kent held her, looking down, with a grave excitement and anxiety, at her eyes; and as though they were strange to him, deliberately, closely, at the strongly arched brows, the black eyelashes, the flawed greenness surrounding pupils where he saw himself reflected, infinitely small. He ran his finger over the elongated line from her chin to the slender point of her jaw, and over her throat. When he lifted his head, the airfield, suspended in the clear light, shivered as though it were part of the bubble surrounding them. His anxiety returned.

  “I wish you had gone, my love.”

  “You don’t,” Cordelia said.

  She had a quick low voice, a little older than her age: the assurance she did not yet feel had touched it.

  “No, of course I don’t—but if for any reason Jock doesn’t come, you’ll be trapped.”

  She smiled and said gaily,

  “With you, and forty million other people.”

  “The others don’t interest me.”

  Moving quickly, she went back to the chair she had been sitting in. She leaned back. Kent seated himself on an arm.

  “We might be all right,” she said. “They may be devils—I don’t suppose they are—or not all of them. But they can hardly kill millions of us. It would be ridiculous.”

  “Idiot,” Kent said. They guarded themselves, by childish insults, from a too willing surrender to their passion for each other: it was not purely a happiness, there was something else in it, obscure, even frightening, and instinctively they avoided it. “They needn’t kill anyone. That chap Nairne who came through last week—how many people did he say we could feed—that is, if they let us? It wasn’t an awful lot. What’s happened … the fact is, we haven’t taken it in yet.”

  “We might stay up here, and become crofters.”

  “We might.”

  She looked away from him.

  “You’d hate not flying.”

  Biting back the anger and impatience he felt—not with her—Kent said,

  “I shouldn’t care to live all day with my feet in muck.”

  “We might both have been born on a croft.”

  “We might. But we weren’t.” Less sharply, he added, “I’m a good pilot; I never wanted to do anything else—I should be a rotten farm labourer. And I don’t want to live up here, either.”

  Cordelia turned her head for a moment to glance at the sea: the shock of delight it gave her—that wide moving acreage of light, pointed thorns of light, springing, falling apart—belonged, she thought, to others of her family, master mariners, stubborn obscure men, surviving only in her. How a child would like living here, she thought.

  “I like it here.”

  “You’ve only seen it in summer,” Kent warned her.

  Without knowing why, she persisted.

  “If we were together I should be happy anywhere. I could be quite happy playing with bits of ice, like Kay in the fairy-tale. I’m the most ordinary person you’ll ever know—I like to polish chairs, and cook, and a fine day makes me want to sing at the top of my voice.”

  “My little love,” Kent said—he could not endure what he felt; he stood up and began to walk about—“we’ve got to get away—and you know why.”

  “You mean—I can’t have my baby in a croft. Why not?” She folded her hands and said calmly, “Yes, seriously, why not? Do you know, silly, when my mother had me she was in a small ship, at Murmansk. They’d been caught in the ice. No one was there but my father and the steward. And she was nineteen, and I’m nearly a year older. It would be better than that.”

  He stood still and glared at her.

  “No.”

  Hiding a smile, she said,

  “Don’t be sorry we’re having it, will you?”

  “Never,” he said, severely—the severity was for himself: at the back of his thought, he felt that her wish and his yielding to it had been a mistake. “But until I get you out of the country I shall only be damned anxious. And you know it.”

  “Don’t!”

  Kent came back quickly to her chair.

  “Don’t what, puppy?”

  She recovered her calm again at once, and said—how easily, he thought, she says what, if anyone else said it, would only be awful:

  “I’m ashamed of this, Andy—yes, really—David would say I’m morbid, which isn’t true. But think of all the children—who knows, who will ever know how many of them?—dead, under those rubbish heaps of towns and villages. Not only our country, but all the others. They must have been afraid—and cried. And—it’s only for a moment—I can hear our child crying. And yet children can be happy. I was awfully happy … it doesn’t seem very long ago—” she turned, abruptly, with a violence unlike her, and pressed her forehead against his arm. “Have we been fools?”

  This won’t do, he thought. He said coolly,

  “No, of course not. We shall be all right. In a few days we’ll be in a country that hasn’t been done for. We’ll live there, we’ll be happy, we’ll work. … You mustn’t make a fuss.”

  She turned her head sideways: he looked down at her, and was struck through by the thought that he could protect her against nothing in a country given over to its enemies. There was no safety, and no one thought any longer that the little bodies of children should not be broken into.

  “There’ll still be the war,” Cordelia said.

  “Of course. But we’re used to that now.”

  She sat up, and he saw with relief that she was smiling. He had fallen in love with her first because she was gay and serious, like a well-brought-up child, with a will of her own but no vanity.

  “My mother could remember what it was like before the first war. That is, she could remember that there was such a time—not what it must have felt like.”

  “Some things must have been just the same,” Kent said. “This sort of thing—” he touched her cheek with one finger.

  “I’ll be a good wife—whatever happens I won’t fuss. And I’ll take care of you.”

  “We’ll prop each other up, shall we?” Kent said.

  He bent over her. His ear caught the sound of Marriot’s footsteps on the dry grass; he slid off the arm of the chair. Marriot, as he came in, said,

  “Bad news, Browny, your blessed little hare has hopped it.”

  Cordelia jumped up.

  “Gone?”

  “Stiff as a board.”

  Half laughing at the grief she felt, Cordelia said,

  “Oh, Davy.”

  “Just as well,” Marriot said. “He wouldn’t have had much of a life with a broken leg.”

  “I was going to take him with me.”

  “They’d have quarantined him,” said Kent.

  Marriot saw that the girl had a superstitious feeling of bad luck; he was amused and he understood it. He said carelessly,

  “Never mind, Browny. I’ll buy you something in New York—a house-trained bear.” He spread the illustrated paper he was carrying, open, on the table, and pointed to a page. “Look at them. Were you ever in a ric
h night club? Did people really sit about vacantly, in rows of teeth, asking to be photographed? They look halfwitted. My God, was it time the ceiling fell on them!”

  They leaned over the picture together, in a single impulse of curiosity—except that neither Cordelia nor Marriot had ever been inside a fashionable restaurant; until the war neither of them had had money to spend, nor, during the war, chance. Cordelia stood between the young men, drawn back into the half instinctive life they shared, with its meagre vocabulary and few childish gestures. Kent said easily,

  “They weren’t doing any harm.”

  “Not good enough these days,” Marriot said with contempt.

  With a friendly pity—since it was so little likely that anyone would say it again of the young woman she was pointing at—Cordelia said,

  “She’s charming. Look.”

  “Umh’m.”

  The closed door leading to the other rooms—and, at the end of the long passage with its half-dozen doors, to the staircase to the upper floor—was vigorously kicked. Kent opened it.

  Entering with his loaded tray, Smith brought into the room the thing it lacked, stability, a link with the outer, middle-aged, once-upon-a-time respectable world. His face showed all the marks of his forty-five years, drawn deeply and roughly in its hard flesh; a shrewd derisive glint in his eyes was unkind only for strangers—not that he meant any harm by them, but, as Yorkshiremen do, he looked slyly down on them, because you never know but what they think themselves clever or successful, and such men need to be watched.

  Piled on the tray in disorder were tumblers, plates, knives and forks, two opened tins of butter, and more of ham. He lowered it on to the table, sweeping off with an elbow the litter of papers. Cordelia helped him; between them, they set out a slovenly meal: she had forbidden herself—not because the other two laughed at her—to give their meals an air of order: knives and forks dropped in a heap, tins half emptied, then chucked out, were one way, surely, to make their departure real.

  “Did you make the coffee?” she asked Smith.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He went back into the passage and lifted from the floor a second tray with cups and large jugs, and brought it to the table. “I must have made gallons of the stuff to-day.”