‘No,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Of course not. For him they are a part of his nature now — a great millstone round his neck.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Everyone makes for himself on this earth some particular hell of his own. With Saeton it is these engines, ja?’ She looked up into my face again. ‘When are they finished — when do you fly them?’
I hesitated, but there was no reason why she shouldn’t know. Living so close at the Manor she would see us in the air. ‘With luck we’ll be in the air by Christmas. Airworthiness tests are fixed for the first week in January.’
‘So!’ A sudden mood of excitement showed in her eyes. ‘Then you go on to the. I hope your friend Saeton is happy then.’ Her voice trembled slightly. She was suddenly tense and the excitement in her eyes had changed to bitterness.
‘Why are you so interested in Saeton?’ I asked her.
‘Interested — in Saeton?’ She seemed surprised, almost shocked.
‘Are you in love with him?’ I asked.
Her face hardened and she bit at her lower lip. ‘What has he been saying?’
‘Nothing,’ I answered.
‘Then why do you ask me if I am in love with him? How can I be in love with a man I hate, a man who has-’ She stopped short, staring at me angrily. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘You are so stupid. You do not understand nothing — nothing.’ Her fingers were white against the stem of the glass as she sought for words.
‘Why do you say you hate him?’ I asked.
‘Why? Because I offer him the only thing I have left to offer — because I crawl to him like a dog-’ Her face was suddenly white with anger. ‘He only laugh. He laugh in my face, I tell you, as though I am a common — Nutte.’ She spat the word out as though she were hating herself as well as Saeton. ‘And then that Carter woman comes. He is a devil,’ she whispered and then turned quickly away from me and stared miserably at the crowded bar. ‘You talk of loneliness! That is what it is to be lonely. Here, with all these people. To be away from one’s own people, a stranger in a-’
‘You think I don’t understand,’ I said gently. ‘I was eighteen months in a prison camp in Germany.’
‘That is not the same thing. There you are still with your own peoples.’
‘Not after I escaped. For three weeks I was alone in Germany, on the run.’
She stared up at me and gave a little sigh. ‘Then perhaps you do understand. But you are not alone here.’
I hesitated, and then I said, ‘More alone than I have ever been.’
‘More alone than-’ She stopped and gazed at me unbelievingly. ‘But why is that?’
I took her arm and guided her to a seat. I had to tell her now. I had to tell someone and she was a German, alone in England — my story was safe with her. I told her the whole thing, sitting there in an alcove near a roaring fire with the sound of dance music in my ears. When I had finished she put her hand on mine. “Why did you tell me?’
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know myself. ‘Let’s dance,’ I said.
We didn’t talk much after that. We just seemed to lose ourselves in the music. And then Mrs Ellwood came and said we must go as her husband had to start work early the next morning. In the car going back Else didn’t talk, but she no longer shrank into her corner of the seat. Her shoulder leant against mine and when I closed my hand over hers she didn’t withdraw. ‘Why are you so silent?’ I asked.
‘I am thinking of Germany and what fun we could have had there — in the old days. Do you know Wiesbaden?’
‘Only from the air,’ I answered and then wished I had not said that as I saw her lips tighten.
‘Yes, of course — from the air.’ She took her hand away and seemed to withdraw into herself. She didn’t speak again until the car was climbing the hill to Membury, and then she said very quietly, ‘Do not come to see me again, Neil.’
‘Of course I shall,’ I said.
‘No.’ She said it almost violently, her eyes staring at me out of the darkness. Her hand gripped mine. ‘Please try to understand. We are like two people who have caught sight of each other for a moment through a crack in the wall that separates us. Whatever the S.S. do to my father, I am still a German. I must hold fast to that, because it is all I have left now. I am German, you are English, and also you are working-’ She stopped and her grip on my hand tightened. ‘I like you too much. Do not to come again, please. It is better so.’
I didn’t know what to say. And then the car stopped. We were at the track leading up to the quarters. ‘You can return the clothes in the morning,’ Mrs Ellwood said. I got out and thanked them for the evening. As 1 was about to shut the car door, Else leaned forward. ‘In England do you not kiss your partners goodnight?’ Her face was a pale circle in the darkness, her eyes wide. I bent to kiss her cheek, but found her lips instead. ‘Goodbye,’ she whispered.
The Ellwoods were chuckling happily as they drove off. I stood watching until the red tail-light had turned into the Manor drive and then I went up the track to the quarters, wondering about Else.
It was to be nearly three weeks before I saw Else again, for Saeton returned the following evening with the news that the Air Ministry now wanted the plane on the airlift by 10th January, and airworthiness tests had been fixed for 1st January.
In the days that followed I plumbed the depths of physical exhaustion. I had neither the time nor the energy for anything else. And it went on, day after day, one week dragging into the next with no let-up, no pause. Saeton didn’t drive. He led. He did as long as we did at the bench, then he went back to the hangar, typing letters far into the night, ordering things, staving off creditors, running the whole of the business side of the company. My admiration for the man was boundless, but somehow I had no sympathy for him. I could admire him, but I couldn’t like him. He was inhuman, as impersonal as the mechanism we pieced together. He drove us with the sure touch of a coachman who knew just how to get the last ounce out of his horses, but didn’t care a damn what happened to them in the end so long as he made the next stage on time.
But it was exciting. And it was that sense of excitement that carried me through to Christmas. The airfield hardened to iron as the cold gripped it. The runways gleamed white with frost in the sunshine on fine days. But mostly it was grey and cold with the ploughed-up earth black and ringing hard and metallic like solidified lava. There was no heating in the hangar. It had the chill dank smell of a tomb. Only the work kept us warm as we lathered ourselves daily into a sweat of exhaustion.
Saeton was working for engine completion on 20th
December, installation by 23rd December and first test on Christmas Day. It was a tight schedule, but he wanted a clear week for tests. But though we worked far on into the night, we were behind schedule all the time and it was not until Christmas Eve that we completed that second engine.
The final adjustments were made at eight-thirty in the evening. We were dead beat and we stood in front of the gleaming mass of metal in a sort of daze. None of us said a word. We just stood back and looked at it. I produced a packet of cigarettes and tossed one to Saeton. He lit it and drew the smoke into his lungs as though smoke alone could ease the tension of his nerves. ‘All right, fill her up with oil, Tubby, and switch on the juice. I’ll get Diana. She’d like to be in on this.’ He went over to the phone and rang the quarters. I helped fill up with oil. We checked that there was petrol in the wall tank, tightened the unit of the petrol feed and switched on.
There was a tense silence as we waited for Diana. Five weeks’ work stood before us and a touch of the starter button would tell us whether we’d made a job of it. It wasn’t like an engine coming out of a works. There everything moves with an inevitable progression from the foundry and the lathes and the electrical shop to the assembly and the final running in. This was different. Everything had been made by hand. One tiny slip in any of the precision work … I thought of how tired we were. It seemed incredible that everything would work smoothly.