“Now that you mention it, toots, yeah.” Bruce was still grinning. “But you know what else? I don’t give a darn.”
And that, she realized, had to be an understatement. Every time he climbed into a B-29, he walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Yes, he visited death and destruction on city dwellers luckless enough to live where Stalin’s whim was law.
But he visited death and destruction himself with each mission he flew. She didn’t know how many he’d flown, in this war and the last. All she knew was, the number wasn’t small, and kept getting bigger. No wonder he seemed to live as if each moment might be his last. He knew too well that it might in truth.
So they went out drinking and dancing, and afterwards the auto would stop on some pitch-black, secluded lane. If it was a hired car and not a jeep, the windows would steam up so no one could have seen what was going on inside even if it had been noon and not midnight.
“It’s warmer in an enclosed car than it is with a jeep,” Daisy said during one of those nocturnal encounters.
“Yeah, it is,” he agreed, his mouth no more than an inch from her ear. “But sometimes I can get a jeep from the motor pool without going through all the paperwork and stuff I need to rent a beast like this.”
Which was all well and good when it wasn’t pouring rain. In an English winter-or, for that matter, an English summer-the sky could turn on the tap whenever it decided to. Daisy didn’t worry about that. Right this minute, Daisy wasn’t worrying about anything at all.
A few minutes later, when the Vauxhall’s windows had got well and truly steamed, she heard a small ripping noise, as of paper being torn. “What’s that?” she asked.
“That, sweetie, is a rubber,” Bruce answered. “I know you don’t like taking chances, and I don’t blame you a bit, but sometimes the real McCoy is better than anything else you can do.”
“Oh, yes.” Daisy shifted to give him room. The Vauxhall was less roomy than a jeep would have been, even if it was enclosed. Her breath sighed out. “Oh, yes!”
As he drove her back to East Dereham, he said, “This would all be simpler if I could just come to your room.”
“It would, yes.” She nodded, though she wasn’t sure he could see her do it. “But you’ve met Mr. Perkins. He wouldn’t be happy, I’m afraid.”
“He’d be jealous, is what he’d be.” Bruce McNulty paused. “Or maybe not-who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a queer.”
“Neither would I,” Daisy said. Simon Perkins, the chemist above whose shop she lodged, was past fifty, and a lifelong bachelor. He was more precise than prissy, but she wondered whether any normal man could possibly have been so neat.
If he was a pansy, he was a discreet pansy. And well he might have been, when relations between men remained as illegal and scandalous as they had been in Oscar Wilde’s day, and when a good many sodomites who didn’t write nearly so well or so wittily as Wilde sat in prison for their crimes.
Since Bruce wasn’t going much above ten miles an hour, the hired car’s motor made next to no noise. When two jet fighters roared by overhead, Daisy wanted to clap her hands to her ears at the noise of their engines. “That will wake up everybody for miles around,” she said.
“It sure will,” Bruce agreed. “They don’t scramble like that unless they’re after something.”
“If they are, I hope to heaven they get it!” she said.
“Doesn’t have to be a Bull with an A-bomb in its belly,” Bruce said. “Those rotten twin-jet Beagles are a lot harder to catch.”
“Whatever it is, I want them to shoot it down before it can unload,” Daisy said. “This poor country’s been bombed too much already.”
“Honey, the way things are right now, there aren’t a whole lot of countries that haven’t been bombed too much already. Take it from somebody who knows,” Bruce said. “And the ones that haven’t, like Venezuela or Liberia or Pakistan, you wouldn’t want to live in ’em anyway.”
He was bound to be right. But those weren’t Daisy’s countries. England was. She went right on rooting for the fighters.
–
“Show me an A, Leon,” Aaron Finch said.
Without hesitation, Leon chose the A from his set of wooden letters. Aaron had made and painted them himself, using patterns he’d got from Popular Mechanics. He’d taken special care to sand them smooth so he wouldn’t give his son splinters.
“Good job!” he said. It was, too, considering that Leon was still more than two months shy of his third birthday. The kid was smart, no two ways about it. Now the real worry was whether he’d turn out too smart for his own good, the way Marvin had. Aaron shrugged. In a kid not quite three, that was a worry for another day. “Now can you show me a V?”
The A was easy. It was the first letter of the alphabet, and one of the most used. Ruth had bought a Scrabble set not too long before, which underlined that. V was at the back of the line and in narrower use. Leon didn’t hesitate, though. He grabbed it and said, “Vee!”
“That’s what that is,” Aaron said. “You are getting good at this stuff, kiddo.”
“Vee!” Leon squealed, and threw it as far as he could. He didn’t throw far or straight. Not only was he still a little guy, but his brain ran ahead of his body. He wasn’t what anybody would call graceful. Aaron wondered if he ever would be. Himself, he’d always had arms and legs that did just what he told them to. His son might not.
None of which had anything to do with anything. “Go pick that up and put it back with the rest of the letters,” Aaron said.
Leon pooched out his lower lip. “I don’t wanna!” he declared.
“You made the mess. You police it up,” Aaron told him. You couldn’t expect a kid his age to clean up after himself all the time. Little kids and messes went together like coffee and cream. But Leon had to understand he couldn’t get away with chucking his toys around for the fun of it.
“Don’t wanna!” he repeated. No, he didn’t get that yet.
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted. I told you what you needed to do.” Aaron waited. When Leon showed no signs of going after the red V, his father wheeled out the heavy artillery: “I guess you don’t feel like sleeping with Bounce tonight.”
That turned the trick. Aaron had thought it would. Leon was as attached to the Teddy bear as if it had grown out of his hip. As far as he was concerned, going to bed without it was a tragedy beside which the A-bomb that smashed downtown L.A. was as nothing. He talked to it while he was awake, and answered for it, too. He halfway made Aaron believe it was alive.
Now he scurried over to the wooden letter and made a small production of bringing it back to the rest of the set. “Okay?” he asked.
“You did it, so that’s good,” Aaron said. “But do you know why you did it?”
Leon looked at him as if he were an imbecile. “So Bounce will sleep with me.” He wasn’t good at lying yet. Whatever went through his head came out of his mouth.
“You did it because leaving it lying out there is sloppy,” Aaron said. “And you did it so nobody would step on the V. It might get broken, or it might hurt Daddy or Mommy’s foot.”
The summer before, crazy Bill Veeck had brought a midget to the plate to start a game for the St. Louis Browns against the Tigers. From what the papers said, the Tigers’ hurler tried to pitch to him, but was laughing so hard that all his offerings went way high. Aaron could see that his explanation flew over Leon’s head by at least as much.
He didn’t give up. Leon was growing every single day. An explanation that flew over his head today wouldn’t tomorrow, or maybe the day after. And he remembered things, even when he didn’t fully understand them. Aaron’s older brother Sam had a memory like that. He didn’t himself, but he’d seen how useful it could be.
Ruth walked in from the kitchen after finishing the dinner dishes. Leon picked up the letter he’d just retrieved. “Look, Mommy! It’s a V!”
“You’re right. It is a V,” his mother said. “Can you show me an A?”