Free The Challenging Heights by Max Hennessy

murmured between the congratulatory telegrams, ‘Parasol Percy hasn’t changed. He was never the type to face up fair and square to anything that might be difficult.’
    Nevertheless, it probably seemed odd to the other guests that two of the three RAF officers present – all in dress uniform and wearing their medals – should totally ignore the third.
    Charley Wright, his red face matching the red carnation in his buttonhole and the red of his eyeballs, insisted on kissing the bride. ‘You haven’t got away with her completely, my old friend and comrade of the desperate years,’ he told Dicken.
    ‘She’s promised she’ll still fly for me on the days when I’m handy. In fact,’ he added, ‘I rather hoped she’d marry me. But then, what has William Albert Charles Wright got to compare with Dick Quinney, who holds every gong in the book except the ultimate, to get which you have to be dead.’
     
    ‘I meant it, you know,’ Zoë said as they lay in the dark in the hotel in Cornwall where they’d gone for their honeymoon. ‘Love, honour and obey. All that rot.’
    ‘I always thought you wanted to be a liberated woman. I thought you’d insist on leaving that out.’
    ‘I lost my nerve at the last moment. I do want to love, honour and obey. If I don’t always manage it, you’ll try to forgive me, won’t you?’
    ‘It shouldn’t be difficult.’
    ‘I’m looking forward to Egypt and India. It should be fun. Charley Wright’s got nothing to offer like that.’ Zoë paused. ‘There’s just one thing, though.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘No children.’
    ‘Never?’
    ‘For a while. I haven’t done anything yet, except run Pa’s garage while he was away during the war.’
    ‘You’ve learned to fly. Not many women have done that. You’ve been to Canada and the States.’
    ‘That was a disaster, Dicky Boy. I went to find Casey Harmer, you know. I thought I was in love with him but when I got there I found he was married.’
    ‘So you married me on the rebound?’
    She slipped warm soft arms round him. ‘I just realised that there was something about you that Casey couldn’t claim.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Honesty. I don’t think you’d ever lie to me.’
    Dicken wasn’t so sure. He still hadn’t plucked up courage to tell her that he’d once discarded her for Nicola Aubrey, whom he’d felt was everything a man could wish – shy, gentle, kind, well brought up, all the things his mother insisted a man needed in a wife. Yet his own mother had been like that, and his father had run off with one of his typists. Perhaps men wanted more than just shyness, gentleness and kindness. Perhaps they wanted what Zoë had in abundance – vitality, vibrant enjoyment of living, laughter, strength and reality.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked suddenly, her face in the angle of his neck. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’
    ‘Oh, things,’ he said. ‘Things that happened in the war and can’t happen again because, after that one, there can’t be any more wars.’
    ‘What was it really like, Dicken? You never talked much about it.’
    He thought for a moment. ‘A perpetual state of wind-up for most of us,’ he admitted. ‘Cold. Cracked lips. Better than the infantry, though. All that man-to-man stuff with bayonets. Sometimes it came as a surprise to find there was a man in the plane you were shooting at.’
    ‘What about Arthur Diplock? What was he like?’
    ‘Very warlike until he crossed the lines.’ Dicken pulled her closer. ‘But, good God, we didn’t get married to spend our first night talking about what it was like fighting the Germans.’
    ‘Trust a man to ask for seconds.’
    ‘It seems like a good idea to me.’
    ‘All right. Provided you take me to India and Egypt.’
    ‘Done. They can’t keep me in that stupid job I’ve got now after all the flying and experience I have.’
     
    They were both wrong.
    With Lloyd George so immersed in the details of peace he had no time for