Free Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks Page B

wore a dinner jacket, the woman a dress with beads and tassels across the bust.
    "Hello, Dick, you old devil. Fancy finding you here. I thought you chaps never left the office. You remember Sylvia, don't you?" The man stood grinning by the side of the table. He had grey hair and a sweaty, indoor complexion; a scarlet cummerbund had been pushed down to an angle of forty-five degrees by the belly it restrained.
    Cannerley sprang to his feet and embraced the woman with apparent fervour. He introduced Charlotte, and the man shook her hand with a conspiratorial chuckle in Cannerley's direction. His appreciative gurglings prevented Charlotte from hearing what his second name was, but Cannerley addressed him as "Roly'.
    "Are you going on?" he asked.
    "Rather," said Cannerley.
    "Shall we team up?"
    Peter Gregory was sleeping badly. He had a narrow bed in a low-ceilinged cottage. The mattress offered sinking reassurance when he was tired, but on bad nights the woollen blankets knotted themselves round him and the lower sheet was drawn up into corrugated ridges by his continual turning.
    Moonlight glanced through a space in the curtains and spilled a track across the floorboards, prompting his mind to turn at once to visibility, cloud base, instruments.
    He was twenty-eight years old, but there were one or two lights of grey in his cropped and uncombed hair. He climbed out of the deep mattress, crossed the room and hauled a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his tunic. He switched on the bedside lamp, which shed a tight glow beneath the circle of its floral shade. In it he could see a green glass ashtray and a book, face-down, broken-spined. So mean was the little pool of light, that when he actually wanted to read he had to balance the lamp on the headboard, behind his right ear.
    He sat up to smoke, then found he was too cold and had to lie beneath the eiderdown with the cigarette sticking out from his lips like a periscope. He whipped his hand out and knocked the ash off as fast as possible, so he could get his fingers back in the warmth. His feet were iced up from the walk across the room. His mind was on Charlotte Gray. Once, he had been able to indulge his admiration, his desire for women in such a way that they seemed to expect little from him. There were mild reproaches when an affair ended soon after it began (he had found another woman, he was posted somewhere else, it was only a lighthearted thing); but something in the way he behaved allowed the women to escape intact with a sentimental letter, briefly brimming eyes, but then smiles and bravado and no feeling of betrayal. He wished he could recapture that lightness, but he felt that it sprang from an innocence of which he had been deprived. It belonged to another time.
    He had been farming in Nyasaland when the war broke out. Like many of his contemporaries, he had found it difficult to settle in England and a family friend had spoken seductively of Africa. At that age he regarded his work as provisional; he was still looking, not very urgently, for what he would really do. A fierce South African neighbour called Forster told him they should at once return to England and join up. Forster was unhappy with the way some people in his own country seemed sympathetic to the Nazis and wanted to put every distance he could between them and himself. Since he and Gregory had both flown planes in Africa they should obviously volunteer as pilots. Gregory reluctantly agreed.
    Another war? What did they want with another war? But he went, and thought he could fight it in a way that suited him.
    He reached up from under the eiderdown and stubbed out the cigarette. Forster was the first man in his squadron to shoot down an enemy plane. Gregory confirmed it; he flew round in fascinated circles, watching the German fighter plummet through the air and bury itself in the hillside with a squally blossoming of flame. Forster was also the first man to be killed.
    Others quickly