Free A Place Of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed Page A

country, Beatrice... should
be there at that exact moment and feel this way about me, a foreigner you’ve
never met. Explain this to me, please.’
    ‘I can’t but it was like I’d always known you’d be there,
waiting for me to arrive.’
    ‘No, I cannot understand. It is beyond all calculation.’
    ‘But that’s what I felt. That’s what happened.’
    His face betrays confusion and helplessness.
    Somewhere, hidden within him, there is also a terrible fury,
blown from the desert of grief he has left behind. For the moment, it is
controlled but its day will come.
    Before more can be said, the apartment’s front door is banged.
Arie gets out of bed quickly. He pulls on his clothes, unwashed in a heap on
the floor, and orders her to answer. Bea wraps herself in a dressing gown.
Standing on the step is Peter Casserley and another man in civvies. Casserley
tips his trilby to her.
    ‘Beatrice, good morning. Your guest decent enough to receive
visitors, is he?’
    He pushes passed her unbidden and enters the flat. Arie
emerges from the bedroom, fully dressed and holding the brown suitcase he had
carried from Prague.
    ‘Minsky – glad you’re ready. Say your adieus, there’s a good
man.’
    Bea knows from Arie’s eyes what has been done behind her
back. She can think of nothing to say, not in sorrow or anger or supplication.
Events she herself contrived are in spate. The urge to kiss him, to cling to
him or demand of Casserley his safe return – all this must be suppressed. She
can do nothing but hold his poet’s hands in hers and grieve. Arie is marched
from the flat as if he is being arrested and taken into custody. Casserley
leads the way. Arie gets into the back of a waiting saloon.
    Bea, alone and cold on the pavement, tries to glimpse a
final image of the face she adores. Then all that is precious and all that is
rightfully hers is driven away.
    Another car is parked across the street... a Humber with a
uniformed chauffeur and a limp RAF pennant on its black polished wing. It, too,
moves off.
    And as it does, so Bea sees her father staring at her with
contempt and distaste.

 
    Chapter Eleven
     
    McCall took a welfare call from a freelance cameraman who
once shared a ditch with him during some minor African skirmish they had both
almost forgotten.
    ‘You need a holiday, chum. Somewhere warm. Pneumonia is
serious.’
    ‘So they tell me.’
    ‘Did you hear Ricky Benson’s died?’
    ‘The stills guy? But he’s younger than me.’
    ‘That’s my point. But it was him in the coffin, believe me.’
    ‘You went to the funeral?’
      ‘Of course. I said
to his wife “Ricky’s looking a bit peeky” and she says “well, he’s not had a
drink for three days.”’
    ‘What price the love of a good woman?’
    ‘Listen, McCall – do yourself a favour and get on a plane
and get some sunshine.’
    ‘Yeah, but where’s the buzz lying on a beach?’
    ‘There isn’t one but it’s a damn sight safer than getting a
tan while some bastard’s shooting at you.’
    It took all morning for the results of McCall’s second
hospital X-ray to come back. The inflammation in his lungs had not reduced
enough to sign him off. He drove back to Garth and found Bea’s note propped
against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. With it was a photograph of his
father he never knew existed.
    Thought you might like this, Mac. Forgotten we
still had it, somehow lost in all those old letters in the attics. Am shopping
with Mrs Craven. Try to keep an eye on Francis.
    Here was only the third picture of Edward McCall he had ever
seen... this stranger who gave him life. It was black and white like the others
and showed the same intense young man, but strapped in a bomber’s tail gun
turret as it prepared to leave on another mission.
    His pale, aesthetic face looked so unsuited to the
utilitarian mechanics of aerial warfare. But it was the eyes that riveted
McCall, big with dread and seeming to draw his son into that