Turbulence Part 13

I pressed the plunger. Up they went then, from behind the line of trees, dipping and drifting, one after another...a host of cracker balloons, each packing a charge, each with a sting in its tail.

I came out from among the trees to see Ryman running back towards the rising tail of the last balloon, his face full of fury. What was he doing? It was as if he wanted to pluck the offending weapon from the sky. Some of the balloons had already begun to detonate. The plane, coming in on its second pa.s.s, was now faced with a line of balloons rising through the air at irregular intervals, with the wind making it impossible to predict where they would rise.

Crack! Crack!

At every level they were going off. Large patches of red fire in the sky. Crack! Crack! Then white flashes as the magnesium caught and flared. Then white flashes as the magnesium caught and flared.

They made a tremendous noise. The sky quickly filled with smoke and the air was acrid with the smell of burning petrol. I heard an exultant laugh come out of my throat.

Black smoke was falling. Through the pall I saw Ryman, closer now. Above him, the plane's engine droned. To my dawning horror, I glimpsed Ryman standing in the path of one the balloon wires, the last in the sequence, which had drifted down. It missed him. As it pa.s.sed by him the tail made a loud pop and burst into flames. I saw Ryman flinch and duck, and then, to my relief, straighten up amid the new puff of black smoke, apparently unharmed.

At that moment, however, the wind changed. The balloon doubled back in his direction, its wire swinging from side to side, the blackened carton spinning round. Twisting as it followed the eddy-driven movement of the balloon from which it was suspended, with the remains of the carton acting as a sort of anchor on which the wind could catch, the copper-wire aerial caught him round the neck, looping rapidly round. All this happened in an instant. I watched, stupefied, as the balloon began dragging him along the field. There was a ghastly comedy in the mechanical movement of his legs.

I ran towards him. What on earth did he think he was doing?

Above us other balloons continued to blow. Flaring pieces of magnesium were tumbling onto the gra.s.s beside me. When I reached Ryman his face was bright red. His weight had anch.o.r.ed the balloon a little, but he was still sliding across the field. I grabbed hold of his kicking legs and pulled him down to me, clawing frantically at the wire around his throat.

I was making things worse. The wire grew tight. A noose. A killing snare like one of Mackellar's for the rabbits. My knees began to shake. I felt the kizunguzungu kizunguzungu feeling returning. feeling returning.

Ryman was frothing at the mouth. I tried again to pull the balloon down, but now it made no difference to the tension on the wire, which had knotted itself and drawn close. Panicking, I twisted the wire tightly with my fingers, still trying to loosen it, but all that happened was that it bit deeper into his Adam's apple, crushing his windpipe. His eyes bulged and his face began turning from red to blue. Ryman's head slumped forward, a trickle of blood at his nostril.

It was no use. I needed something to sever the wire. Leaving him suspended, I ran to the cot-house to search for a suitable tool. I remember frantically sweeping everything off my desk and overturning half a dozen crates before I eventually found a pair of tinsnips. I rushed back outside in a daze to find Ryman's body still hanging from the balloon, wreathed in smoke. Stumbling and falling on the gra.s.s, the plane still swooping overhead, I ran back to release him. I snipped the wire above him and he fell to the ground, enabling me to get at the strangling copper. But I was too late. His face remained as swollen as the balloon whose aerial had just garrotted him. I think he must have been dead even before I'd run to the house. Moaning, I fell to my knees by the body. The earth seemed to quake, as if rocks deep below were being rent asunder.

The plane pa.s.sed overhead again. At that moment there was another explosion in the air. I looked up. One of its engines was smoking-I a.s.sumed from drawing into its propeller housing another wire and carton, followed in short order by a hydrogen balloon, just as intended.

But there was no grand finale, at least not then. The Junkers just seemed to wobble for a moment, then sailed on imperturbably into the blue light of the horizon, leaving me and my disaster to run their course. What I did not see, what happened later, in another part of the picture, were parachutes opening, men falling to earth.

Nine.

The rest of the day pa.s.sed in a blur of ambulance men and vehicles and police. I half-dragged, half-carried Ryman's body to the cot-house, laying it on the gra.s.s outside, then went inside to make the necessary telephone calls. Afterwards, appalled at myself, I sat beside the body on the porch, unable to look at the face. Something inside me had broken.

Confirmed in a sense of personal futility, I sat on the step as the officials went to and fro. Later the Mackellars appeared-they had been at the agricultural market in the town and had just come back in the trap.

Mackellar strode across the gra.s.s towards me, the whip from the trap in his hand. Someone had obviously told him that I was responsible for what had happened. At first, craggy-faced and trembling with anger under his flat cap, he just stood there in front of me where I sat on the step. I was about to say something when he lifted the whip and began swiping me with it, uttering curses as he did so. I cowered on the step, curling fetally under the rain of stinging blows.

Eventually-and it seemed like an awfully long time-a pair of policemen pulled him off me.

I wiped blood off my face and sat back on the step, caught in a terrible immobility of misery and pain. I was almost grateful for the pain, not feeling sufficiently self-lacerated for what had happened. Just a terrible numbness and dizziness: oh yes, a vicious return of that.

The ambulance took Ryman's body. His gla.s.ses fell off as they loaded him onto it. With tears running down my bleeding face, unable to watch any more, I stood up and went into the cot-house. I washed my face and staunched some of the bleeding with a towel. I looked awful.

Questions surged into my mind...What had all this been for? I must, I thought, send a telegram to Gill at once. But what could I possibly say to her? The prospect of facing Sir Peter also terrified me. Had I got what he wanted? If so it was at a great cost. As I was standing in front of the mirror, a policeman appeared, telling me I had to go with him to Dunoon.

From that moment a stream of further misery flowed. First of all I had to face Mrs Mackellar, who was waiting outside the door. Her wild white hair more awry than ever, and her ragged red coat flaring out behind her like the tail of a banshee, she came up to me as I was being put into the police car. She was carrying her hazel herd-stick and I thought for a second she was about to continue the work her husband had started, but all she did was lean her Gorgon-like face into the car window.

Nodding to herself more than me, she said, "I was right about you. Dangerous." They were sentiments that I could only agree with.

I was then driven to Dunoon for questioning. I told the inspector who interrogated me that I was doing my duty in trying to down a German plane. It was four hours before I was released. Four hours being quizzed and signing statements. In the end my explanation that the whole thing had been an awful accident was accepted. On being released I was given instructions to report to Whybrow, of all people.

I did not care very much what that idiot thought, though I was worried about the extent to which he could colour Sir Peter's opinion. But Whybrow was not full of the malevolent satisfaction I was expecting. It was as if he was as shocked as I by what had happened.

He said in mild tones that I should go back to London immediately and see Sir Peter. "It seems to me," he continued, "that you've behaved extremely irresponsibly. In this as in other matters. I shall be making a full report to the director."

I went in search of Joan and Gwen, but on climbing to the makeshift studio in the observation tower I found it quite bare. The mattresses, the mirrors, the easel and other painting equipment-everything was gone. I climbed back down and went to the Waafs' quarters to ask.

A sullen looking girl with pins in her hair came to the door. She told me that Gwen and Joan had been transferred to another unit. Whybrow had kept his promise. That was why he had been so anodyne. He must have known I would come in search of them.

I returned in a box-like green bus to Kilmun to pack, in preparation for my journey south. As I walked up through the village for the last time, someone opened a window and shouted something down at me.

"Murderer!"

That was the word.

Ten.

Dawn and the beginning of my long journey south for a reckoning with Sir Peter brought only more shame. As I was waiting for the ferry to Gourock, who should appear but Minister Grant, the cleric who had left Ryman's table in such a rage.

The bombast seemed to have gone out of him. "I did not rub along well with him myself, as you will be aware. But he was a popular figure here. Do you know, they used to call him the Prophet? So I am afraid there is a deal of animosity towards you. Really, it is a good thing you are leaving."

I nodded distractedly, looking at the ferry as it drew close to the quay, propeller and exhausts churning up the water as the captain manoeuvred the vessel into position.

Grant told me that Ryman's body had been removed to a funeral parlour. "He left instructions in his will that he was to be cremated. A rationalist to the end."

"Mrs Ryman has been informed, then?"

"So I understand."

"Will she be coming back?"

"I don't know." And then he gave me an imperious look, full of all the authority of the Kirk. "What I do know is that her husband is dead because of a schoolboy prank. Was that what you came here for?"

"Of course not. I came to learn-to predict the weather."

Now the old Grant came back, the Grant of the dinner table and the Old Testament. "You should read your Job, young man. 'Great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. For he saith to the snow, fall on the earth; likewise to the shower of rain...Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge?'"

No.

I do not know them.

I cannot compute them.

Though I did not say that, simply nodding and turning away, towards the arriving MacBrayne, which was already rattling down its anchor.

Once across the water I caught the shuttle train from Gourock into the city. Light came down awkwardly through the hedges at the edge of the line.

At Fort Matilda children's heads popped up, calling out obscenities at the train as it pa.s.sed.

At Greenock there were walls covered with red lichen.

At Port Glasgow there was a mill chimney.

Then came warehouses with broken windows and the cruel, careless Clyde, a depressing expanse of rippled mud now the tide was out, a lagoon of slime and seaweed which it now seemed that all the choir of heaven could not sing back to beauty. In fact, all it would take was water-rivulets of running water, pushing over the isobar-like lines of mud, cleansing, purging water, water running in from the sea.

Later-on the train south from Glasgow to London, my thoughts ebbing to and fro with the rocking of the carriage as the hours pa.s.sed-the enormity of what I had done finally hit home. Someone had died. An individual individual had died. Wallace Ryman had died. The police might have let me off but there were still moral charges to answer, focused, even if only internally, on the degree of consequence and my intentions. had died. Wallace Ryman had died. The police might have let me off but there were still moral charges to answer, focused, even if only internally, on the degree of consequence and my intentions.

On consequence-well, it's impossible, isn't it? To chart it all, backwards and forwards through time and s.p.a.ce, as one might a rainstorm. Yet I was was foolish, I foolish, I should should have been more careful, I have been more careful, I ought ought to have given thought to what might transpire. to have given thought to what might transpire.

I pondered the different ways in which I might be able to explain it all to Sir Peter. Really, I should have been thinking about how I could explain it all to Gill. But it's a fact that the human mind tends to run away from its true responsibilities-always seeking an exit, always seeking a place to hide.

Examining my intentions, I found that I couldn't gauge them with any accuracy. I? My? Who was I kidding? My state of mind was so agitated I no longer knew what I was, what I meant.

I didn't know. I just didn't know. Even now I don't know who I am.

Feeling uncertain of myself like this, I heard the Prophet's voice in my head, extemporising on the nature of the eddy. Difficult to define precisely: for a limited time it retains its ident.i.ty, while moving with the surrounding fluid-until it becomes something else Difficult to define precisely: for a limited time it retains its ident.i.ty, while moving with the surrounding fluid-until it becomes something else. That is how I myself felt on that train-as if my very soul were being diluted by the surrounding fluid of life, that whirl of kizunguzungu kizunguzungu which is ever with us. which is ever with us.

Outside, in one of the speeding cities of the north of England, flames burned from two towers, the light of each cross-cutting the fading daylight between them. Munitions factories, in all likelihood. Very soon, on account of the blackout, the flames would be extinguished, for dusk was s.n.a.t.c.hing away the last of day, taking a little piece of not just mine, but each man and woman's life as an extra t.i.the.

After an hour or two more we came to a creaking, juddering halt while another train pa.s.sed. Now it was fully dark. The train vibrated, hummed. The other train's pa.s.sengers sped by in their lighted boxes. The carriage gave a sideways shudder, as if someone had clouted it with a piece of track they had picked up from a siding. The engine changed its tune, and with a hiss of hydraulics and a screeching jolt the train resumed its motion.

As the journey continued, I came up with resolutions that now seem inadequate. All sorts of causes might drive one (this was the manner in which I considered the issue) to the corner of one's poor little acre, such a place as I'd found at Kilmun, launching into the path of that aircraft those balloons with their fatal tails. But the causes are more or less irrelevant. The real moral issue is how much one turns in the yoke. To what extent-irrespective of the historical goad-a particular course of action might authentically be claimed as one's own.

Yes (I told myself), surely the key now was being honest about why the action was made. Facing up to the fact that I had simply craved excitement, accepting that was why I'd set a trap for the plane like that. But I could hardly admit that to Sir Peter.

Stiff and bleary-eyed, I alighted at St Pancras no more a.s.sured of my personal coherence than of the shreds and patches of steam, the bits and pieces of smoke that surrounded me. I stood on the platform for a moment listening to echoing voices of the porters and guards. A brown paper bag was drifting around under the great gla.s.s arches. Watching it fall, I noticed a half-eaten, half-rotten apple lying on the ground nearby and was struck by the aspect of a mouth it presented. Staring at it, I realised my face was hurting from the gashes on it where Mackellar had whipped me; people had looked at my injuries curiously while I was on the train. Hoping they would heal at least partially by the time I had to see Sir Peter, I picked up my suitcase and walked.

Eleven.

As I waited outside Sir Peter's office, once again Admiral Fitz-Roy stared down at me from his painting, this time in reproach, or so it seemed to me. There was no sign of Sir Peter's secretary, Miss Clements, as I then knew her. Still wondering how I was to gloss my tale of catastrophe, I could find-apart from the fact that Ryman may have given us what we wanted-only one hopeful note.

Perhaps here in the high castle of Adastral House, from where the grandee of British meteorology tried to direct a flock of weather forecasters across Britain and the Empire into providing coherent, standardised, reliable information not just for specific military missions, but for the prosecution of the larger policy of the conflict, perhaps here the death of a single man might not be considered of great moment.

But I dismissed the notion immediately. I might as well sign up for the n.a.z.i Party if I started thinking like that. Even though a single death might not count in the large scheme of the war, it nonetheless had to be accounted for in the still larger moral scheme of life. With every sparrow that falls...that sort of thing.

Eventually I was called through into the room of clocks, with its familiar smell of beeswax. The office was darker than I remembered, the overcast weather outside penetrating as if it had been piling up on the other side of the gla.s.s and only now, with my entrance, found one of its own. Little grey pearls of light-fragments of the insinuated material, fluxes of local dissipation-danced on the faces of the timepieces.

Sir Peter himself was standing by the window as I came in, looking down at the traffic in Kingsway.

"Sit down, Meadows," said the weather magus of the war, still with his back to me. A buff-coloured folder was in his hand.

I sat in one of the big green armchairs. The fire which had warmed the room on my previous visit was unlit this time, and the sight of the empty grate heightened my anxiety. It was like a mouth with teeth, but no lips or tongue.

At last, Sir Peter turned. As if on cue, one of his clocks sounded. Then others, one after the other: a cascade of sound. Followed once more by the man-in-the-moon clock chiming on completion of its own dilatory circle.

Silhouetted in the window as he was, it was impossible to make out the exact tenor of Sir Peter's expression, but I could see well enough that he had changed. His hair was quite white now, rather than grey, and his pale face was much more deeply lined, with eczematic patches here and there, standing out like the little red flags used to mark the positions of weather ships on charts.

The number of staff at the Met Office had doubled to nearly 7,000 since I had last been in the room. This had put a colossal strain on the director, so it was later said. With Allied successes growing at last, each new military operation to dislodge Hitler's troops or their proxies demanded the appropriate meteorological forecast. The range of operational activities planned and executed was now enormous. Experienced forecasters were being shifted from one operation to another as missions evolved.

But of all these plans and plots the proposed landings on mainland Europe were the most important-and here was I with only shame and disgrace to contribute to them, awaiting a reprimand when I had expected triumph and honours, rightful laurels. Underneath it all was guilt, the pure, searing guilt of one who has taken a life. The kind of guilt which purples a soul for ever.

What was I going to say? I swallowed hard as Sir Peter crossed the room, carrying the manilla folder.

"It hasn't really worked out, has it?" he said, sitting down in the other armchair. I was surprised, both at the understatement and at the almost offhand manner in which he spoke.

"It was an accident, sir."

Now the voice acquired the hardness I had expected. "So you say. It seems to me a piece of tomfoolery on your part that went badly wrong. Others, such as Gordon Whybrow in Dunoon, are putting a much darker interpretation on your behaviour."

He opened the folder. On a paper inside I caught a glimpse of Whybrow's typewriting-recognisable from the dozens of instructions I'd received from him in Kilmun-but could not read the words. "I must say, he has developed a very low opinion of you. He seems to think you were more interested in chasing after women than doing any work. And he says that you are p.r.o.ne to drink."

"That's not true, sir. Well, the point is-I worked hard for you. If it were not for the business with the plane..."

My voice trailed off. I leaned forward, putting my head in my hands-and then there was silence for a while.

"Don't be too hard on yourself," said Sir Peter eventually. "It could be argued you were only doing your duty in trying to down that plane. You know you did damage it fatally?"

I shook my head.

"The crew realised they would not make it home, so fearing coming down in the sea they bailed out. They parachuted down in Ayrshire and were soon picked up."

"I'd no idea."

"There's more, and it's very interesting. It might make you feel a little less guilty for what has happened."

I could not see any way in which that could be possible, I thought to myself as Sir Peter continued. "Among the crew was a man called Heinz Wirbel. A weatherman, an observer in the Zentral Wetterdienstgruppe. About your age and similarly overqualified, with an academic background. Anyway, Wirbel was willing to sing, and I'm more inclined to listen to what he had to say than to Whybrow or the Dunoon police. The Germans weren't just flying meteorological reconnaissance, they were trying to establish Ryman's whereabouts. Moreover, Wirbel was attached to Professor Weickmann's invasion watch group, which shows they have been following the same train of thought as us."

I sat up. "Really? I did think it was all rather odd."

Sir Peter continued. "Well it was. The death of Ryman might have been an accident, but the appearance of the plane wasn't. They couldn't kidnap him, at least not easily. They might have wanted to kill him, though Wirbel says he had no orders to do that. They certainly were looking for him, I suppose to see if he really was retired or whether his revolutionary approach to forecasting was now being used by us officially. It's all bluff and counter-bluff, nowadays, between me and my opposite number in Berlin. They try to think what we could consider a tolerable meteorological interval for a military operation, given our approach to interpreting weather, and I try conversely to do the same with them. Both always speculating on what relative a.n.a.lytical techniques might mean for operations. So any intelligence regarding the underlying theories being employed is useful."

I felt a great, if bogus wave of relief on hearing all this, as if the Germans might now share my responsibility for Ryman's death. "But how did they know about Ryman? I don't just mean citations in papers-how did they know where he lived, what he was up to and so on?"