Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 6. Whole No. 283, June 1967

Return to Base by Colin Watson

Colin Watson’s “Return to Base” is written with rare distinction, with a magic quality of mood, place, and emotion. Like Miriam Sharman’s Second Prize story, also in this issue, Colin Watson’s has only two important characters (again with one leading character offstage). But there is more than one scene, and more action in the physical sense.

Also life Miss Sharman’s, Mr. Watson’s story could be a one-act play; it is equally full of suspense, though of an entirely different kind from Miss Sharman’s; and while there is what might be called a “battle of wits,” its impact and meaning and “texture” are again altogether different...

In other words, two stories, alike in some ways, yet worlds apart — illustrating again the startling contrast to be found in the warp and woof of today’s detective-crime-mystery short story... Yes, there are superficial resemblances, similarities in underlying techniques; but a hundred modern mystery stories, or a thousand, can offer a hundred or a thousand different reading experiences. The basic principles and patterns always persist — as they have persisted these past 126 years; but the genre as a whole has an infinite capacity for variation — and it is this infinite variety that will preserve the form, and guarantee that the mystery short story will last forever...

It was the look of the money that broke his long dream of a return. The sight of the first handful of change from a pound note. Note, not bill. That he remembered.

He looked down at the heavy, elaborately fashioned coins. There were fewer than he had expected. But dreams take no account of rising prices. A fourpenny cup of English coffee was doubtless as dead as the five-cent cigar.

Half a crown. That was the big one, with the thick milled edge and Latin words and a shield and heraldic lions. A wheel that had rolled out of history. He ran his thumbnail over the corrugated rim. A beer and twenty tight-packed British — no, English — cigarettes, very white, with a thin, acrid fume, exactly the same color as his airman’s tunic. And some change.

“Give me a pack of those, will you?” He pointed, unable to remember the name, then automatically recalled something else. “Please.”

He put the half crown on the counter and made a question with the rest of the coins on his open palm.

“Five and five, sir.”

The money was slicked away into the cash register and he was left alone, unnoticed. Well, why not? The world was just one long street now. Nationality was no more noticed than the color of one’s eyes. Even the English, it seemed to him, were too preoccupied to pretend their famous magnanimous surprise at the existence of foreigners. A sort of beavers’ peace prevailed everywhere.

Professionally watchful behind his busyness, the barman noted that the thin, worried-looking American was shaking his head as he grappled uncertainly with the cellophane wrapping on the packet of cigarettes he had just bought. The barman reached for the packet, deftly skinned and returned it, and smiled. He was a little afraid that the man’s nervousness might swell into something odd, and bad for trade.

“A bit different from what you’re used to, sir.”

“I guess so. Thanks.”

The American lit one of the cigarettes and inhaled resolutely. He suppressed the immediate desire to cough, and tried again. This time he shut his eyes and tried to will the effect he had wanted — to draw through the long tube of the years the curiously exhilarating compound of mist and smoke and frost that had hung in the dawn above an East Anglian runway.

It didn’t work. The smoke tasted stale and scented; there was a feminine second-handedness about it, redolent of dance-hall powder rooms or of a car lately emptied of a necking party.

He crushed out the cigarette and turned to go. He caught sight of the barman’s reminding gesture toward the packet on the counter. With a nod he made its abandonment a bequest.

The barman watched the closing door and stirred coffee for his next customer. Thoughtfully he slid the cigarettes into the pouch of his apron. “They like to be liked, don’t they?” The customer grinned.

The American’s mind fastened on the next two facts in the line of his purpose. He had to get to King’s Cross station. And taxis were expensive. Almost expertly, he found his way by Underground.

There was no point in hanging around London. His journey had nothing to do with nostalgia. Even the flight, for which he had saved so long, had failed to register as an experience. It had been no more than a numb wait between the closing and reopening of a door.

He asked about trains to Emblestone. The name came as easily to him as if it were a New Jersey commuters’ suburb.

“Emblestone?” The clerk peered at him doubtfully.

“It’s the station for Carding Down. There’s — there used to be an air base there.”

The clerk leaned away for hidden consultation. When he faced the window again, he held a book of timetables.

“There is an Emblestone, apparently. But that line’s closed now. I’d say that Peterborough’s your best bet.” He sounded like a reluctant seller of lottery tickets.

“Okay. Peterborough.”

“There’ll probably be a bus or something.”

“Sure.”

“Return, sir?” The clerk waited, eyeing the queue behind.

For a long, absurdly impotent moment the traveler stood clutching the notes he had taken from his breast pocket. The quiet, almost indifferent question echoed round his brain like a challenge on the borders of death.

“Are you coming back, I mean?” The clerk had tried vainly to think up some acceptably American version of “return.”

The man started. “I’m sorry... No, just a one-way ticket. That’ll be fine.” He leaned down, ready to pay.

At Peterborough he hired a car. Long and confusing formalities were involved before he was allowed to drive, tensely aware of the task’s wrong-sided difficulty, into the thronged, narrow streets. Until he was clear of the city he kept in second gear. The car felt small and rigid about him, its engine feverish and frighteningly responsive.

Carefully he bored through the husk of the suburbs, heading east.

In the open country he relaxed a little and let the car roll along in high. The straight fenland road arrowed ahead into a landscape of black earth, parceled meticulously between parallels of hedge and dike. Flatness, relieved only by distant smoke puffs of trees and a dozen steeples that spiked the sky’s edge in lavender silhouette, gave a sense of huge distance and universal immobility.

He passed a scarlet tractor that seemed fixed in the furrows like a monument. The farm truck that he had noticed a couple of miles farther along the road neither approached nor receded. The only tokens of motion were crows and curlews banking and sideslipping across the great ivory sky like wind-blown pages of burned books.

He had not eaten for twelve hours. More. It was now well past midday. But the thought of food did not occur to him. His mind was abandoned, in what amounted to an almost langourous acceptance of physical weariness and hunger, to the contemplation of what he had set himself to do.

At ten minutes to three he arrived in the village of Great Carding. He drove to the end of the main street, round two corners of the church into the green, and over a humped stone bridge.

The inn was unchanged except for fresh, more garish paint on its timbering and a string of colored lights across the top of the porch. Its familiarity startled him. As he pulled round into the graveled yard, he saw that the wall nearest the river was still streaked with ivy and bright bronze lichens.

He went at once to look at the white-lettered board above the door.

Herbert Coppin, licensed to retail beer, wines, and spirits in accordance with...

Coppin. Not dead. Not moved away.

He bowed his head and breathed in slowly. At the end of the breath came a deep shudder, as if he had worn himself out with weeping.

The oaken darkness of the barroom smelled of snuff and wet clay. Copper gleamed here and there among the rafters, sending back the light from a single-element electric fire perched in the great brick chimney corner.

The last of the morning customers had gone. Behind the bar, turned half away as he gently, dreamily polished a glass, was a man with massive shoulders.

“Mr. Coppin?”

The shoulders swung unhurriedly round. The American saw a broad, countryman’s face, its high color dark as pottery in the shadowed recess of the bar. Again, as when the inn had come into sight, he felt immediately the shock of reconnection with the past. He looked straight into the publican’s eyes, certain of answering recognition; but they showed only patience and mild curiosity, the acquired calm of the server of liquor.

“My name’s...” It was ridiculous, like re-introducing himself to an old neighbor. “My name’s Reider — Lou Reider.”

Coppin nodded slowly. He smiled at the glass that he had not ceased to revolve around the wadded towel. “Reider. Aye, of course.”

He turned to put the glass on a shelf. Then his hand was open across the bar. “How are you, Lou? It’s been a long time.”

Reider had known he would speak like this. No haste, no gush. Each word carefully chosen and presented, like a special object.

Coppin poured him whiskey straight from the bottle. Reider could not remember his ever having dispensed a drink, even a free drink, without putting it through a measure; the favor moved him.

“It was whiskey, wasn’t it?”

“Sure.” So it was. Nothing else in those days.

“Have you been over here long?”

“Not long. Seven, eight o’clock, maybe.”

“What, this morning, you mean?”

“Today, yes.” He saw that Coppin was surprised.

“So you came straight on up here?”

“More or less.”

Coppin watched him take two small sips of the whiskey.

“I wanted to see you,” Reider said. “That’s the only reason why I’m in England.” He stared into his glass, tilting it gently from side to side. “It’s about Betty.”

There was a long silence. Each man seemed to be waiting helplessly, awed by the thought of what the other might say next.

Then Coppin leaned back a little from the bar and eased a thick silver watch from his waistcoat pocket.

“I’d better close up.”

He lumbered off, frowning. Reider heard the rattle of bolts at the door by which he had entered, then the publican’s slow steps along a stone passage to the rear of the house.

When Coppin returned, he sat down by the table to which Reider had brought his drink. His breathing was labored; the effort to control it gave his mouth a tightness, like a suppressed smile.

“You’ve... you’ve not heard any more, I suppose,” Reider asked.

Coppin said nothing. Even a gesture of confirmation seemed pointless. His eyes remained steady, waiting.

“You and her mother—”

“The wife died five years ago.”

“Oh.” He paused and looked down. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I wondered what you both thought — what difference it made.”

“I can’t tell you. We never really talked about it.”

“No.” Reider raised his eyes. He gazed at the old man’s thin rumple of yellowish-gray hair. “You, though — what do you think happened to her?”

Coppin made no answer. He spaced the thick finger ends of one hand along the table edge and watched them gently caress the black polished wood.

“There’s something you’ve got to know,” Reider said. “I didn’t say anything about it at the time. Maybe I should have but... oh, I don’t know — it was five, six days before the police came round the base and questioned all the fellows. I just shook my head with the rest. That seemed to finish it. I guess at that age it’s easy to mistake the beginning of something for its end.”

Coppin went on stroking the edge of the table. He seemed scarcely to be listening.

“That night when... when Betty didn’t come home...” The rest of the sentence was like a door facing a man too encumbered to open it.

The fingers stopped moving. Coppin waited a moment before looking up. Then he said, “Yes?”

“She was with me.”

The old man nodded calmly. “And so?”

Now words poured out of Reider.

“I’ve often thought about it. That night. I think she was ill. Or hurt. That might have been it. Over the years the thing shifts and changes shape. Bits of dreams get drawn in and grow. You come to wonder about things you couldn’t have even imagined at first. You keep scratch, scratch, scratching away at the possibilities and all the time they become more horrible.

“And they sort of change into memories. Real memories. Things you believe have actually happened to you. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you know is that you’re telling yourself: I’m the guy — me. It’s your very first thought, morning after morning. And every time it scares you sick. Every time.

“And then you think: yeah, but that was five years ago. Or ten. Or twenty. But it makes no difference. Every morning it’s like something you’ve only just found out.”

Coppin was looking not at Reider but toward the dark, timbered wall beyond. His breathlessness had passed and the big body was quite still. When he spoke it was with the quiet, courteous patience of country habit.

“You asked just now what I think happened to Betty. Well, I’ll tell you. I think she went off with some fellow she’d fallen for. Maybe to London, Birmingham — you know, some big city or other. Then she got killed in a raid. Before she could get in touch again, I mean. She would have done that sooner or later. We got on all right — the wife and me and Betty. So that’s what must have happened.”

Reider frowned at his empty glass. He wondered if he were slightly drunk. “In an air raid? You think she was killed in an air raid?”

“It’s all there is to think. All there’s ever been.”

“But you don’t really believe that, do you? I’ve been trying to tell you — can’t you understand. It was me who was with her that night.”

The old man’s bulk heaved and subsided resignedly. “Twenty years, Lou. It’s a very long time. One night and another night — what’s the difference? People forget.”

“No! Oh, no...” Desperation began to rise in him.

“But they do — they sort of melt into each other. Look, I’m not saying she did anything wrong, but Betty would go out with a different lad every night. Another thing — you talked about her being ill or something. She never had a day’s sickness. Never.”

“She was hurt. And it was that night. My God, I ought to know!”

Reider’s outburst left a wavering resonance among the bottles on a glass shelf behind the bar. He listened to it, wondering if it was just a sound in his own head. Then he heard Coppin’s voice.

“Hurt? How do you mean?”

“I... I think I might have hurt her. Her neck. Not meaning to. I wouldn’t have done that. But it happens sometimes that a girl gives you the wrong idea — or you just get the wrong idea anyway, never mind how — and you end up feeling mad. Oh, it’s stupid as hell. Like playing at God just because you’re in uniform. That’s stupid, too, but it’s part of it. And booze — that’s another part.”

“You’d been drinking?”

“Sure I’d been drinking,” Reider said wearily. “Could you see me dating anybody sober?”

Suddenly Coppin felt that he and this shriveled, middle-aged man in his crumpled suit and dusty shoes had been talking of people he had never known, who had never existed as far as he was concerned. A young airman. A girl. Laughing and quarreling in a village lane in the wartime darkness. What was it to do with him?

“We’d been for a walk,” Reider went on, “out to that bit of forest on the other side of the base. Something-or-other Woods, they called it. I didn’t have a late pass but there was a place where we could get back into camp. She came in with me and we sat around a while out there near the end of the East runway, and she was very sweet — you know? — and I had to get damned stupid, and kind of rough with her. Just for seconds.

“You kind of stop thinking, just for seconds, like losing hold of a wheel or something. Then I was on my own and listening to the noise she made in the grass, going away from me, and then a Flying Fort came in to land and I couldn’t hear her any more after that.”

Reider stared a long while at his hands before looking up again.

“You know something?” The eyes seemed to crave belief.

Coppin waited for the lie.

“I’ve wondered sometimes — now and again at first, then every damned day in life — I’ve wondered if I didn’t hear her fall just as that Fort was coming in.”

“Fall?”

“Trip and fall.” Reider gestured with his hand. The action suggested a plunging bird.

“I don’t quite—”

“You wouldn’t know the place I’m talking about. There’s something there that I remembered afterwards. I want to show you.”

The old man shook his head.

“But you’ve got to let me. It’s why I’ve come back after all these years. Can’t you see that?”

“But what good would it do?”

Reider brought up both hands, held them there a moment as if to clutch forth words. Foreigners, thought Coppin inconsequentially, they always wave when they talk.

The hands fell.

“Please,” Reider said quietly. “Please won’t you come with me? Now.”

Again the old man shook his head, but he pushed back his chair and got up. He went in front of Reider to the door. Before opening it he took down a blue cloth cap and carefully smoothed it over his sparse, tousled hair. Reider thought how bowed he looked, how slow and vulnerable.

Half a mile from the village, tilled fields and cottages and gardens came to an end on the edge of the great gray scar of the abandoned airfield. Its boundary was a high thorn hedge in which the rusty remnants of steel-wire fencing hung like red creeper.

Reider drove slowly along the lane that skirted the western side of the airfield. The first two gaps in the hedge that once had given on to service roads were now blocked with rubble and old oil drums. The third, nearly twenty yards wide, was clear enough for the car to get through. Only when Reider had steered past the littered wreckage of a blockhouse and a heap of rotting, wire-enwrapped trestles, did he realize that this had been the main entrance to the base, busy then as a city street, white-lined, neat, a-clatter with the crisp footfalls of boys in men’s uniform.

“They’ll not clear this, not in a hundred years,” murmured Coppin at his side. “They say they’re nine foot thick, those runways.”

Before them lay an immense checkerboard of concrete, moss-stained and dappled with shallow pools. From its narrow fissures brown grass had grown. The grass was tall but it looked lifeless.

The car traveled diagonally across the vast square. The place was strewn with chunks of concrete, some as big as suitcases. Avoiding them demanded concentration, but Reider spared a glance now and then through the side windows of the car, as if to take bearings.

He saw, far off, the long featureless rectangles of the hangars, sinister geometrical anomalies in the wilderness. He saw the turfed mounds of the old bunkers. He glimpsed against the sky the frame of the control tower, bereft of glass and most of its paneling, like the skeleton of a carousel.

They were off the square and turning onto the main runway. The old man stared in front of him, bewildered. He had never seen the runway before. From here it looked limitless. A gigantic road with its own horizon. Lonely and purposeless. And he hated it.

The concrete rolling back beneath them was still faintly marked with the great red and yellow arrows that Reider once had watched streak past the belly of the Flying Fortress bearing him and his young good luck back from a raid on Germany. He had poured death on cities jauntily, a boy up-tipping a bucket of slops in the night.

Reider stopped the car at the edge of the runway just before the point at which its surface crumbled and merged with rank grass and brambles. He got out and stared anxiously across to their left.

“We’ll have to walk from here. Not far.”

He swayed slightly, Coppin noticed. And there was a grayness about his mouth. The old man went to him and laid a hand lightly on his arm. He felt it shiver.

“Hadn’t we better go back? I mean, it’s not likely to do any good, is it?”

For an instant Reider looked at him with anguished exasperation. Then he turned and began clumsily picking his way through the long grass. Coppin, ponderous but more sure-footed, followed him.

They went on for about a hundred yards, the ground rising slightly all the way. Reider stopped and looked about him intently. At the sight of a cluster of yellow-painted pipes, jutting from a bed of weeds, he nodded and bore off to the right.

“This is where we were. Just here.”

The old man stood beside him. His shoulders were hunched with the effort of drawing breath.

Reider pointed. “You see, anybody in the dark going that way — without knowing, I mean — look, I’ll show you.” He walked on.

“NO!”

Reider turned and stared. The cry had been one of pent-up fear. He came back and seized the old man’s arm.

“We’ve got to see. We’ve got to make sure.”

“I don’t want to! Let it be, for God’s sake!”

“Please!” He pulled Coppin forward.

“But they looked — they looked for weeks.”

“Not everywhere.” The words sounded hard, wrought from knowledge.

Coppin stopped resisting. Between gasps for breath the low gabbled phrases of appeal became incoherent.

“Hold on.” The grip on his arm halted the old man. Reider took another step and knelt. He pulled aside clumps of long grass.

Coppin saw a sill of moldering brick. It rimmed the dark mouth of a pit, four or five feet wide.

Reider dragged away more of the overgrowth. He worked fiercely, as though glad of the barbed punishment of hawthorn and bramble, until the whole opening was clear.

Coppin watched him all the time, using Reider’s back as a shield against seeing what lay beneath.

When he had finished, Reider crouched against the sill, gripping it and peering down.

Coppin remained still, a little way behind him.

“Can’t see from here.” Reider stood. There was blood where he had grasped the bricks. He went to the left-hand side of the pit mouth where part of the structure had collapsed into a steep ramp of earth and rubble. He began to climb down.

Coppin stared unseeingly over the flat, mist-veiled landscape. He looked like a man beside an open grave whom grief had at the last frozen into mindlessness.

In the bottom of the pit Reider leaned back against one of the three undamaged walls. Intense cold struck at once into his shoulders, arms, and hands. For several minutes he remained pressed rigidly against the seeping brickwork. The air was thin and sour.

His gaze was fixed on a point low on the wall directly opposite. What he saw was a semicircular arch, framing blackness, the vent of some kind of culvert or drain. He was still watching it when, without consciousness of effort, he found that he had stepped forward and was slowly crossing the weed-tangled floor. For the second time in his life.

The old man did not hear the shout when it came.

“Mr. Coppin!”

Reider waited, then called again.

“Mr. Coppin!”

In the echoing confinement of the pit the cry crowded back into his own ear. It was like the wail of a terrified child.

Reider climbed a little way up the ramp until he could see the old man’s head against the sky. He drew breath to shout a third time.

The name, though — he couldn’t think of the name.

At that moment Coppin turned a little. Reider saw his face. He remembered that he had been about to call out. It was just as well that he hadn’t, he thought. The old man was a complete stranger. And weeping.

Pulling himself forward by roots and tussocks, Reider dragged himself from the pit as wearily as if he had been imprisoned there for years. When he reached the level grass above, he remained on hands and knees for nearly five minutes, his breathing quick and shallow, his head down like an animal’s. Then he got to his feet.

He felt terribly tired and cramped. But he knew the first thing he ought to do was to be kind to the old man standing silent before him. What was he crying about, for God’s sake?

Reider went closer, staring, until the glistening lines down the old man’s cheeks filled his vision. Strings of half-dried tears, tenuous, unaccountable. Absolutely unaccountable. Like the pale fronds of that skeletal foot, sprouting from the culvert’s mouth.

He put an arm round Coppin’s shoulders and smiled wonderingly into his face.

“Say, you’re new here, aren’t you? So shall I tell you what we’re going to do? We’re going over right now to that canteen and have a drink. War or no goddam war.”