Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue by Alan Judd Page B

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right.’ He put them down without opening
    any and picked up Tony’s brown wallet, taking out the picture of a smiling blonde girl wearing a roll-necked jersey. ‘Lucky Tony. Or was.’ He put
    it back and counted out some pound notes. ‘Three quid here, plus the loose change in that jacket pocket. That makes three pounds seven and
    nine. Note and witness it.’ He replaced everything and sat staring at the pile. ‘Hope whoever goes through my stuff when my
    number’s up will be as considerate as us.’
    Frank was surprised and dismayed. ‘You reckon it’s coming, then?’
    Patrick smiled again, almost indulgently. ‘Would’ve today, but for you.’
    He didn’t like to think of Patrick as vulnerable. He could accept his own vulnerability – was
    only too well aware of it – so long as there was someone who wasn’t, someone dependable who would keep him up to
    the mark. He picked up Tony’s uniform dress shoes. ‘But that’s the same for all of us, every time. There’s
    always someone who gets someone else out of trouble.’
    ‘I’ll give the love-letters to the clerks. They’ll know what to do. Must be a drill for it. Drill for everything in the RAF.’
    Afterwards Frank went to his hut and wrote to his mother. He had intended to go fishing but there wasn’t time now.
    He would have caught a fat trout and taken it to the colonel, or, at least, to the colonel’s house. Vanessa would have received it with surprise
    and admiration, they would have eaten together, themselves alone, and then – but then he imagined the distancing brightness
    of her switch-on hostess’s smile, how desirable yet unapproachable she was in her stockings and
    smart clothes, the enigma of her appearance in the darkened window. He tried to imagine being in bed with her but
    he couldn’t, not with any particularity, partly because he couldn’t imagine what that was like with anyone and partly
    because, in his mind, she was forever withdrawing, closing the door, fading like the light outside the hut window.
    Those stockings, hard to find in England now, must surely have been given her by someone. Most likely an American serviceman. It was impossible to imagine she had no
    admirers and he hated to think of her with them. He couldn’t be the only virgin in the RAF but it felt like it, from the way the others
    spoke. This secret, like his fear, he nursed closely. It was even more shameful – fear was at least
    understandable and, he was sure, privately shared by many. But being a virgin made him feel he was living under false pretences, pretending to be a man
    without having fully qualified. He feared being killed without having done it, as if even in death he would be incomplete. Tony had done it,
    clearly. That must have made it easier to die.
    It ought to have been easier to get rid of his virginity than his fear. He had tried a couple of times in Canada and once nearly succeeded
    – perhaps he would have if he’d stayed. Since arriving in England he had had only one chance to try again,
    during a couple of days’ leave in London between finishing training in north Wales and joining the squadron in Kent. He had taken a room in a hotel
    near Paddington station that smelt of damp carpet, stale cigarette smoke and old dust. Someone on
    the course had said there were plenty of prostitutes around Paddington and that the more exotic and desirable-sounding high-class call girls were available there. During two days of lonely and frustrated
    discontent, feeling more homesick than at any time since docking in Liverpool, he had failed to find any high-class call girls. Indeed, he
    had no idea how to go about it, assuming that the names and telephone numbers found in call-boxes were not
    what his informant had in mind.
    He roamed the streets without result, identifying women he thought might be prostitutes but then avoiding them. The drabness of the
    city, the bomb sites with their peeling walls of half-demolished buildings, like

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