"Almost" - A Novel by Stefan Molyneux Stefan Molyneux, MA

BOOK THREE
Chapter 81

Runciman was almost too much for Reginald to bear.

Cuthbert had had his faults, but had been able to rouse himself to some sort of passion about British interests and international affairs. Runciman was almost to urbane to draw breath. He smoked endlessly, through a long black cigarette holder. He had lazy eyes, a long nose and a tiny moustache. He was imperturbable. He yawned when their aeroplane had hit a chilly downdraft over some mountains. Reginald was used to yawns from Cuthbert, but this was quite another matter. Cuthbert’s indifference had been an affectation. Runciman’s was innate.

On the aeroplane, Runciman had made things very clear to Reginald.

“You see, my boy, it’s quite simple. All our negotiation will be a show. We’ve already talked to the German Foreign Office and asked them to give us a list of their demands. We’ve assured them that we are going to press Benes into two dimensions to accept them. Classic diplomacy. We go, we lie, we return. We hint to Hitler what we might do – fight. We hint to Benes what we might not do.” Another yawn. “Fi-ight.”

As Runciman dozed, Reginald’s hands kept wandering over the armrests of his humming seat. The image of his tiny little brother, in a garden shed, turning blue, kept coming back to him. It was accompanied by a question, which he tried to bat away with all the mental hands he could summon, which was enough for a hall-full of riotous applause.

But the question made it through anyway:

What am I doing here?

He glanced over at Runciman’s dozing profile. He saw that the older man had fallen asleep holding a cigarette, still burning in its holder, between two fingers. Reginald reached out and took it, to put it out.
“I say, old fellow,” murmured Runciman, not opening his eyes. “You want one, just ask.”
“Sorry,” said Reginald. “I thought you were done.”
Runciman grunted, turning to the window. Reginald stabbed out the cigarette. He remembered a time, as an undergraduate, when he had tried to smoke for a week, and had been driving when his cigarette fell from his lips into his groin, scalding his testicles, and he had felt trapped panic at his need to keep his eyes on the road, as well as to stop the burning…

Reginald sighed, closing his eyes. If I ever figure out the point of these random little visions…

Chapter 84

Ruth vomited, the precious scrap of paper clutched in her fist. She did not keep quiet. She did not hold her hair back. Her customary terror of germs was gone. She was an animal trying to purge a poison.

When she had returned with Catherine from Uxbridge’s little room, she had been struck down by a terrible suspicion. She was no stranger to avoiding her own thoughts, but this one smashed through her defenses like a thundering locomotive through an opening-day ribbon.

When did my brothers die?

They died in 1915. In the summer. Quentin signed for the grenades in the summer of 1915. They were not terribly far from each other. The middle of France. None of her three brothers were in the same outfit; the Army didn’t want to risk wiping out entire bloodlines.

And, strangely enough, the thought had struck Ruth with a grim certainty. She did not imagine that it would be anything other than what it turned out to be. It would be one of them, or… Or… The thought was striking, insistent. Or there was never any reason for you to have stayed in bed…

But that made no sense. How could she have known? My guilt was entirely about my father, she thought blindly, vomiting once more. My betrayal of my husband, my love for and hatred of Gunther, my complicity in the coming of war… I knew nothing about Quentin’s guilt. I knew nothing about what he had done during the war. I could not stand to ask – and now, I know, he could not stand to tell me…

But all lost lives are lived in the shadows of silence. Active silence. Silence that is a turning away. When you cover your eyes, you cover your mouth. And your heart. Your soul.

Chapter 92
Ruth was not by nature a confrontational person, and she agonized over her decision to confront her husband for over a week. It was, for her – and quite literally – the worst thing in the world. Something about demanding something from him – enforcing her will – made her feel as if she were hanging from a frayed rope over an endless chasm.
And what was worse, the events at Munich – which she followed daily in the newspaper – were forcing her to act, and act now. The endless excuses of procrastination were being overshadowed by the need to do something now, immediately, before the time was lost. It’s now or never, she kept thinking, and ruminated for a long time on the last word… Because the ‘never’ has already been happening for twenty years. The ‘never’ is not in the future, but was in the past…
Every time she made a decision, or fixed a time, she shied away. The confrontation and herself were like opposing magnets. The more effort she put into bringing them together, the more they seemed to fly apart.
Her attitude wasn’t helping. After enough time, even badly-married couples can hide very little from each other. She was nervous, and prone to outbursts, headaches, and speaking out of turn. It seemed impossible to confront him. She must confront him.

It had a lot to do with Tom. Ruth knew, in her heart, that she would not see him unless she acted. Oh, she might see him at family functions – or even have the odd, stiff lunch – but it would never be the same again. Never be as it once was. When he was her secret, lovely heart. But it was more than that. It was about much more than Tom. I want to exist before I die, she thought.

But Quentin was always busy, and Ruth didn’t want to warn him of what was coming. If she went to him and said: I need to speak with you about something of great importance tomorrow at seven p.m., he would be tipped off, and all would be lost. He would be busy, or distracted, or would have time to think up some sort of counter-scheme…

And – and he would need time to think. This was the worst part, the part that caused her to bite her nails to the bone. But I cannot give him time to think! It will all be over then! I must force him! I must force him!

To do what? was her first thought. But that was quickly resolved by the newspaper. To oppose Munich. To change sides. To join Churchill and – and Gunther…

Chapter 99
The siren jolted Tom from sleep. His body twisted on his little cot. His brain was scalded with exhaustion. He flew ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. He closed his eyes at night, and saw his trembling windshield, felt the shaking of his seat as he opened fire, jerked his head involuntarily as his bullets chewed bits of metal off Nazi aeroplanes. When he slept, he dreamt of flying. It felt as if he had closed his eyes for only a few minutes when the siren started up again. Sometimes, he dreamt of the siren, and even in his sleep, he was afraid that the siren was really going off, and he was losing precious minutes of altitude and interception.
Tom was one of three thousand fighter pilots. Modern warfare had come down to such tiny numbers. Three thousand knights of the air who threw themselves into the sky as a shield against the oncoming German air force, the Luftwaffe.

For the first time in his life, Tom knew complete rage. He had been afraid for so many years that it was a blessed relief to have something tangible and evil to shoot at. He had joined the Royal Air Force in November, 1938, the day after his conversation with Gunther about radar. He met a few of his former students, who wondered what had taken him so long. He contacted a secret tribe he had always dreamed of; men his own age who knew that there was going to be war, and ignored or found amusing the endless antics of the appeasers. Tom was utterly humbled by their courage. They had all read reports about the hopelessness and doom of modern aerial combat. They knew nothing of the existence of radar, but they were unafraid. Tom met two young men who had been present at his great debate at Oxford in 1933, who had voted for the resolution to refrain from fighting for King and Country. One of them was abashed and shamefaced. The other just laughed and said: “Oh, but I’m still not fighting for King and Country. At the time, King and Country were appeasers. Still are. And I still refuse to fight for them. Now, I fight for myself. I am just sad that I shall be saving them as well.”

They were mostly children of the lower middle classes – very few came from England’s elite schools.

There were some refugees from the Continent. By far the most skilled pilots were the Poles. They had a careless sort of courage which allowed them to perform maneuvers which took Tom’s breath away. They did ‘victory rolls’ when returning from combat – one roll for each German plane shot down, which none of the British pilots had the stomach for. To do a victory roll when you didn’t know what sort of structural damage your aeroplane had sustained in combat..? Ugh!

But they were the highest-scoring pilots. Some of the British were good – Lock, Bader, Lacey, Lane – but more than eighty percent of the pilots had never even shot at an enemy plane. This was partly luck – finding enemy planes in the endless blue was very, very hard. And even if you found them, they were so easy to lose again. It happened all the time. One moment, the sky was full of planes; the next, it was empty, and you had to go home alone.

The battle was hard. Very hard. You flew far more than you fought. But the RAF had some significant tactical advantages. They had more fuel for fighting – the Messerschmidt BF109 fighters could only spend half an hour over England before having to turn back to France. The Spitfires had a tighter turning radius than the 109s, and so could get into a kind of ‘spiral’ turning war with the German fighters, inching closer to a good firing position with every loop...

BOOK TWO
Tom Prepares to Go to Germany

It is odd, thought Tom, that I have so few people to tell that I am going away for two months. He had to tell his family, of course, because he was going to be away from the end of November to the end of January, and so would miss the holidays.

The truth was that Tom was actually quite relieved to be out of England for Christmas. There was something terribly complicated and messy about his relations with his family. He had to avoid even thinking about them, since it generally made him either cry, get angry, or give up and be depressed. There was a great hole in his heart where his family portrait should have hung.

The primary problem was his mother. This was one of the great disappointments of Tom’s adult life. He had felt depressingly special with his mother. She had always called on him to ease her pain. She got very skittish on the rare occasions when Reginald came sidling into her room, and usually had to take a nap after he had left. But she grew florid and torrential when she was alone with Tom. Tom, Tom, Tom was the constant salve to her wounded heart.

Tom hated this, but he also loved it. Well, not quite ‘loved.’ It was more – more as if…

His choices had always been twofold. First, he could have a mother who shied away from him as if he were carrying a bomb, or about to burst into acid, or was a wolf in child’s clothing. He could have a mother who fought with him without words, without quarter, without end. He could have a mother who recoiled from his very presence. He could be Reginald...

Tom in Germany

Tom arrived in Germany on November 30, 1932. Klaus met him at the airport in Berlin, and they drove to a small hotel right in the heart of the city. They were going to see the sights in Berlin before taking a bus out to the small town where his family lived.

Berlin was magnificent. Tom knew all about big cities, having lived in London. But London had been muted since 1929, since the crash. The soft ash of depression had fallen over its mythic energy. But Berlin was nothing like that.

Berlin was insane.

Far underneath the madness, a dim bourgeois body could still be seen. Berlin was like a senile grandfather who occasionally tells stories of a lost and dynamic history. Tom arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon, with a pack of other scratchy, yawning, vibration-dazed travelers. Klaus was waiting in the concourse; Tom found him after spending an endless time in a customs lineup.
“Destination!” the short, squat official had barked in English, after glancing at Tom’s passport.
“Berlin,” replied Tom.
“Anywhere else?”
Tom had switched to German. “I will be visiting a priest in the country. A friend of mine’s father.”
“Your accent is bad,” said the German man, glancing up. But he closed Tom’s passport and handed it back. “Welcome to Germany, Mr. Spencer.”

Klaus had hugged him extravagantly. He had graduated from Oxford in May of that year. He was taking a year off before deciding whether or not to go back for his Ph.D. He was very emotional. He had always been emotional, but now it seemed beyond all civilized bounds. He was in tears as he hugged Tom.
“Sweet Tom,” he cried, “it is so good to see you!”
“Steady on!” laughed Tom, attempting to extricate himself. Klaus only held him tighter. Tom shrugged mentally and grappled him back. An odd sensation possessed him. It suddenly felt as if some sort of energy were flowing from his own body into Klaus’s lean form, something warm and stable and reasonable and friendly.
He’s in a panic, thought Tom.