“Africa?” Ivanhoe hissed. “How in Crivvens name did you end up in Africa?”
I quickly looked around, but no one else had heard. “That, dear sir, will have to wait until the de-briefing.” My words were quiet, the jangling and hum of the tram keeping my secrets between just the two of us. “First I need to know if it’s okay to turn up at my apartment.”
Ivanhoe nodded. “There’s been changes, right enough. Your father’s brother turned up out of the blue, and he’s been staying there.”
I nodded, shocked inside, but hopefully not letting it show. Dad didn’t have a brother, and I assumed dad had gotten home, and that was the story the family were going with. Clever. I felt smug that I’d got him out of the desert. “I never really liked Uncle,” I mused. “I hope he’s treating mum okay.”
“I don’t know that much.” Ivanhoe said. “Apart from that everything’s pretty much the same. Alice is still in The Scotsman, as you discovered today, in fact she’s been doing your job, but that won’t last long.” he gave me a wry grin, I assumed it was because I’d out-witted him in his street-work. “And we’re still making things as nasty for Jerry as we can.”
I stopped speaking as the conductor positioned himself next to us. “Where to gents?”
“Oh, we’re going for a beer at Finnegan’s.” I announced.
“We are?” Ivanhoe’s disguise looked so out of place I almost laughed.
We all looked to the front as the tram slowed to a halt. “Checkpoint.” The conductor said, taking my money and running off two tickets.
“Checkpoint?” I hissed. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed a tram being stopped, obviously part of the new German regime against Avenging Steel. I could hardly contain my amusement.
“Papiere!” the guttural commands began to dominate the tram, and I fished my temporary papers out of my wallet. The soldiers hardly gave the women a glance, but scrutinized every male face, looking for any sign out of place.
I stared right back.
As I watched the backs of the grey uniforms leave the tram, I thought of putting a bullet in every one.
We got off at the bottom of Leith Walk, and fifty yards away, Finnegan’s door lay invitingly open.
“I’m not sure I can resume my job at the paper.” I said after taking a huge quaff from my glass. Oh boy, the taste of a good beer.
Ivanhoe gave me a deep stare. “I did wonder about that. Intelligence is very consuming; once we’ve got a feel for the job, it soon takes over.”
I nodded. “It’s not just the thrill of the operational side; but, getting back into a boring nine to five. I mean, how do I explain to everyone, including Captain Möller, why I’ve been absent for six months?”
“We could work it out; we could come up with some bizarre story or other.”
I’d thought about it for the last six months, at camp in Canada, and in the desert. I’d come to no reasonable outcome. “I’ve trained for more than the newspaper. I’ve done the field assignments. I’ve offed more Germans in the last six months that you could shake a stick at. I think my future now lies within the organization.” My words had just owned up to how I’d felt for some time. “I have skills; it turns out I’m good at what I do.”
Ivanhoe didn’t argue, he didn’t try to dissuade me, he just stuck his hand over the low bar table. “Welcome to the club.”
“Thanks.”
“So what were the highlights?”
I gave him a questioning look.
“Of the last six months.” he nudged.
“Oh,” I hardly needed to think. “We uncovered a conspiracy in New York. I sipped cocktails on a beach in South America somewhere. I captured a German General…”
“What?”
I held my hands up. “Wait for the briefing for details.” I laughed. “I saw dad in Palestine.” I knew I’d leave that whole episode out of the de-briefing. “I watched the invasion of Africa at Rabat.”
“Rabat?”
“Aye, it’s near Casablanca.” I watched his eyes roll, and realized I’d covered considerable ground since our last meeting. Almost as if I’d grown up more than he had, and somehow passed him on the scale somewhere. “I took part in a raid on secret rockets on Sicily. Then I came home via Italy and France. Oh, and blew up a Gestapo officers club on the way.”
“Oh,” Ivanhoe laughed. “You make life in Edinburgh seem so commonplace.”
I nodded. “I certainly got around.”
“Look, I’ve got your suitcase at the farm, why don’t I get it brought here, and at least when you return to the house, you’ll actually have your old stuff.”
“Okay, and after that?”
“We’ll leave you a couple of days to get re-settled, then we’ll get you de-briefed. Once we’re happy with everything, we’ll see about getting you a position.”
“Any idea what it’ll be?”
Ivanhoe shook his head. “That’ll all come from up top, I’m afraid. We won’t have a say in any of it.”
I felt suddenly cold, as if someone had walked over my grave. I gave a shiver, but Ivanhoe didn’t notice. He was rising to use the bar telephone. He returned to the table minutes later with two more beers and a wide smile. “Charlie will be here in twenty minutes. Just enough time to get another one down you.”
Charlie dropped me off at the top of the Bruntsfield hill, and I walked down the pavement, anticipating what might be going on in the apartment. Frances would be there, probably listening to some kind of music. Mum and dad were early risers, maybe having been at church, maybe not. With my keys and my own ID card in my pocket, I approached the door, the rain almost gone, my heart in my mouth.
The castle key let me in the outside door, and I savored the familiar climb up the worn, smooth, stone steps. I slipped the key in the lock of the apartment door, pushed it firmly against the thick draught excluder, and called out. “Anybody home?”
To my surprise, Frances bolted out of her room, a huge grin on her face. “James!” Then she stopped, almost mid-step, her face instantly changing from a grin to one of shock, almost horror. She stepped back, her hand over her mouth; one of the few times I’d witnessed her speechless.
“Have I changed that much?” I grinned.
“Oh, God!” she threw herself into my arms. “It is you! We thought you were dead! Well, we thought you captured or something. What happened to your hair, your face, all that tan. Where have you been?”
As she barraged me with questions, mum and dad came out into the hallway from the kitchen. Mum ran to hug me… and mum never runs. Dad just stood at the end of the hallway, smiling. He’d let a beard grow, big and bushy. It suited him, and lent weight to the idea that outside the house he was my uncle, not my dad.
“Oh, Jamie, Jamie.” Mum coursed, her fingers running through my hair. And for the next few minutes, I was told so many times that they’d thought me dead, captured, jailed, or worse.
Then mum did what all mums do to a returning child. She got to work boiling water for tea, making me a sandwich because I looked deathly ill, pale, malnourished, and obviously hadn’t eaten since the breakfast six months before.
When mum got busy at the cooker, Frances retreated to her room, leaving me and dad at the table. “Any regrets?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nope. I’m glad to be home.” He looked across the kitchen at mum, making sure she was out of earshot. “Let’s just say I’m more active against the Germans now than in Palestine.”
“Active?”
“A.S.” He said, keeping an eye on mum.
“What?”
“Avenging Steel.”
I thought about the A.S. lettering painted on walls, and immediately was taken to Jules Verne’s book, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. A.S.; the monogram for Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm had been scratched onto walls of the caves under the volcano… I’d read it many years ago, and determined to revisit the story.
The thought that dad was now a part of an organization my newsletter had spawned seemed very bizarre. “As long as you’re looking after yourself.”
“I am. Since I’ve walked the walk, so to speak, they’ve got me doing a lot of the training.”
“Good.” Training would keep him away from operations.
“How about you?” he countered. “What are you going to be doing now?”
It was my turn to watch mum, but she seemed to be oblivious to our conversation, now making sandwiches. I saw cold meat being cut, and an open jar of Branston Pickle. “Oh, I’m probably going to do some work for the Government, but we won’t let that go any further. As far as mum and Frances are concerned, I’ll make up a fictional company that I work for; it’s all they have to know.”
“That sounds good to me.”
We spent an hour in meaningless conversation, where I let mum indulge me, and avoided most of her questions.
Then I heard a key in the lock.
“Alice.”
I rose, and walked into the hallway, to Alice, my body would be silhouetted by the smoky glass of the bathroom door. “Hi everyone, I’m…” she froze, her mouth open, her expression full of questions.
“Hello, baby,” I said, watching the tears grow in her eyes. “I made it.”
“Oh, bloody hell.”
We met halfway, right by the coat stand. Our mouths met in a flurry of lips and tongues, a torrent of tears between us. Her bag was across her belly, keeping our pelvis’s apart, and I used my hand to try to shift the obstruction… only to be met by her stomach. My hand stopped, thinking she’d something stuffed inside her coat.
“Oh, bloody hell.” I mimicked. “It’s…”
“Yes,” she kissed me again, licking the tears from my face. I turned to see mum and dad arms round each other grinning at the joke they’d kept from me for the last hour. “Yes, James Baird, when you were prancing around, I was growing our baby.”
My stories were instantly sidelined, my adventures forgotten. I thought of my wife, all alone, coping with my extended trip, never knowing if I was alive or not, all the time knowing that our child grew in her belly. I thought of the teary nights, the morning sickness, all of which I’d probably missed.
I noticed Frances, leaning in her bedroom doorway, a huge smile on her face. “I’m going to be an auntie.”
I looked back at Alice. “I’m sorry,” I managed at last.
“So you will be.” But her tone held no real rancor.
“I think it’s time for a strong cuppa!” Dad announced behind me. “I’ve got a bit of a story to tell.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes, son. It’s time I came clean.”
“But that could put Mum and Frances in danger.”
“James Baird!” Mum’s strident tone cut through everything. “Do you think your sister and I are stupid?” I stood in silence, unable to answer. “You come home with strangers, you go out at all hours of the night, coming home with gunshot wounds, which your sister, wife and I have to deal with. You festoon your sister with rare records, just before the radio station is bombed. Don’t you think we’re already half in the loop anyway!”
I looked at her face, half exasperated, half angry, but she was right. It was safer to know most of a story than half-truths.
“Go for it, dad.”
Surprisingly, it turned out that dad had never told anyone about my part in his leaving the army, and his return home. To his credit, he kept most of the details vague, but of course, the story got punctuated with questions. You were in Jerusalem? You were in Gibraltar?
I found out he’d gotten passage on a frigate heading round Britain to Murmansk, dropped off on the Outer Hebrides, and had to find his way south from there. Hardly the same scale as my journey, but of course, I kept that part to myself.
I slept well that night, my arm round Alice, resting on her bulging belly.
Times had indeed changed.