Both Jemmy and the Croupier were in the Citadel next morning with such bad hangovers that Jemmy yelped every time a twitch jerked his head. Ned, who had walked home down Whitehall and Victoria Street after telephoning Clare, had spent a couple of hours in front of a fire which flickered with all the ferocity of two lumps of coal and one of slate, alternately glancing at the four pages which comprised the evening newspaper and trying to think of U-boats.
Here he sat within half a mile of Parliament and Downing Street in his own home, inconvenienced only by the noise of bombs and anti-aircraft guns outside. But out in the Atlantic on this November night, between 300 and 3000 miles to the west, there were many convoys under way, some heading south towards the sun, some steaming north from the Tropics, but the majority steering east or west, bringing arms and supplies to Britain from the New World, or returning for more. How many of those convoys had sufficient escorts, and how many were being decimated nightly by U-boats attacking without warning from inside the convoy? Decimate was the right word; one in ten was about the proportion. A thirty-ship convoy losing three ships a night was being decimated. In ten such nights it would be destroyed.
A piece of coal cracked and then fizzed as a pocket of gas ignited. It gave little heat but in common with most Britons on a winter’s night, Ned wore warm clothes and regarded a small coal fire as a spiritual rather than a physical comfort.
He had slept fitfully, a night when the sudden drum-rolls of an anti-aircraft barrage interrupted thoughts of Clare which in turn merged into sleep. Camp coffee and scrambled dried eggs on burnt and dry toast (they were hoarding the butter and margarine ration for the weekend) made a depressing breakfast and he thought he would go in to the Admiralty and read another docket, although Uncle had made it clear that no one was expected to work on Saturday mornings: with a decent night’s sleep impossible and his staff recovering from various unusual experiences, he wanted five good days’ work from each man; the weekends, he said, were for charging batteries and picking up the ideas that tended to float in through the French windows or, he said with a lewd wink, emerge from between a lissome tart’s bosoms.
‘That gin,’ Jemmy whispered. ‘It was the first step on the road to Sodom, or Gomorrah. When you deserted us we went along and met Uncle’s Wren at the point of no return – in this case the number nine bus stop at the end of Piccadilly, whence she had travelled from her Wrennery in Earl’s Court, and, in response to an urgent phone message from me, she had brought company for my loyal shipmate the Croupier.’
At that the Croupier groaned. ‘Soaks up booze like a cruiser’s main suction line, makes love with the thrust of a 16-inch gun’s recoil, laughs the whole time, and is called Sandra.’
‘Are you complaining or boasting?’ Ned inquired.
‘I’m not sure,’ the Croupier said shakily. ‘I’ll tell you later. What doesn’t ache is sore; what isn’t sore is trembling.’
‘When do you see her again?’
‘This afternoon. And with a bit of luck we’ll go straight to bed and stay there for the weekend and I’ll be here making the same complaints on Monday morning.’
‘If you keep off the booze you might conceive some ideas by then,’ Ned said unsympathetically, unlocking the safe and taking out his next docket.
‘If it’s only ideas,’ the Croupier said. ‘I think Jemmy has died. A corpse with a twitch. Ought to be preserved in formalin.’
‘Don’t think so loud,’ Jemmy said. ‘I was just watching Ned taking that docket from the safe. The second convoy, eh Ned? And there’s another of Doenitz’s boys in the middle of it like Neptune’s jack-in-the-box, ready to jump up as soon as it’s dark and shout, “Booo”.’
At that moment Captain Watts’ Wren secretary, Joan, walked in with four cups of coffee on a battered tray. ‘No sugar left and yesterday’s milk has gone sour,’ she said, putting the tray down on Jemmy’s desk. ‘Here, this may help.’ She took a cup herself, sat down at one of the nearby desks, and groaned.
Yorke then noticed that she was pale, with dark rings under her eyes, and remembered Jemmy’s comment a few days earlier, ‘She’s mine.’
‘Poor Joan,’ the Croupier murmured sympathetically. ‘Do you want some aspirins?’
‘I’ve had three already. I ache all over and I feel sick.’
‘Never dive with a submariner,’ the Croupier said. ‘I warned you. They’ve six hands and a rampant periscope.’
‘I know all about that,’ Joan said crossly. ‘And he has all the subtlety of a German sausage seller.’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Jemmy said quickly, knowing there was no stopping her once she began grumbling.
‘This – this desiccated Neptune’s idea of being romantic is to shout “Up periscope” as he begins to make love. It’s funny the first time, if you like a joke in bed, but not every time.’
‘You can always shout “Down periscope” at the appropriate moment and see what happens,’ Ned said.
Jemmy sipped his coffee. ‘I don’t know what she’s grumbling about. Six sightings in one night.’
‘Six?’ Joan was outraged. ‘One and he falls sound asleep. He dreams the rest.’
‘It is not the custom of the service,’ Jemmy said, ‘to discuss one’s sex life with one’s brother officers.’
‘Joan’s a sister officer,’ the Croupier pointed out. ‘The Wrens work under a different set of KRs and AIs.’
‘They bloody well don’t,’ Jemmy said. ‘The King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions apply to everyone. Like the Bible. Everyone in naval uniform, I mean.’
‘I imagine that neither officer was in uniform at the time,’ Ned said dryly.
‘Not unless you count socks,’ Joan said. ‘He complained his feet were cold.’
Ned coughed and Joan said: ‘We’ve shocked the lieutenant. It’s an old Yorke family tradition that a gentleman takes off his socks.’
‘It is,’ Yorke acknowledged, ‘but this particular lieutenant finds it hard to study dockets in an atmosphere thick with concupiscence.’
‘Thick with the stale memory of concupiscence,’ Jemmy corrected. ‘But you’re right. To work. Joan, is there more coffee?’
An hour later Yorke had read the details of yet another convoy attack. Thirty-seven ships sailed and eleven were sunk in seven days; two of them each hit with two torpedoes. The convoy had started with an escort of four corvettes but once the attacks started they had been reinforced by two frigates, whose presence made no difference: sinkings went on at the same rate. Thirteen torpedoes. Although no other tracks had been sighted, the U-boat had probably missed with one and begun the attack with a full outfit of fourteen. Then the U-boat had presumably left the convoy, transmitted a brief score-board report in cipher, and headed for home, which most likely would be Lorient. British direction-finders would have picked up the transmission, plotted the position and perhaps broken the ciphered message, but none of that helped; the U-boat’s route home didn’t matter a damn – as far as Ned’s problem was concerned – and the number of ships she had sunk was hardly a secret…
Six hundred and sixty men had died in those eleven merchant ships. The lucky ones were killed by blast from torpedoes. The rest were drowned as their ships sank, died suspended in the water by their lifejackets, or died of exposure in lifeboats. Ten masters had died – and they were the most irreplaceable part of a convoy. More than ninety DEMS gunners, men of the Maritime Regiment of Royal Artillery or seamen from the Royal Navy, all volunteers, had died. And all of them, ships, cargoes and men, recorded only by a few dozen pages in a manilla folder.
He glanced at the cargoes lost and totalled some of the figures: 1595 lorries, 550 tanks, 66 fighters, 24 bombers, 44 thousand tons of mixed cargo… All sunk by one U-boat in a convoy which included British, American, Norwegian, Dutch and French ships belonging to the Allies, and a neutral, a Swedish dry cargo ship. It must be nerve-wracking to be in a neutral ship sailing in an Allied convoy. Still, quite a few did; it was better than taking the risk of sailing alone and being sunk by a U-boat captain who did not believe that navigation and accommodation lights by night or a neutral ensign by day were anything but a trap.
Once again he drew a convoy plan, marking in the positions of the thirty-seven ships and the names of those sunk. Once again none of the victims was in the two outside columns, nor among the leaders or the last in the columns.
A pattern? Not really. On a night when two ships were sunk, they were usually in adjoining columns, but in two cases on the next night the third ship in a particular column had been hit, followed by the fourth, and the U-boat had obviously waited after the first hit and fired at the next ship to pass.
The coffee and Nature’s own resources had restored Jemmy, and Yorke walked over to him with the convoy diagram. ‘Another picture – can you tell me a story to go with it?’
Jemmy examined it for several minutes.
‘The victims are more concentrated than those in the last convoy you showed me.’
‘Which means the U-boat didn’t move around so much.’
‘You’re learning, Ned. You’re not sure what the lesson is, but you know you’re learning something!’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘Handwriting, Ned; everyone writes differently. Driving a car – everyone has some mannerism which might be difficult to spot but is there all right. Taking soup: everyone slurps it up differently. Understand?’
Yorke nodded. ‘Two different Ted skippers. This one is cautious, doesn’t move far from his first victim to his second, probably because he fears detection by Asdic. Seems not to have missed, although the previous chap missed at least once. And he seems content to shut the shop for the night once he’s sunk two ships.’
‘Exactly,’ Jemmy said, mustering a grin. ‘Now bear that in mind when you plot the other convoys.’
‘But I can’t expect to find two different convoys attacked by the same skipper.’
‘Of course not. You might over a long period, but it wouldn’t help much even if you did because he’d show the same style. Now, what you should be doing – if you haven’t a fearful hangover like mine – is getting into the minds of several U-boat skippers. Eleven, in fact, and discovering eleven different ways of torpedoing a number of ships from inside a convoy. I don’t know the total number of ships sunk in all those convoys but say one hundred. One hundred attacks by eleven boats. Shake that up inside your skull and then you should be better able to dream up ways of stopping it.’
‘Poachers and gamekeepers.’
‘Exactly. Brother Doenitz and his gipsy orchestra have thought up a way of penetrating a convoy with a single U-boat; now Brother Watts and his string septet have to find out how they got in and mend the fence. In fact Brother Ned has the job, and I don’t envy him.’
‘Do you think they’ve worked it out, or just that in the beginning one boat did it more or less accidentally, and U-boat Command have put it in the drillbook?’
‘Worked it out, I’m sure. Worked it out at a desk in U-boat Headquarters in Lorient or the Seekriegsleitung in Berlin.’
‘Why not discovered it accidentally?’
Jemmy looked up at Ned, his eyes narrowing as he held out the convoy diagram to return it. ‘Ned, my old chum, do you feel strong enough to hear Jemmy’s Epistle to the Heathens?’
Ned nodded. ‘As long as you’re strong enough to preach it.’
‘Well, Ned, you don’t seem to realize it, but Uncle has given you ASIU’s toughest problem to solve. Not just ASIU’s, but the Navy’s.’
Ned laughed, misled by Jemmy’s tone, but the lieutenant gave a spasmodic twitch and held up a warning finger. ‘I’m serious, Ned: let me explain. The Battle of the Atlantic is simply the battle between our convoys and Doenitz’s U-boats. We’ll win it in the end because we’ve got to – we’re within months, if not weeks, of starving. The Teds are sinking more ships than we’re building and that quite simply means we’re losing. You can draw graphs, juggle statistics, make speeches in secret sessions of the House of Commons, puff a Woodbine or wave a cigar, but the Teds are bound to win the war if they can go on sinking more ships than we build.’
‘Don’t forget the Americans.’
‘I’m not. They’ve been in the war only a few months, and up to now their Navy is not affecting convoy losses: even when you toss in their shipbuilding capacity – not very impressive at the moment – the Teds are still sinking more than we and the Yanks are building. So we’re losing. It’s like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.’
‘What about the pack attacks?’ Ned asked. ‘They’re sinking scores of ships but my “insider” Teds are only sinking dozens. What’s the importance of these inside-the-convoy boys compared with the packs attacking from the outside?’
‘That’s easy to answer. Beating the pack attacks means quite simply having more and bigger escorts and maybe – once we have enough – letting loose packs of frigates or destroyers to hunt down the Ted boats. Unless Doenitz has some surprises in store, we’ll beat the packs once we have more escorts. That’s oversimplifying, but basically we and the Yanks just have to build more.
‘But even when (on a morning like this I think it’s “if”) we get enough escorts to smash the packs, we still have your problem, or rather the single-Ted-boat-in-the-middle. The insider. We’ll be losing five hundred ships a year, working on the present number of our merchant ships at sea and the losses. But to win the war we’ve got to have double or quadruple the number of merchantmen. Unless you produce some answers, Ned old boy, we’re going to double or quadruple our losses, too…’
‘Why pick on me?’ Yorke grumbled. ‘Christ, I’m no A/S specialist, nor a submariner like you!’
‘And that’s why Uncle chose you. He had a hell of a fight with the Second Sea Lord’s office – they wanted to send you off in another destroyer.’
‘But why me?’ Yorke persisted.
‘You are a bore, you know,’ Jemmy said amiably. ‘All the other days in the week when we could discuss this, and you have to choose a morning when my brain is raw. Well, the anti-submarine boys think their bloody Asdics and hydrophones give them all the aces. It’s quite useless to show ’em the figures of losses and ask ’em what happened. They say too few ships, a bad winter with too much rough weather, the summer too fine so the Teds use planes to hunt the convoys. They say we should never have given the French the secret of Asdic, then the Teds wouldn’t have got it when France fell.’
‘And the submariners?’ Yorke prompted.
‘They’re just as bigoted. They say that if they had as many boats as Doenitz and as many convoys at sea as we have, they’d sink the lot. In other words, the A/S boys and the submarine boys all have axes to grind. Uncle, for reasons not clear to me in my present befuddled state, thinks you have four virtues.’
‘Only four?’
‘As far as he’s concerned, four are enough. You aren’t an A/S specialist, you’re not a submariner, you’re reasonably experienced in escort work, and you hate the Teds.’
‘What makes hating the Teds so important?’
Jemmy sighed. ‘The Innocent Abroad… The strongest motives that drive men – which means they’ll plot, scheme and work overtime to achieve them – are lust, greed, jealousy and hatred. There may be others, and you can juggle the order, but Uncle reckons (and I agree) a good whiff of hatred for the Teds clears the mind wonderfully.’
‘It’s not doing much for you this morning.’
‘I was sabotaged last night by my friends. Here, take your bloody diagram and buzz off for the weekend. The Croupier over there is about to go, Joan and I have plans, and she has to lock up the shop.’
Clare snuggled back in the deep, wing-back armchair, the flames in the fireplace flickering to light the comfortable sitting room and make her black hair seem a deep purple. Dusk in central London on a Saturday afternoon – boring, peaceful, cheerful or the dead end of the week: it could be any of these things. There was a faint smell of hops from the brewery on the other side of Palace Street; occasionally a distant train gave a whistle as it came in over the Thames bridge into Victoria Station, as though it was the railwayman’s equivalent of touching wood in case a bomber lurking in the clouds made an attack.
She was happy and at peace. She wore a corn-coloured dress of wool, cunningly cut so that although it appeared a normal fit, her body moving inside it seemed to be nude; dark but sheer silk stockings (the first time he had ever seen her in anything other than black uniform stockings or thick woollen country-wear ones that matched comfortable brogues) which revealed, almost flaunted, slim legs that invited him to speculate about the thighs above the hem of the dress.
It was hopeless, he realized; he had not heard her few sentences because, from the comfortable depth his own armchair, he had let his imagination speculate about her body. In hospital it was always sheathed in the sexless nurse’s uniform; on their country walks it was hidden in tweed suits or heavy coats.
‘…Do you?’ she asked.
‘…Do I what?’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry, darling, I was daydreaming.’
‘So I noticed. You’d even put the dress on a hanger.’
‘On a hanger?’
‘Yes, after taking it off me.’
‘Oh dear, was it as obvious as that?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be; it’s very flattering for a girl just up from the country.’
‘Warms the room, too.’
‘How is the arm, darling?’ The question was sudden and, he realized afterwards, deliberately so.
‘Getting better. Hurts in the cold. The muscles feel as though they’re a fraction of an inch too short.’
‘What about the grip?’
‘Improving. I wouldn’t want to be hanging on the edge of a cliff using only that hand, but it seems to belong to me now.’
‘Sister Scotland and the physiotherapist want me to do tests before I go back.’
‘Are they worried?’
‘No, just interested. They loved mothering you.’
Yorke looked startled. ‘I’d prefer being mistressed to being mothered.’
‘By Sister Scotland?’
‘Well, maybe not.’
Her nose was slightly hooked, her lips full, her skin golden, as though she still had the early-autumn remainder of a good summer tan. He knew her eyes were brown but by firelight they were black, large and emphasized by the high cheekbones.
‘You’re off again,’ she said.
‘No, I’m examining your face. Dictating notes to a lot of spotty medical students who need the obvious explained to them. “Now this patient, female, has two eyes, a mouth, nose and two ears, one on each side of her head…”.’
‘Professor Jepson at Charing Cross Hospital: you sound just like him. A wonderful surgeon but a fearful bore. The patient has no defects for you to point out, Dr Yorke?’
‘If lack of height is a defect, I should point out five feet one inch is not Amazonian. The bust measurement is not stated, nor waist and hips. Legs slim, quite acceptable where examined. Feet small, elegant in court shoes, when they – the shoes – have not been kicked off… Temperature normal, pulse normal–’
‘In fact the pulse is “elevated”,’ she interrupted. ‘That means it’s beating faster than usual.’
‘Why? You’re not feeling ill, are you?’
She laughed at the alarm in his voice. ‘No, but a girl’s pulse is allowed to beat faster when she’s alone in a strange man’s house and about to meet his mother for the first time. What a dragon!’
‘She’s not! You’ll like her.’
‘As far as nervous girlfriends are concerned, all men’s mothers are dragons at the first meeting. They may improve as time goes on.’
Yorke nodded. ‘Yes. I wonder why they usually start off so badly?’
‘They don’t always, of course. If it is obviously just a mild flirtation, mum is charming. If it is more serious, mum breathes smoke and flames or is as bright as a glacier on a sunny day.’
‘But why? Jealousy?’
Clare held out her hands towards the fire, as if to warm them. ‘Jealousy? Yes, I suppose so, but of a very involved sort. Being protective, I think. Even though the son is ten feet tall and twenty-five years old, he’s always a baby to the mother, who sees him becoming involved in another womb… She’s afraid of losing him, feels the girl can’t be worthy… One of the oldest stories in human relationships.’
‘The more polite mothers control their feelings. Put on a mask. Go through the drill.’
‘I know. It’s hypocrisy, but it’s more pleasant.’
‘Most of the world runs on hypocrisy. One has to work with a number of people one dislikes. But there have to be smiles and handshakes and so on.’
‘The social conventions,’ Clare murmured.
‘Exactly. Machinery needs oil to make it run smoothly. It’d work very briefly without the oil, and then seize up. Society is the same. So are the social conventions hypocrisy or society’s lubricating oil?’
She shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘The rebels call it hypocrisy but I prefer the lubricating oil.’
‘This is a hell of a conversation to be having on our first real afternoon together,’ he grumbled.
Clare looked at her watch and said, a practical note in her voice: ‘Your mother is due home any moment, and I have nothing to deter me from my duty, which is to put on the kettle and prepare some bread and butter.’
‘I’ll help.’
‘I can fill a kettle and slice a loaf without help, but you can come and admire me.’
She watched him stand up. ‘I’ve seen you in pyjamas, uniform and uniform trousers and a heavy jersey. I’ve never seen you in proper civilian clothes before.’
‘You’ve seen me naked too. Half and half, rather, when I had those blasted blanket baths.’
‘Yes, and I’m not sure who was the more embarrassed.’
‘I was. I was afraid I’d…’
‘Quite, but you didn’t. Men usually don’t, as a matter of interest. Shyness is very inhibiting. Anyway, there’s only a dinner jacket left. And tails and topper.’
‘You’re still ahead of me, anyway.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’ve seen you in nurse’s uniform, country tweeds, and now an ordinary dress.’
‘Well, that’s–’ she paused and blushed. ‘I see what you mean.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘I’ll start preparing tea. You had better pull the blackout curtains, otherwise a warden will be banging on the door saying we’re showing lights.’
‘It might be a noisy night,’ he said. ‘Half moon, broken cloud, not much wind…’
‘I’ve been in London since the blitz started,’ she reminded him. ‘Willesborough is a new experience.’
They both heard the front door opening. ‘Damn!’ Clare exclaimed. ‘I wanted the kettle boiling when your mother arrived!’
Both women were secretly pleased to find that their original fears had been groundless. Mrs Yorke had quickly realized that Ned’s latest girlfriend was far from being a grasping young widow thirsting (lusting?) for a quick wartime romance and some good jewellery in payment, and Clare had found that Ned’s mother was gentle, decisive, well able to look after herself and certainly, not (as Clare had once feared) attempting to interfere in Ned’s life.
They were nibbling at some dried-up and bright yellow fruit cake made with powdered egg when Clare had realized that Ned was the head of the house: he owned the house (and probably everything in it) and his mother lived there as – well, guest, housekeeper, mother, châtelaine. It was obvious neither of them ever thought about it – the house near Willesborough was closed up and likely to be requisitioned ‘for the duration’, so Mrs Yorke quite naturally lived here in Palace Street, with a small oil portrait of her husband on the wall in the dining room and a photograph of him in a silver frame beside her bed. One day Ned would marry and Mrs Yorke would move out to leave the house to the new Mrs Yorke, but that was usual: these were the rules by which people like the Yorkes lived their lives.
Ned had – at Clare’s request – taken her into the room to show her the photograph of his father. The similarity between the two men was almost alarming, yet now she had met Mrs Yorke she saw that Ned had her smile, her chin, and her rather dry humour. The three Yorkes must have been an affectionate, closely knit family, and Clare had (inquiring about some other portraits on the dining-room wall) discovered the Yorkes had been shipowners until the First World War. They had flourished – according to Mrs Yorke, who seemed to view them with affectionate irony – in Nelson’s day, continued to run their ships profitably during the Crimean War, started to find profits were becoming sporadic at the time of the Boer War, and finally gone under at the end of the Kaiser’s War.
The various members of the family had not starved but Clare sensed that Yorke House and the Palace Street house represented all that was left of Ned’s share: death duties, a need to adapt a Bentley attitude to an Austin income, meant that they had learned from experience that it was better to have a few of the best rather than a lot of the second best; they would never come to terms with Bakelite and chromium plate but they understood the decline that Gibbon was describing.
She was surprised – startled and frightened in an odd sense she could not explain to herself – to find Ned was the last of the Yorkes: in one war the family had been all but wiped out. Four of five Yorke sons had died fighting in the Kaiser’s War, and the fifth had been Ned’s father. Only two of the four had been married; only one had a child, a girl, who was Ned’s first cousin, a don and a spinster at one of the women’s colleges. So from five Yorkes the family had been mown down – Clare was satisfied with the phrase; it summed up all its dreadful tragedy – from five brothers to one son.
Because she was a woman with her normal sensitivity heightened by a new and unexpected love, Clare looked across at Ned and wondered if in fact the family was not already as good as wiped out. She could see him lounging comfortably in grey flannel bags and a tweed sports jacket, the left hand held awkwardly, almost askew, because he still had not become accustomed to it. Although the uniform, the DSO, the war, the Battle of the Atlantic, were for the moment ignored, away to the westward was the broad sweep of the Atlantic, torn by torpedoes and bombs. Ned knew all the time and accepted it, and so did his mother, but Clare suddenly realized with a shock that was almost physical that within months of going back to sea he would probably be killed: that was simple mathematics, not cowardliness or heroics. She realized at that moment that Ned so accepted it as his duty that he never even hinted at it, and that was his mother’s attitude. She could see her son depart for the war and death, and accept it as duty: his duty to go; her duty to have had a son who was available to go if the need arose.
It was not blind acceptance of fate, though; Clare needed only to remember the ribbon of the DSO, and Ned’s determination to get his left arm working again. A functioning left arm and hand meant returning to sea, going back to his beloved destroyers. It was a miracle that had saved his arm – and as far as she was concerned another that had just given him an appointment in the Admiralty. It must be an odd job and presumably would not last long, and she was slightly irritated that he would not talk about it. She knew him well enough to understand he was not being deliberately reticent to disguise the fact he had been given a glorified clerk’s job because of his arm. No, he was not talking about it because it was something secret and something which had made him preoccupied, almost tense, since he left Willesborough. Well, anything that kept him on land was welcome. She was being selfish – or was it protective? Men fought for their country; women fought for the men they loved.
Mrs Yorke spoke that pleasant shorthand used by intelligent and self-assured people. Clare sensed, after only a quarter of an hour, that this woman with prematurely white hair, aquiline nose, finely carved features and the hands of a pianist already saw (and accepted) her as a possible daughter-in-law, and while it was still on the ‘Miss Exton–Mrs Yorke’ level she had said, casually, ‘Any relation to Charles Exton?’
‘Yes, he was my father. You knew him?’
The woman seemed to go away for a few moments and then come back as if she had left briefly to glance back over a wall into the past. She gave a slow smile. ‘Yes, quite well. He went to school with my husband; they served together in the same battalion in the First World War. He was one of the most handsome men I ever met.’
Ned sat up, startled. ‘Good heavens mother, I didn’t connect…’
‘There’s no reason why you should: we always referred to him as “Charles”. I doubt if you ever heard us using his surname.’ She turned to the girl. ‘He must have died when you were quite young, Clare.’
‘Seven. But he’d…’
Mrs Yorke nodded. ‘I know. Your mother behaved splendidly.’
‘She didn’t have any choice.’
‘Oh yes, she did, you know,’ Mrs Yorke said mildly. ‘Any woman whose husband deserts her can always comfort herself with drink, a series of lovers, or a mild affair with the gardener. Or she can remarry.’
‘Which is what my mother did.’
Ned, puzzled, asked: ‘What happened to your mother?’
Guessing the girl would prefer not to explain it herself, Mrs Yorke said quietly, the sympathy quite evident in her voice: ‘Clare’s father ran off with another woman, and Clare’s mother married again. Happily, I believe?’ When Clare nodded, Mrs Yorke said: ‘Her new husband, Clare’s stepfather, was badly wounded and captured at Dunkirk. He was not a young man, naturally, but the Germans refused to include him in the exchange of prisoners. I believe that he was in a special camp with others that the Germans might try to use as hostages. Anyway, he died last year.’
Ned tried to remember the details of Dunkirk, but all memories of people, of accounts heard later and wardroom gossip, were blurred by the overpowering memory of smoke over the beaches and the rows of hopeful faces up to their chins in water and shaded by steel helmets as the soldiers waded out to boats which ferried them to the waiting rescue ships. The insane scream of dive-bombers, the raucous chatter of the destroyer’s guns… The dash back each time to Harwich with the decks so crowded it was hard to distinguish the ship for khaki-clad men, all cheerful once they were sure they were on board a British destroyer. Then suddenly it came to him who Clare’s stepfather was. As he glanced up and caught her eyes he realized that the only remarkable thing was that they had never met before.
‘How do you do,’ he grinned, and from her chair she mimed a curtsy. Then, unexpectedly, she turned to Mrs Yorke and said: ‘I was married. My husband was killed in the RAF.’
Mrs Yorke nodded. ‘Your mother told me all about it before she died. We had met at a WVS reception. You know how old women gossip.’ There had been a faint emphasis on the ‘all’.
Clare had noticed it and said: ‘You’re not old; but I’m glad you gossiped. It saves me having to explain.’
‘When people meet and fall in love,’ Mrs Yorke said, a hand going up instinctively to make sure her hair was tidy, ‘there’s nothing to explain. Perhaps to fill in some answers for Donne, but only with affection.’
‘Donne?’ Clare asked. ‘You mean John Donne?’
‘Mother is a romantic,’ Ned said, and quoted:
‘“I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov’d? Were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?”’
Clare smiled and, watching Ned, said: ‘I can only answer, kind sir,
“Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, in love’s philosophy.”’
Mrs Yorke stood up and looked affectionately at Ned and said ‘Another line of Donne is also appropriate – “Go, and catch a falling star” – and I’ll go and put that scrawny rabbit in the oven: dinner is going to be late.’ Just then the rising and falling of the air raid sirens cut through the night. She looked at her watch. ‘Hmm, they’re late, too.’