Ben reached to the telephone, checking the time simultaneously, realizing the operator might have sugared off home by now. When she did pack up – at about this time – she connected the outside world to the Duty Officer’s line. He himself didn’t have the duty tonight, thank God.
‘Yes, Commander?’
Still there. And that ‘Commander’ was what might be called greatly accelerated promotion. Saved her enunciating three syllables, anyway. He asked her, ‘See if you can get Second Officer Stuart at “F” Section for me, Hilda?’
Waiting, he eyed the paperwork he’d dealt with this afternoon, and shifted a few stray items into the ‘out’ basket. Nothing had been left undone, he thought. The secret of getting rid of bumph as soon as it hit your desk was to hate it so profoundly that you couldn’t stand seeing it lying around.
‘Commander?’
‘Yes, Hilda.’
‘Second Officer Stuart’s not in the building, they say.’
‘You and I ought to get jobs there, Hilda. They don’t even come to work.’
‘Well – that’d be nice!’
‘Anyway – I’m off now. Goodnight.’
It did seem that Marilyn never was in that bloody building. Not at any rate if she knew it was him calling: and it was impossible to get through without identifying oneself. It could have been paranoia that told him she was avoiding all communication with him, but if it was as it seemed, her consistency and obduracy suggested there’d have to be something more than just reluctance to tell him once again: ‘No, Ben – sorry. Nothing…’
May 29 today – Monday. He’d been in the job a month exactly, and spoken to her only once, since the day he’d gone along to meet Hallowell. The last time had been about a fortnight ago – no, less than that – May 19, the day after the moonless period, the motor gunboats’ last crossings. Between May 14 and 18 there’d been several deliveries on the Brittany coast and two pick-ups, one of some shot-down Americans from ‘Bonaparte’ beach and the other of three agents and a Spitfire pilot from Grac’h Zu. Both of which pinpoints were of still comparatively recent memory, to MGB 600’s former navigator. ‘Bonaparte’ was the nearest, in the Bay of St Brieuc, more specifically l’Anse de Cochat, and Grac’h Zu was several stages further west, a little beach enclosed between jagged rock defences which made for a tricky navigational approach. He could still see it in all its threatening detail: the rock called Meau Nevez for instance which was an essential marker on the run in. Not easy, especially in the high white winter seas as it often had been, and of course pitch darkness – a sine qua non, with German coastal defence posts within spitting distance of any of those pinpoints. Anyway – of the three agents brought out on May 18 one had been categorized as SIS, male, and the other two as SOE, one male, one female, and Ben had had his crazy, short-lived dream – despite knowing it couldn’t be her, not this soon. He’d asked Marilyn on May 19, ‘Couldn’t have been my girl, could it?’ and she’d told him patiently, ‘No, Ben. Heavens, no.’ She’d added, ‘If it had been, you’d have heard from me before this.’
‘Heavens no’, because otherwise it would have meant something had gone badly wrong, from SOE’s point of view. And in any case when she did come out – touch wood – it was more likely to be by Lysander, he guessed, than by sea. Or over the Pyrenees, for that matter. One thought of the Brittany-coast route because it had been – and still was, though less directly – one’s own business, but for all he knew she could be hundreds of miles from that coast. While another factor in his worrying – which he thought he might mention when or if he finally did get to talking to Marilyn, was that as she hadn’t agreed to give him bad news as well as good, he couldn’t ever rely on no news being good news.
News today incidentally – announced by Churchill in the Commons – was that 47 RAF officers had been shot by the Gestapo: having tunnelled out of a POW camp in Silesia and later been recaptured. If the report was accurate, it was cold-blooded murder. The Swiss government had been asked to investigate, Winston had told the House. But you could take it as read, Ben thought. It was how the Master Race displayed its superiority über alles.
And Rosie had been in those bastards’ hands once. It amazed as well as appalled him that she could have been through such an experience and have suffered since in the way he knew she had – knowing it through the nightmares, fits of terror in the small hours, Rosie a small frightened animal clinging to him, soaking wet and whimpering – and still, by her own deliberate choice, gone back.
It had had a lot to do with the SOE work she’d been doing here, preparing other agents and packing them off to take their chances and asking herself, Why her, not me? In her rare attempts to explain it to him, that had been most of it, and up to a point was understandable. The point – his – being that having done it twice already and both times got out only by a whisker she might have been satisfied to leave it at that. Although another element in it that he’d sensed – found hard to define but knew was there – was an assertion of her own Frenchness, combined with respect for the memory of her dead father.
As if it was something she owed him.
Ben checked that his safe was locked, locked the door of the office and took the key along to the colleague who had the night’s duty, went down to the street and limped up to Piccadilly. Might have a drink in Hachette’s, he thought, before getting on a bus. Thinking about Marilyn Stuart again, whether she was deliberately avoiding contact with him. SOE had several training establishments in different parts of the country, and as she was involved in the training programmes she obviously would be out of London much of the time. On the other hand, surely the message he’d left eight or nine days ago would have got to her and elicited some response? He’d told the girl he’d spoken to, ‘I’d like her to give me a ring so we can fix a lunch date, tell her’, and she’d said she would.
Leave it in her court, now? Bite on the bloody bullet?
Barrage balloons floated silver in the fading light. The last heavy raids had been three months ago – in February, when there’d been a week of it, the worst since May of ’41. In reprisal, it was said, against RAF and USAF raids on German cities including Berlin, where the Allies had been getting some of their own back, of late. In that same month, extraordinarily enough – February, when Ben had been in hospital – there’d been protests in the House of Lords against the bombing offensive. It had astonished all of them in his ward: remembering the Luftwaffe’s onslaught in ’40 and ’41, the shattering of Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, Hull, Liverpool, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, Belfast – and of course London. On one night in May of ’41 seven acres of the capital had gone up in flames, 1400 civilians had been killed. After those protests in the Lords, one of Ben’s fellow patients had expressed the view that the Germans were lucky they weren’t being carpet-bombed continually from frontier to frontier; and not even the nurses had disagreed.
Who’d started it all, anyway? Who’d set up the concentration camps and the gas chambers? Who’d voted the Nazis into power in the first place, screaming their Sieg Heils on cinema news-reels for the whole world to see and hear?
At the top of St James’ Street he turned right and then crossed over. Piccadilly was already thronged with tarts. All in pursuit of the Yanky dollar; there were droves of Yanks on the pavements too. Overpaid, over here, et cetera. A lot of the girls were amateurs who worked in munitions factories and took steps to avoid being on late shifts, so as to get out of their overalls and into tight skirts and lipstick and come tripping up to town.
At Hachette’s, in the bar off the curve of stairs leading down from street-level to the restaurant, there was a Coastal Forces book – as well as a Submarine book, and others – through which men on leave or in transit could contact any friends who might happen to be around. Ben glanced through it, saw a name or two but not of any particularly close mates. He drank one pint of the watery wartime beer – which cost him a shilling, but if they’d tried to sell it in Brisbane at any price might have provoked a riot – and then climbed back up, crossed the road and made his way towards the bus stop. The girls were out in force tonight, and he found himself repeating over and over, ‘No, thank you’, and ‘Not this evening, thanks.’ One of them, unwilling to accept the brush-off, joined him as he reached the bus queue, taking his arm and asking, ‘Where we going, darling?’ He gave it a moment’s thought – others in the queue were agog to hear his answer – then stooped to whisper in her ear, ‘You wouldn’t want what I got, sweetheart.’
Conveniently, the bus arrived at that moment. But she was a nice-looking kid, as it happened, and after a shrewdly assessing look at him she’d laughed; he waved goodbye to her from the platform, and she waved back, mockingly. There was only standing-room inside, but that was OK – with straps to hold on to, and he wasn’t going all that far. Swaying to the motion, he let his imagination wander: seeing that kid’s boyfriend or fiancé as a young soldier in hard-worn khaki, dented tin hat, eyes slitted against the Italian sun and with the ruins of Monte Cassino as a backdrop: and an air-letter form – which she’d have written a couple of weeks ago, already sweat-stained and slightly crumpled in his hand: Love you for ever, darling, keep yourself safe for me and please please come home soon…
Cassino had been taken by British and Polish troops just twenty-four hours ago, after some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
Rocking from Knightsbridge, after ten minutes or so, into the Brompton Road… At the next stop after that a seat close to him was vacated, but with his stiff knee it would have taken a lot of getting into, and as there were only a couple of stops to go, he didn’t bother. Instead he enabled a stout, grey-haired woman to squeeze past him and drop into it. She glanced up at him: ‘Thanks, love.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He moved his stick so she wouldn’t see it.
The bus pulled in to a stop opposite Thurloe Place, then bore left – southward – and after only one more halt was in Fulham Road, where he got off – it was easy enough as long as they gave you time and a bit of room – and waited to cross the road into Pelham Crescent. Wondering where Rosie might be now, this moment. And how she was, how it was going, whether she was confident or frightened, lonely or with good people. It would make an enormous difference, he imagined. In fact that was one of the awesome aspects of the job as one envisaged it – that image of her as so utterly alone.
But he did have to stop this, he realized. Take a grip: evolve some formula in his thinking to reduce the level of anxiety. She was there – no amount of worrying would change that. And Christ’s sake – if she could stand it…
Pelham Place now: and a short way up it on this side a terraced house, mellowed brick, faded blue shutters on the windows. Crumbly brick steps: he paused at the door, found his key and let himself in. He paused again then, hearing voices – and while pushing the door shut behind him he noticed on the hall table a rather smart forage-cap that didn’t belong here. Or anyway hadn’t up to this morning. Visitor, presumably: and he didn’t want to get caught up in anything – like sitting around making bloody conversation. He started quietly up the stairs. Left hand on the banister, stick assisting on the other side, his naval cap in that hand too. The stairs were awkward – two flights of them, steep and rather narrow.
‘Good evening, Commander!’
Professor Mallinson, Ben’s landlord: beaming up at him from the hall, having heard the front door, no doubt. He was a small man with bushy white hair, round face, thick glasses; he spoke seven languages fluently and worked at the BBC.
Ben had stopped – half turning, shifting the stick and cap hand to the banister. ‘How’re you doing, Prof?’
‘Very well, thank you. But, Commander – we have a very special friend of my wife’s here, and it transpires she’s also a friend of yours!’
He needed a pee rather badly: another reason for not having wanted to hang around. And Mrs Mallinson was frankly a bit of an old cow, so whatever friend this might be… He temporized, ‘If you’d give me a minute – get cleaned up—’
‘Ben?’
She’d emerged from the living-room down there. Joan Stack. In her MTC uniform. Gazing up at him: no smile, just that rather uncertain gaze.
‘Joan…’
‘Small world, Ben… And what’s this “Commander” business?’