For one who has led as I have done, a scattered, travelling life, middle age has its own special compensations. I have, for example, acquired by now so wide an acquaintance that I never board a boat, check in at a hotel, disembark at a foreign port, without the thought, “Whom out of the past shall I run into here!’ It is fascinating to see how people change over the years.
One of the most exciting encounters of this kind came my way in the spring of 1950. I had been commissioned to write a series of articles on the smaller British West Indian islands. I was already familiar with them, but there were several that I had not visited since the war. I went to St. Kitts, Montserrat, Antigua, then I booked a passage for St. Vincent. I boarded the boat in the late afternoon; by the time I had unpacked it was close on six and I went into the bar. In the doorway I checked, delighted. There are few people I could have been more glad to meet unexpectedly than Lily Martyn.
I had seen her last in Baghdad, in the last year of the war, when we were both employed in Military Intelligence. She still looked twenty-four, but that did not surprise me. She was the type—tall, slim, dark-haired, clear-skinned—that does not alter between eighteen and forty; I was, however, surprised to see her drinking Coca-Cola. In Baghdad, though she took wine with meals, she refused cocktails. She did not trust hard liquor, she explained; she might give away State secrets. It was a wise precaution. Whisky was in short supply and Cyprus gin and Persian vodka were a lethal mixture. But that was wartime and in Baghdad. This was peacetime in the Caribbean.
She was alone and I sat beside her. ‘Still on the wagon, then?’
She smiled.
‘It’s as hard to break yourself of a good habit as a bad.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘My mother died. I came into some money. I’d an idea of coming out to settle. I thought I’d have a look and see. I’m trying Dominica first.’
That meant she would be getting off next morning. We would only be fellow passengers for half a day.
‘We must make the most of it,’ I said. ‘Let’s dine at the same table. Tell me about yourself.’
‘There’s not much to tell. I stayed on in Baghdad another year after you’d left. Then Daddy died. I came home to look after my mother.’
‘You’ve not remarried?’
‘No.’
It was strange she hadn’t. She was the type that attracted men and her husband had been killed on the Dunkirk beaches. She ought to have got over it by now. But then from the start she puzzled me.
From the very start.
As the liaison link between my branch and hers, I had met her at the Baghdad Airport.
‘Tell me about this place,’ she said.
It was then late April and I described the long, hot, arid summer that lay ahead, with the temperature hovering between 100° and I20°, one day like the last and no hill station, the desert on every side.
‘How about the flies?’ she asked.
‘There are none after June. The heat kills them off.’
‘What about the people?’
‘Baghdad’s a large Arab city with a small British community living on its fringe. There’s the Embassy and the men in oil and the men in trade. At the moment it’s a G.H.Q. with all that goes with that.’
There was plenty of social activity, I told her. There was the Alwiyah Country Club with its tennis courts and swimming pool and Saturday-night dances. The British residents were hospitable and most weeks one of the messes threw a party. ‘The males outnumber the females by thirty-five to one,’ I added.
She let that one pass.
‘What do you make of it yourself?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been here twenty months. I loathed the first three weeks, but the place grows on you. You are so far from everything. It gives you a sense of comradeship, like shipwrecked sailors.’
‘An island in the desert. That might suit me very well.’
It was a strange thing to say; it was said too in a strange tone of voice. I started to feel curious.
I felt more curious as the weeks went by. I saw quite a lot of her. My office hours were long, eight to one and half past four to eight, and I was always glad of an excuse to leave my desk. She worked on the east bank of the Tigris in a dignified old Turkish house. It was pleasant to row across the river in the late afternoon when the heat of the day had lessened and a sun-shot, dust-laden haze lay over the mosques and minarets, over the low ochre-brown mud-houses and the blue-tiled domes; and it was more than pleasant when our ‘shop’ was finished, to sit gossiping on her veranda in the cool of a shaded courtyard in which a fountain played. She was agreeable company, even-tempered with an occasional unexpected flash of wit. We soon became good friends. I went there oftener than our work required. One way and another I met her on an average three times a week. Yet when a year later I left Baghdad, I knew her no better than I had when she arrived.
I was not the only one she puzzled. To the many young and eligible officers who had been deprived for upwards of two years of feminine society, she was a cause of considerable concern. She was not shy. She seemed to have no inhibitions. There was nothing spinsterish about her. She was after all a widow. Yet her many suitors were given very clearly to understand that ‘that’ was ‘not her game’. I rather fancied indeed that she showed such a flattering preference for my company largely because I was neither young nor eligible.
Several of my friends brought their perplexities to me.‘I can’t make head or tail of her,’ they’d say. ‘She was only married a few weeks. Her husband has been dead four years. She ought to have got over it by now. One ought to be resilient at twenty-four, particularly in wartime.’
They all made the same complaint. She didn’t look cold; they didn’t believe she was cold. She was just not interested. What did I make of it?
I was as much in the dark as they were. On the surface she was a straightforward person. The facts of her life were in Who’s Who: her father an admiral who had been knighted, her mother the daughter of an Indian civil servant; two brothers and a sister; a place in Devonshire; no scandal, no divorce. But I could not forget that first remark about ‘the island in the desert’. Surely it could only have been made by someone with something on her mind.
She was also, I suspected, on her guard. Did she really refuse cocktails on grounds of military security or was she afraid of giving herself away.
I only caught one clue as to what might be worrying her. At the time that England was being attacked by buzz-bombs, someone made a remark at a mess party about wishing the Germans would fight clean. She flared up instantly.
‘Fight clean! We aren’t living in the days of the Crusades and the Knights of the Round Table. War’s filthy. Let’s accept the fact. Let’s win by any weapons we can find: bomb hospitals, poison drinking wells. Use everything that’ll end it quickly. Thank heaven the Germans are realistic. Let’s hope we follow their example.’
It was said indignantly, and there was an awkward pause. She recovered quickly.
‘I’m sorry. It’s the heat,’ she said, ‘and that’s a hobby-horse of mine. I’m off it now.’
It was an unexpected outburst. But the mess discounted it. ‘No wonder she feels bitterly,’ they said. ‘She’s lost her husband. She loathes the whole idea of war, thinks of it as a crime. That’s why she’s the way she is. She lives on the surface, friendly but not more than friendly. Now and again the surface cracks.’
I nodded in agreement. It sounded plausible. Yet somehow I did not feel the explanation was so simple. The outburst had been so very vehement and I could not forget that phrase, ‘an island in the desert’. I could not rid myself of the feeling that she was trying not only to get over something but to escape from something. It would be interesting, I felt, to see what she did after the war. It was surprising to discover now that she had spent four years buried in the country with an ageing mother.
‘Wasn’t it very dull?’ I asked.
‘There was no one else to do it.’
Or rather there was nothing else she thought more worth doing. People don’t sacrifice themselves unless they want to. I watched her as we talked. There were lines now between mouth and nostril. In a way it was a more interesting face, but there was an air of strain. She refused a cigarette. ‘I only smoke after meals,’ she said. Was that in self-defence to stop being a chain-smoker? Because her hands were idle she had developed a trick of twiddling a curl of hair behind her ear. A sudden gust of wind blew a plastic ashtray on to the floor; she started. Her nerves were definitely on edge.
We had champagne for dinner. ‘This is like old times,’ she said. We chattered about mutual friends, reminding ourselves of this and the other joke. She was gay and friendly. By and large she was the friendliest person I have ever known. It is easy to explain why you dislike a person, it is not difficult to explain why you’re in love with someone, but it is very hard to explain what it is that makes you really like a person. I think that in her case it was that warm, fresh friendliness. I wished that I were disembarking in Dominica.
‘Why don’t you? It’s not too late to change your mind,’ she said.
I shook my head.
‘I’m on a job. I’ve got all the dope I need on Dominica.’
‘You know it well then.’
‘As well as you can know any place where you haven’t lived.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I shrugged.
‘It’s a funny place. It’s an island of contradictions and of contrasts. Its mountains are its pride and beauty. When the sun shines you wonder how green can have so many shades, but half the time you can’t see the mountains because of cloud; the mountains attract the rain, and the rain makes the valleys fertile; the best fruit in the world is grown here, but the rain washes away the roads and the peasants can only market their produce by carrying it to the coast upon their heads. One thing cancels out another. The island’s always in the red. It’s a curious place. It attracts misfits and eccentrics.’
‘Misfits and eccentrics.’ She repeated the phrase in the same way that six years back she had repeated the phrase ‘an island in the desert’ as though it were the clue to something.
‘When were you there last?’ she asked.
‘Two years ago.’
‘Did you meet a man called Douglas Eliot?’
‘Indeed I did.’
In a way he was a typical Dominican, an ex-Army officer on the edge of thirty who had come out with a pension and a small private income and large plans to make coffee pay. The plans came to nothing, but he stayed on. He was tall, blond, with a florid complexion and large features. He walked with a roll. He looked and probably was an athlete who was letting himself grow flabby. I had enjoyed his company. He had been a prisoner in the Second War; I had been one in the First. We compared experiences, we discussed books about prison life. I asked him if he’d read E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room. ‘No,’ he said, but he knew Cummings’s poetry. He had read a surprising amount of modern poetry. We were talking about Dylan Thomas when someone interrupted us.
‘What’s he doing there?’ she asked.
‘Not very much.’
‘Is he married?’
‘He wasn’t then.’
‘Any entanglement?’
‘Nothing of any consequence.’
‘What does he do all day?’
‘His place has an acre or two of ground. That means some daily chores. He plays a little tennis. He’s in the club every night.’
‘Is he drinking?’
‘Everyone drinks in Dominica. He does his share. Why are you so interested?’
‘I briefed him for the Commando mission that he got captured on.’
‘I didn’t know he was a Commando.’
’No? Well, he might not mention it.’
She said it on an off-hand note, but it had an undercurrent of something I could not place. I had never seen her so absorbed by anything.
‘It shouldn’t be difficult to find him, should it?’ she continued.
‘The easiest thing possible. He’s at the Paz every morning by eleven.’
‘What’s the Paz?’
‘A bar attached to a hotel. You might call it “The Beachcombers Arms”.’
‘Will you take me there tomorrow?’
‘Of course. It’s where I’d have gone anyhow.’
My ship sailed for St. Vincent in the afternoon. The Paz was the likeliest place for me to pick up the threads of gossip.
We dropped anchor next morning soon after eight.
It was not actually raining when we went ashore, but the sky had a sodden look and mists lay low along the valley.
‘Is it often like this?’ she asked.
‘Too often. It’s what gets people down. They feel imprisoned, shut in by all these mountains that they never see.’
She booked into her hotel, then we toured the town. Roseau with its low dun-coloured houses and its puddled streets looked dingy. Even the market-place was drab. Within an hour we had seen it all.
‘Let’s go to the Paz,’ she said.
Though it was only a little after ten, already there were seven men at the bar. They were variously dresssed in khaki trousers, bush shirts and shorts. They were white or white enough to pass as white. In the centre of the line was a man in a gabardine suit that though unpressed was relatively clean.
‘That’s him,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Shall I bring him over?’
‘Please.’
I walked across. I let my hand fall on his shoulder. He lifted his head, blinked, tried to focus me. I introduced myself. ‘Of course, it is. Why, what the hell,’ he said.
’Will you have a drink?’ I asked.
‘Why not.’
Because he was fair-haired, it was not immediately apparent that he had not shaved that morning. His polka-dot red tie was knotted so high that its first inch was crumpled. He was not so much grubby as ill-kempt. He smelt, but not offensively, of rum. Two years ago he had looked flabby. He was bloated now.
‘What’ll you have?’ I asked.
‘The wine of the country. Rum and water.’
I gave the order to the barmaid.
‘There’s someone here who knows you. Would you like to join us?’
He swung round on his stool, glanced, then stared, then started.
‘Why, so there is,’ he said. He walked across to her. ‘Why, look who’s here,’ he said.
They did not shake hands. They looked at each other very straight.
‘The small back room near Baker Street,’ he said.
‘The small back room near Baker Street,’ she echoed.
There was a sudden dramatic tension in the air. I remembered that the London Headquarters of her outfit had been near Baker Street.
‘You haven’t changed,’ he said.
‘Nor’ve you, at least not much.’
‘We can cut that out, can’t we?’
‘I spotted you at once.’
‘That’s a relief, anyhow.’
His voice had a half-sneer to it. The barmaid brought the drinks and he sat down. He put both hands to his glass. They were long, narrow-fingered, wide, short-nailed, well-cared-for hands.
‘Only my second today. I’m never quite normal till I’ve had my third,’ he said.
‘I’ve always wondered what had happened to you,’ she said.
‘The Germans got me.’
‘I knew that; but afterwards.’
‘They put me in a prison camp.’
‘And then?’
’That was all there was to it.’
‘I see.’
‘What else could there have been to it.’
‘I don’t know. I wondered.’
‘What could you have heard to make you wonder.’
‘Nothing. I just did wonder.’
‘You’ve not been sent here by those boys in Baker Street,’
‘How could I?’
‘Aren’t you with them still?’
‘I don’t even know if they exist.’
‘What happened to you, then.’
‘I was posted to Baghdad. I was there two years. Then Daddy died. I came home to look after my mother.’
‘What are you doing here?’
She told him what she had told me. There was a pause. He seemed to want to say something, but thought better of it. She took up the lead.
‘That small back room near Baker Street. February 1944. Six years and it seems yesterday. I’ll never forget the way you looked when you came in; so buoyant, on top of everything.’
‘And so I was. Is that so surprising? After all those months of training to have the chance I’d prayed for, a genuine commando mission: to be dropped behind the lines in France. And it all turned upon this interview. Did you guess how desperately keen I was to make a good impression?’
‘That’s why they chose me for that job, because I could spot those whose hearts were in it.’
And as part of that job, she had taken, as I had for mine, an interrogation course. We had both learnt how to extract the truth from prisoners and from suspects. I knew what she was doing, creating a mood in which he would find himself making admissions without knowing it.
‘You were the exact type that we were looking for,’ she said.‘I knew that from the start. There wasn’t any real need for an interview, but I was having such a good time gossiping.’
‘Don’t you think I was too.’
‘Do you remember saying …?’ She had started him on a trail of reminiscence, leading him to recall this, to recall that. I might not have been there at all. I signalled to the barmaid for another round. He barely acknowledged its arrival.
‘How long did we go on gossiping?’ she said.
‘Over forty minutes.’
‘And with all those other candidates outside.’
They laughed together. He was utterly relaxed, and off his guard. The tension gone. She had done a lovely job, got him where she wanted him.
‘Do you remember your promise that if I came back safe, my first night home you’d dine with me?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
Their voices had grown soft. His face wore a brooding look. He had become in memory the volunteer of twenty-five on the threshold of high adventure. What had happened in six years to turn that brisk young officer into this rum-sodden beachcomber? Why had the bright steel rusted?
‘As I walked away up Baker Street,’ he said, ‘the sun was shining. It was one of those miraculous February days when summer seems round the corner. The world lay at my feet. In a week I should be across the Channel. It was a short mission, a few messages to be delivered, a few reports to be received; by the end of the month I should be back, dining at some corner table. Life was a shop window waiting to be rifled.’
He paused and shrugged.‘I haven’t felt that way since,’ he said.
‘Was it all that bad in prison?’
‘Oh, no, it wasn’t that.’ He checked. He looked at her enquiringly.
‘You really haven’t heard?’ he asked.
‘Heard what?’
‘What happened afterwards.’
‘What could I hear?’
He shrugged, laughed ruefully.
‘And I’d supposed you had. I’d assumed you had. That you must have, being in that racket. I’d wondered how you’d felt. I dreaded to know. Yet I ached to know. It was the one thing that mattered, how you felt about it, how you judged me. And now to realize that you’d never heard.’
’You’d better tell me, hadn’t you?’
‘I suppose I had.’
He leant forward across the table, on his elbows, his glass between his hands. Yes, she had got him where she wanted him. He was hypnotized. I felt I had no business there, but was afraid that if I moved I should break the spell.
‘Have you read Odette? he said.
‘No, but I know about it.’
‘You know what the Germans did if you had any information they could use. Well, I broke down under it.’
It was the most sensational admission I had ever heard, and it could not have been made less dramatically; there was no self-pity in his voice.
‘I’d always thought that when the pain became too great you just passed out,’ he said.‘I didn’t, and my nerve broke.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing. I’d served their purpose. I’d told them all I knew. I was a prisoner like any other.’
‘No special treatment?’
‘I could have had, I suppose. But they didn’t press me. I was a coward, not a traitor. I wouldn’t broadcast for them. I was sent to an ordinary camp. You can imagine how I felt after the D-day landings, wondering how many Englishmen I’d killed. I wanted to get away by myself, and of course I couldn’t. I wanted to get drunk, but I was only allowed to cash small cheques. I could only afford to get drunk once a week.’
‘And after the war?’
‘Something I’ve never understood. When the Germans collapsed, I started to worry on my own account. I’d got over my sense of guilt, or at least the acuteness of it. What was done was done and we were winning. In a few weeks I should be back in England. I began to wonder how much was known about me. Surely something must be. I’d given away valuable information. References must have appeared in Intelligence reports. Some of them would fall into Allied hands. I was really frightened.
‘Can you imagine how I felt back in England, being fêted as a returned hero, having to lie and lie? Each week I read about some new traitor who’d been arrested; someone who’d talked over the wireless or given away information. Sooner or later they’d get round to me. I pictured the disgrace, the court martial, the prison sentence. I toyed with the idea of suicide. I avoided my old friends; I sat in a dark corner of my club drinking the afternoon away. I’d talk to strangers in a bar. I made no effort to find myself a job. I laid in a store of sleeping pills instead. And then the surprise came —a letter from the War Office, awarding me the honorary rank of captain in recognition of my exceptional services, and an annuity of £500.
‘It was a mistake, of course. But I’d have been a fool not to turn it to account. I’d no need now to hunt myself a job. That pension with the small private income that I had would let me escape from England, away from my fellow countrymen and all their talk about the war and what they’d done in it. I got my atlas out. The West Indies were a long way off. The war had scarcely touched them. There’d be very few ex-soldiers there. If there had been no currency regulations, I’d have gone to a French island, Martinique or Guadeloupe. But Dominica’s not too bad a substitute. And that’s what put the water into this coconut,’ he concluded.
He had told his story quietly, calmly, his eyes fixed all the time on her, completely indifferent to my presence.
‘What about your music? You told me that you wanted to become a pianist,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘That’s another reason why I decided to come out here. I wanted to forget that ambition by making it impossible.
A piano won’t stand this climate. Insects eat the felt.’
‘So you don’t do anything?’
‘Nothing that I’d have called anything ten years ago. I’m thirsty.
Won’t you change your mind and have a real drink now?’
She shook her head. ‘Too early, I’m afraid.’
‘Too early. I’d have thought too late. I can’t drink alone. I’ll rejoin my friends.’
He rose and held out his hand, his long, well-tended hand that alone had survived the change.
‘I’ve always hoped we’d meet again,’ he said. ‘I’ve often thought about that small back room near Baker Street, and the man I was that day. You are the last person who ever saw that man; I’m glad to have got this off my chest. You’re the only person in the world I could have told it to. I’m glad you haven’t changed, that nothing’s happened to make you different. I wished I could have made that date. Good luck.’
He moved over to the bar, perched himself upon the stool and caught the bar-girl’s eye. He didn’t give an order. She took his glass and filled it.
‘Let’s go,’ Lily said.
We had been barely an hour in the Paz, but Dominica, in that short time had staged one of its transformations. The sky had cleared. The clouds had lifted from the lower mountains. The puddled streets were glistening in the sunlight, the dun-coloured buildings wore a gleam of gold.
‘Let’s take a drive,’ I said.
We drove out to the Morne, a high hill behind the town. There was a seat there, and we left the car. Below us stretched the broad green valley with its neat rows of lime trees divided every twenty yards by the tall thin galba trees that stood as wind-breakers. It looked very fresh and clean after the rain, and Roseau had lost its lack of colour with the general effect of amber relieved here and there by the bright scarlet of the tulip tree and the vivid canary yellow of the Poui.
‘Do you see how this place could grow on you?’ I asked.
She nodded. During the drive out she had scarcely spoken.
‘What did you make of all that?’ she asked.
‘Did he really look the way he said in ‘44?’
‘Yes, just like that.’
‘That talk about a date, was it all on his side, or did you feel something too?’ She pursed her lips.
‘I lied when I told you that I came out here with the idea of settling. I didn’t. I heard he was here. I came out to see him.’
I had the sensation of something under my heart going round and over, an acute sense of sympathy and fellow feeling. Basically her life must be all wrong. Otherwise she wouldn’t have let herself vegetate in a Wessex village, otherwise I should not have noticed those signs of strain. It was pathetic to think of her, wondering during those long slow passing years whether that bright young officer met for forty minutes in a small back room near Baker Street might not be the solution to her problems; to think of her corning all that way, and to find this; now she had nothing left.
I sought for the right words of sympathy; sought and could not find them.
She spoke first.
‘Did anything in that story strike you as odd?’ she asked.
‘That pension did.’
‘I thought it would. Exceptional services indeed. I’ll say they were. They were worth five divisions to us, at the least. You saw something, didn’t you, of “deception” when we were in Baghdad?’
I nodded. ‘Deception’—the giving of false information to the enemy, was a highly organized industry in World War II. Myself, I only touched its fringe. But I saw enough to recognize how intricate a game it was. We once found an enemy agent with a wireless transmitter. We put him behind bars and continued to operate his set, sending misleading information to the Germans. The Germans discovered we were doing this; so we had to start sending a different kind of information. We had, in fact, to start telling them the truth, because they would not believe it. Had they discovered later that we knew they knew, we would have returned to telling lies. It became most involved. But, as I said, I only touched the fringe. She was right inside it. I waited for her explanation.
‘In February 1944,’ she said, ‘during D-day planning, it became highly important to confuse and mislead the Germans. Some very ingenious devices were employed. You’ve read of the actor who was dressed up like Montgomery and sent to Gibraltar. His presence was reported to Berlin. The Germans couldn’t believe an invasion was imminent when the British Commander-in-Chief was in Gibraltar. There were quite a few plans like that. My chief thought out a very pretty one. We’d drop behind the lines a Commando volunteer whose nerves we had reason to believe would give way under torture. We would prime him with false information that he would believe was true; then we would warn the Germans through one of our double agents. He would be captured at once.
To begin with, he’d be brave enough. When he broke down, his subsequent sense of guilt and of remorse would be so acute that the Germans would be convinced that he had told the truth. The success of the scheme depended on the prisoner’s own belief that he had betrayed his countrymen.’
‘You couldn’t be sure he would break down.’
‘I know, but even so his capture would be useful. That double agent was worth two divisions. The Germans were getting restive. It was high time he reinstated himself with a piece of genuine information.’
Inside myself I shivered. I had known that such things were threatened, I had been told such things were done, but this was the first actual example I had had.
‘I thought I was unshockable,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
‘How do you think I felt? At first I wouldn’t touch it, but they talked me into it. War was war, they said. You couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Generals made feint attacks, sent whole battalions to their death. “Suppose,” they said, “you, as a general, had ordered a feint attack upon a certain hill. The attack could only be effective if the regiment making it was convinced that the whole issue of the battle depended on its success. You’d lie to the colonel, wouldn’t you?” That was the argument they used and they were right. War’s basically a crime. Use the sharpest weapon.’
She spoke bitterly in the same tone that I had heard her use at Baghdad all those years ago when she had defended the use of buzz-bombs.
‘What made you suspect he would break down?’ I asked.
‘Did you notice his hands? He told me that he wanted to become a pianist. The artist, in the last analysis, will sacrifice anything, even his country, for his art.’
‘Was that all you went on?’
‘No, of course not. I had to make more certain first. You only heard half the story. It was true about that date when he came back, but there was a whole lot more to it than that. We had a date that very evening. I forced his hand on that one. He asked me where I’d like to dine. I suggested Boulestin. It was underground and there was spasmodic bombing. It was a very cosy dinner. I felt that I had known him all my life. “Now what about a night-club?” he suggested. I shook my head. “My flat’s quite close. I’ve a piano. Let’s go there.” I had it all planned out, you see. I wanted to hear him play.
‘He played … well, he was out of practice and I’m no judge but I watched his hands, the way his finger-tips now struck, now caressed the keys. … I had no doubt at all he had the artistic temperament. He played to me for half an hour. “Now you deserve a drink,” I said. I had an open fire and we sat before it. “I promised not to talk shop,” he said. “But won’t you put me out of my misery. Do I get that job?” “Of course you do,” I told him. Perhaps I made a mistake in telling him. It was just too much for him: pride in his own achievement, the imminence of danger and of parting, the growing intimacy between us, it was too heady a wine. He started to make love to me.’
She paused, she shrugged. ‘He was going to danger and I was sending him—to worse than danger. I owed it to him to make his last hours happy. Women have a sense of sacrifice to men going overseas; they want to give something too. Besides, in my case, how shall I put it, but that side of things … I loved my husband. I was in love with him, but when you’re young and inexperienced and unformed … it’s more general I think than women will admit … the actual act of love meant nothing to me, except for the happiness it gave him. I wondered why there was so much talk about it …. You can be very nonchalant, you know, with regard to something that means very little to you when you know that it means a lot to someone else; so that when Douglas started to make love to me, I thought, “I must give him all the happiness I can.” But then …’
She paused again.
‘I don’t know what it was,’ she said. ‘The moment, the mood, the music, something special about him, his hands perhaps, that sense of touch, but suddenly, deliriously, I knew what all that talk was about in books. It shattered me.
‘He had to leave early in the morning to get back to camp. Can you imagine how I felt as I watched him go down the street; to have found him at last and then to have to lose him and under such conditions? Can you imagine the torture that I went through all that day? I tried to console myself with the thought that I wasn’t sending him to death. I repeated the arguments my seniors had given me, that we weren’t living in the days of the Crusades, of Arthurian tournaments. What was one Commando officer against five divisions? I reminded myself that I had taken on this job, that I was a sailor’s daughter, that I had been trained to believe in duty, that my father had risked his life, my husband given his life for his country. Who was I now to shirk my duty?
‘I believe actually, in the last analysis, that if I hadn’t been involved myself, I’d have called the whole thing off, told my superiors that it was a dirty business and walked out on it, but my own personal happiness was at stake. I couldn’t put that before my duty. I sent his name in. A week later he was in German hands.’
She paused. She smiled wryly.
‘Maybe it was telepathy,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should find if we could get the exact day and hour, that it was at the precise moment his nerve broke that mine did too. It was a complete collapse.’ She shrugged.
I had the explanation now of all in her that had puzzled me, that had puzzled all of us.
‘You know what happened after that, or you can guess,’ she said‘I couldn’t take it any more. I had to get away from all that office stood for, as far away as possible. That’s why they sent me to Baghdad. I might be able to forget in a whole new world. I couldn’t, though. I never have. All the time it’s haunted me, the memory of that small back room and what I did there. I wondered what I’d done to him, but I didn’t dare find out. I made my mother’s old age an excuse for staying where I was, but I had to face up to it in the end. Do you understand now why I came out here? I had to know the answer.’
And now that she knew it, what came next, I wondered. I offered such consolation as I could.
‘You shouldn’t feel too badly,’ I began. ‘There’s every kind of casualty in war. Think of the men who are maimed and blinded, who’ll never know a painless hour till they die. There are many worse lives than a beachcomber’s.’
She made no reply. She leant back against the seat, her hands clasped behind her head. I had no idea what she was thinking.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Why not move back on to that boat, come on to St. Vincent with me and let’s beat it up. There’s a lot of fun going there.’
She shook her head. ‘He’s here because of me; he’s my responsibility.’
‘Surely it’s rather late …’
She interrupted me.
‘He’s barely thirty-two, he’s basically strong. He’s not an alcoholic, simply a man who drinks too much. He could snap out of that. If he had a reason; most illnesses are mental. You know that.’
My spirits sank. There it went. That psychopathic jargon. The belief that a man was cured the moment he knew what was wrong with him.
‘Do you really think it’s going to make all that difference to be told that he saved five divisions, that he did perform exceptional services.’
‘Are you mad? How could I tell him that?’ She swung round and her eyes were angry. ‘What effect do you think that would have, to be told he’d been hand-picked for cowardice? If anything would drive a man to drink that would.’
‘What are you going to tell him then?’
‘That I’ve never loved anyone but him, that I’ve tried to forget him but I couldn’t; that I’ve come out only to see him, that I don’t care what he did: that he showed more courage in attempting that kind of mission than ninety-nine men in a hundred. I shall remind him that we’re both young, that we’ve the whole of our lives ahead of us.’
I was appalled; that persistent belief of women that they could reform a man; all those films and novels about the bad man being redeemed by the good woman’s love, and the way it was all confused with the maternal instinct and woman’s capacity for sacrifice. I could see now where it had been so important that the admission should come from him.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to make that sound convincing?’ I asked her.
’Of course I shall. It’s true.’
There was a look in her eyes that I had never seen before. ‘Do you think I’ve come out only on his account? You’re crazy. I can’t do without him. They talk about the one man for the one woman. I don’t say that’s true. I think for some women, certainly for myself, there are a dozen men who might be right. But when they have found a man who is right for them, they’re spoilt for the eleven others. When they’ve found that man, they’ve got to stick to him. That’s what I’ve got to do.’
She rose to her feet. She stood straight like a spear. Her eyes were shining. She was transformed, passionate, vibrant, vivid. For the first time I was seeing the real woman.
‘Do you think I’d have come here, if I wasn’t desperate; if I hadn’t experimented, tried every device, yes, every one. I’m as much a war casualty as he. But we can save each other. We’ve got to save each other. I can save us both.’
Her voice rang like a challenge, like the proud acceptance of a challenge. Behind her the mountains towered in the sunlight, their jagged peaks were sharp against the sky, deep green against deep blue. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago the landscape had been grey with cloud, a symbol of despair and gloom, a fitting backcloth for a beachcomber. There was a sense now of a whole world reborn.
‘I’ve got to make a go of it,’ she said. In her voice there was the glow of victory.
‘You will,’ I said. ‘You will.’