Even at sea the sullen smell of smoke came, foul and threatening. Ashore, the build-up continued, lorries, men, guns and tanks moving steadily inland. Only a few German planes had appeared and the worst danger now was from falling splinters from the ack-ack shells. The night had been one of tension but there had been none of the expected counter-attacks and the men in the orchards and fields ashore had seen only shadows in the darkness as they lay in their slit trenches to write home that they were safe.
The morning had started with a raid by four Me 109s, which had come in low and fast, hit a ship with a small bomb, and flashed away over the hills, while every ship in sight had filled the sky with a rash of shellbursts. When Rodney arrived, swinging to the British beaches to the east, they knew the situation was safe, and suddenly the place was less like an enemy coast than Spithead as the great ship ran close along the shore, training her triple sixteen-inch turrets towards the land. Behind her came Warspite. She seemed to have been everywhere there had been trouble since the war began and the ship’s company crowded up to cheer her. Finally, other ships arrived and throughout the day there was always one of them in the assault area, firing its big guns through clouds of rolling cordite smoke.
Rumours were around that the Germans had improved on their glider bombs and lookouts were alert for rocket-propelled pilotless aircraft. As they headed back to Portsmouth to reammunition, just ahead of them they heard a tremendous bang and saw a huge cloud of smoke and water rise into the sky. Imagining it a ship that had hit a mine, they headed for the spot but found no trace of debris.
‘Flying bomb,’ Latimer said laconically. ‘We’ve just seen the first.’
Almost immediately the new blitz on London started.
After refuelling, they were back across the Channel, this time to the British beaches where the nights were becoming exciting as enemy planes arrived and E-boats came out, but by the middle of the month the shore was secure; and by the end, with the invasion moving northwards, the need for the big guns off the coast had vanished and they were recalled to England. With Chichester due for a major refit, Kelly was ordered to strike his flag and report to the Admiralty for instructions.
It was Corbett who met him as usual – a curiously shrunken Corbett – and he informed Kelly that he was to be given a shore job in Europe.
He held up his hands before Kelly could protest. ‘Admirals don’t always lead from ships these days, my boy,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll be wanted after the war’s over and you need experience of this committee work we go in for nowadays.’
It seemed Kelly’s name was being considered for a new task force which the Admiralty was considering for the Far East, comprised of battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, oilers, supply ships and every other kind of ancillary vessel, and he was being ordered to join the headquarters Ramsay was setting up in Normandy.
‘There’ll be a lot of rebuilding to do in Europe,’ Corbett said, ‘and you might as well be in on the ground floor.’
It seemed to be time to take up Verschoyle’s tip about Charley and, unable to face Biddy at Thakeham, he headed direct for Felixstowe. He still couldn’t thrust Paddy from his mind. She’d been all he’d hoped for from Charley – brave, forthright, undemanding, intelligent and full of spirit. He had managed at last to lose the image of her dying or lying on a littered beach with the sand in her hair and in her eyes. Now it was just the ache of bereavement, and a feeling of guilt because it was the Navy, in the end, which had killed her as surely as it had destroyed Charley.
Light Forces headquarters were in a pub, near the small boat basin, overlooking a concrete quay filled with gunboats and torpedo boats, and there were a great many incredibly young men about who made him feel aged. They looked like piratical schoolboys, with shabby uniforms smeared with grease and caps from which the wire had been removed.
The first person he met was Fanshawe. He was a captain now and he’d grown fat and bald.
‘They have a habit of entering harbour without lining the decks,’ he said. ‘They leave their ensigns at the masthead until they’re blown to threads. They aren’t very good at answering signals and in harbour you can never find them, because they spend all their time asleep except when there’s a dance on somewhere. But give them a job to do and they do it with aplomb and a hell of a lot of courage, though they sulk like prima donnas if they’re reminded they should enter harbour with their crews in some sort of uniform. In fact–’ Fanshawe grinned ‘–they remain entirely civilian at heart and nothing on God’s earth’s going to change their outlook. They belong to a different navy from mine and I love ’em.’
He knew Charley and listened to Kelly’s story quietly. ‘I thought you married her long since,’ he said.
‘No,’ Kelly said shortly.
‘No, I suppose not,’ Fanshawe agreed. ‘Because she’s a widow, now I come to think of it. I heard she’d been crossed in love or something, so she probably came here because everybody here’s so bloody young she didn’t have to fear one of them making propositions to her.’ He smiled. ‘Unfortunately, she’s just moved to Harwich.’
He laid on a boat and Kelly was driven across the river by one of the most beautiful girls he’d ever seen, so that he wondered again, as he always did, if the Navy, being sailors, always made sure there was no dearth of pulchritude. She gave him a salute that would have done the master-at-arms of Chichester justice and then a beaming smile that ruined it as she directed him to base headquarters.
Destroyers were coming in from their patrolling of the D-Day beaches and the place was full of activity. In the Communications Section, Wrens and civilian workers were sitting in front of telex and cipher machines and there seemed to be a constant hither and thither of messengers. There was no Charley.
‘She’s on leave,’ he was told.
‘Leave?’
‘We’re all entitled to a little, sir.’
Kelly’s heart began to sink. ‘Where does she live?’ he asked.
‘Here,’ they reassured him. ‘In Harwich. We’ve got her address.’
He found a taxi but the driver was a refugee from bombed-out London and, short of petrol, refused to cruise round looking for a street he didn’t know. Instead, he dropped Kelly nearby and left him to set off walking.
It was dusk by now and his face was grim. This time he had no intention of taking no for an answer. If Charley weren’t married already, he was determined to have her.
As he drew near the address he’d been given, the air raid sirens went but he told himself it couldn’t be much. The Luftwaffe was virtually finished and nowadays there were only the flying bombs. A policeman who saw him striding along thought differently. ‘You ought to be going to the shelter, sir,’ he said.
‘Bugger the shelter,’ Kelly growled.
It was only when he became aware of the clatter of what sounded like an enormous motor-cycle engine and heard the quadruple concussion of a salvo of ack-ack shells that he realised the area was more dangerous than he’d imagined and took shelter in an archway, deciding he wouldn’t be much good as a courtier if he were dead. A sailor sheltering with his girl friend stiffened at the sight of his braid and slammed him up a salute.
Kelly’s return salute was brief and indifferent and the sailor looked at his girl friend, pulled a face and started making plans to bolt as soon as he could. Bad-tempered admirals were best left alone.
The guns went again, banging away enthusiastically. The sound of the motorcycle engine had become shatteringly loud by this time and the sailor and his girl were looking up nervously. Having only just come from Normandy and not being so experienced with flying bombs, Kelly watched them to see what they did.
Suddenly, with a frightening abruptness, the sound of the motorcycle engine stopped dead, and a workman’s bus just down the road emptied at full speed, everybody running for shelter. The sailor’s girl friend, who seemed to know more about what to do than any of them, flung herself down, so Kelly did the same. He landed on top of her and the sailor landed on top of him, so that they were all huddled in a heap by the wall.
For a long time there was dead silence, almost as if the whole of Harwich were holding its breath, then there was a tremendous crash and the halted bus vanished in a sheet of flame. The blast lifted Kelly from the pavement and slammed him down again and he felt a rush of air strike him. Lifting his head, he saw the whole front of a row of terraced houses sliding down in a torrent of bouncing bricks and skating slates, and a vast flattened smoking area of sterile soil where the bomb had exploded.
He was about to scramble up when he realised he could hear another bomb coming and instead he clung to the sailor and his girl. Glass was tinkling all round him and pieces of metal from the bus were slamming and clanging down into the road. What seemed like tons of fragments of brick fell on him as he held his arms over his head, and a tremendous cloud of plaster dust welled up and spread over him. He felt the pavement lurch twice more as the second bomb landed and saw another sheet of flame spring up some distance away beyond the houses and a vast spiral of black smoke rising.
It seemed to be safe at last and he felt the sailor climb off him and in his turn he scrambled off the sailor’s girl friend. She looked scared as she pulled her dress down over her knees.
‘You hurt?’ Kelly asked.
‘No, sir,’ the sailor said. ‘She’s not hurt, are you, Dot?’
He seemed determined not to offend an admiral and the girl shook her head, more frightened of Kelly’s rank than of anything else. They dusted themselves down and shook off the fragments of glass and stone, and Kelly lent the girl a clean handkerchief to wipe the dust off her face.
‘Better keep it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see if there’s anything I can do.’
Near where the bus had been, a body was lying in the gutter. It had no head or arms and the stumps were pumping blood out at an extraordinary rate. Another man was vomiting by a wall nearby, a long stream of saliva hanging from his open mouth. Policemen and air raid wardens had appeared like magic, and one of them touched Kelly’s arm. ‘You all right, sir?’
Kelly stared down at himself. His braid was fouled with dirt and there was blood on his shirt cuff. What a bloody silly thing to do, he thought, nearly getting himself killed just when they’d upped him to rear-admiral.
Smoke was lifting into the air beyond the houses ahead and, knocking the dust from his uniform, he set off again. His stride was firm and his face was grim, but inside he was more uncertain than he’d ever been.
He became aware of more policemen, then he saw an ambulance and crowds on the pavement, and he began to hurry. Unable to get through, he pushed his way past, only to realise with a shock that the crowd was round the address he’d been given. There was a whole area of flattened houses such as he’d just left, with a further fringe of damaged ones where the blast had been less violent. A string of vehicles, fire appliances and ambulances had arrived and what looked like hundreds of men were picking among the rubble.
From among the wrecked houses on the edge of the crater, an ambulance man was just helping an elderly woman away. She was bleeding from cuts made by flying glass, her clothes were torn and were covered, like her face and hair, with a mask of pulverised plaster and soot. The whole street smelled of smoke, old dust and fear. Slowly he picked his way along it until he found the address he was seeking. Like the other houses, it had lost its facade, and the interior looked as though it had been – through a shredder. The wallpaper hung in strips and windows and doors were missing. The walls were pockmarked with fragments of stone and hedgehogged with jagged daggers of glass, while in the street below there were sickening splodges on the pavement which a workman was covering with sawdust.
His heart cold, he pushed forward, and was just on the point of asking a policeman whether he’d heard what had happened to the occupants when he saw Charley. She was sitting on a low wall, her face black, her clothes covered with dust, and she was clutching a silver frame, which he recognised at once from three years before as the one which had held the photograph of the dead RAF officer. He stopped, feeling that he’d been wrong to come, but then his heart went out to her and as he approached she lifted her face. Tears had made two pale runnels through the dirt on her cheeks, and she looked dazed, but he knew at once that she’d recognised him. She didn’t seem in the slightest surprised to see him and he saw her expression twist into anguish.
‘Oh, Kelly!’ she said, as if he’d seen her only the previous day, as if she’d been in touch with him through all the empty years. Then, as he lifted her to her feet and put his arms round her, she began to shiver and her face crumpled and the tears came. ‘Oh, Kelly, Kelly,’ she whimpered.
‘Thank God you’re safe,’ he said.
She seemed to recover a little and after a while the shuddering seemed to subside.
‘I was at the back when it happened,’ she was saying. ‘If I’d been at the front I’d have been killed. Everything’s gone. There’s nothing left worth having.’ Her head moved as if she were shaking it to try to put her senses in order. ‘I’ll have to find somewhere to live.’
‘There’s Thakeham, Charley.’ His arm still round her, he began to lead her away and, when an ambulanceman approached, his expression questioning, he shook his head.
Leaving her drinking tea at the police station, he set out to find a car. There appeared to be no taxi drivers with enough petrol to go beyond the city boundaries, but in the end he found a car hire firm with a load of black market fuel and persuaded them with a colossal bribe to take him to Thakeham. Pushing Charley into the car, he put his coat round her and climbed in beside her. She said nothing, flashing him only occasional glances as she sat huddled beside him, still clutching the silver picture frame to her. It was a slow drive across London because the flying bombs were still coming in, and they were diverted half a dozen times. It was late when they arrived at Thakeham but Biddy was at the door the minute the car drew up. She asked no questions but, as she led Charley inside, she turned to Kelly, her eyes questioning.
‘Bombed out, Biddy,’ he said laconically. ‘She’ll be staying here until she can find somewhere.’
She nodded and vanished and he hurried to what had been his mother’s room to make sure it was in order. He could hear splashing from the bathroom next door and Biddy’s low voice.
His coat, smeared with dust and spotted with blood, lay on the bed. Alongside it was the silver frame Charley had clutched to her all the way from Harwich and he picked it up to put it where she could see it, wishing he could produce in her the same devotion she seemed to feel for this dead airman. But, as he turned it over, he saw that the face staring out at him through the cracked glass was his own, the press picture taken when he’d been to the Palace to collect his CB.
Deliberately he kept out of the way and Biddy, her face still showing her own grief, arrived soon afterwards to say that Charley was sleeping.
‘Best leave her alone,’ she suggested. ‘She’ll probably be all right in the morning.’
He ate the meal she set in front of him without noticing it and slept badly, finally falling into a restless doze in the early hours of the morning. When he woke, he bathed, shaved and dressed hurriedly before going to his mother’s room. Charley was sitting up in bed, wearing a dressing gown belonging to Biddy. There was a piece of sticking plaster on her forehead and a red weal on her cheek. The ordeal had marked her and shadows like bruises lay beneath her eyes against the mask-like pallor of her features.
‘Hello, Charley,’ he said quietly.
She gave him an uncertain smile and he noticed that the silver frame was on the table near the bed facedown.
‘That’s a lovely shiner you’ve got.’
She nodded her smile tremulous and doubtful. ‘I’m sorry to be so much trouble,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘I’ll find somewhere to go as soon as I can.’
‘No! Stay here. The place’s enormous and there’s nobody in it. Stay as long as you wish.’
He was cheating a little, trying to make her dependent on him so that she’d be unable to leave, but his hold on her was too tenuous and he was determined not to let it slip from his fingers again, especially after he’d seen what was in the picture frame that she’d clutched to her so determinedly.
‘I’m grateful for what you did,’ she whispered.
‘I’ve been looking for you ever since 1941,’ he said. ‘I even tried to find Mabel in the hope she’d know.’
Tears welled up in her eyes but she managed a smile. ‘You became an admiral after all, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I’m so pleased.’
‘We might have celebrated it together,’ he said gruffly. ‘But I didn’t know where you were.’
‘I knew where you were,’ she said. ‘Always. I knew when you were bombed in the Mediterranean. I was watching the signals in the Ops Division when Impi was sunk and I followed the fight against Ziethen and Müffling every bit of the way. I wasn’t supposed to read the signals but I did. I told them–’
‘Told them what, Charley?’
She was silent for a while. ‘I told them that I knew you. I was terrified.’
‘Why?’
He sensed an advantage and decided to have it out of her. He believed in himself and, confident now that he’d seen his own photograph in the silver frame, he was determined to push it to the limit.
‘Why, Charley?’ he persisted.
‘I thought you might be hurt.’
‘They can’t touch me,’ he said briskly. ‘I’m fireproof. But why should it worry you?’
She stared at him with enormous eyes, a black fear like a physical presence in her body. Before she could answer, he spoke again, forcefully, and with no sign of humility.
‘Marry me, Charley.’
She looked at him. ‘You sound as if you were on the bridge giving orders.’
‘I’m not on the bridge,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to give orders. I need you. I love you. I’ve loved you all my life.’
She looked at him wonderingly and he had a sudden uneasy thought that, in all the years he’d known her, in all the years of telling her she meant something to him, he’d never managed to tell her that. His briskness dispersed.
‘I have a feeling,’ he said uncertainly, ‘that that’s something I’ve never said before. I’ve told you a lot of things – that I needed you, that I depended on you, things like that – but never that.’
‘No, Kelly,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t think you ever did.’
‘Well, I do, Charley. Now you’re here I want you to stay here.’
She still said nothing and he went on, almost desperately, feeling he was making a very bad job of it. ‘When you arrived last night, I happened to pick up the picture frame you brought with you – the only thing you brought. I thought you’d want it where you could see it, but then I saw it was me. Why, Charley?’
She hesitated for a moment before speaking in a whisper. ‘Because I loved you, Kelly,’ she said.
It didn’t make sense because she’d behaved as if she were totally indifferent to him. He’d been desperately jealous at Dover of the other men who’d been in her company, able to see her and talk to her while he was away at sea. He’d wanted to be brutal, violent, demanding that she be faithful to him, a late manifestation of passion that he could only guess had been held back by his ambition and his devotion to the Navy. He’d held it in check because he’d felt it would only have produced coldness.
‘Marry me, Charley,’ he said again. ‘There are such things as special licences and I couldn’t bear to lose you again.’
For a long time she was silent and he decided she was going to refuse him again and felt a surge of despair in the uneven stroke of his heart. Then her body trembled as if an electric current had passed through it and there was the sudden bright shine of tears in her eyes.
‘Yes, Kelly,’ she said. ‘Yes. I want to. Please.’
He was bewildered. It was impossible, he felt, to understand women. If he’d asked her before the bomb had dropped, he felt certain she’d have refused him. Yet he knew she wasn’t just accepting him now because he was offering her a home and a measure of comfort. Somehow, the flying bomb had snapped some resistance, cleared some final obstacle that lay between them, exposing to both of them their need for each other.
‘Stay here, Charley,’ he said. ‘Don’t move.’
She looked up. ‘I hadn’t thought of going away,’ she said.
He went to his room and rummaged in his drawers until he found a small faded red box. He’d almost forgotten it and had never expected to use it.
Returning, he took her hand and slipped the ruby ring on her finger. It looked enormous and he saw her eyes widen.
‘Kelly, it must be worth a fortune!’
‘It probably is,’ he agreed. ‘It was given to me in 1919 by the Grand Duchess Evgenia Vjeskov when we fished her out of Russia. I thought then it would make a good engagement ring. It’s just taken a long time to arrive.’ He paused. ‘Christina never wore it, Charley. I never offered it to her.’
She seemed awed by it and she lifted her face to his, a lost look in her eyes, then the tears welled up and she flung her arms round him.
‘Oh, Kelly, we’ve been such fools!’