Storm Island Read online

  want a drink."

  Terry did not look at his menu.

  "Seriously, Percy, why are you still in Town?"

  Godliman's eyes seemed to clear, like the image on a screen when the

  projector is focused, as if he had to think for the first time since he

  walked in.

  "It's all right for children to leave, and national institutions like

  Bertrand Russell. But for me well, it's a bit like running away and

  letting other people fight for you. I realize that's not a strictly

  logical argument. It's a matter of sentiment, not logic."

  Terry smiled the smile of one whose expectations have been fulfilled.

  But he dropped the subject and looked at the menu. After a moment he

  said: "Good God. Le Lord Woolton Pie."

  Godliman grinned.

  "I'm sure it's still just potatoes and vegetables."

  When they had ordered, Terry said: "What do you think of our new Prime

  Minister ?"

  "The man's an ass. But then, Hitler's a fool, and look how well he's

  doing. You?"

  "We can live with Winston. At least he's bellicose."

  Godliman raised his eyebrows. "We?" Are you back in the game?"

  "I never really left it, you know."

  "But you said ' "Percy. Can't you think of a department whose staff

  all say they don't work for the Army?"

  "Well, I'm damned. All this time..."

  Their first course came, and they started a bottle of white Bordeaux.

  Godliman ate potted salmon and looked pensive.

  Eventually Terry said: "Thinking about the last lot?"

  Godliman nodded.

  "Young days, you know. Terrible time." But his tone was wistful.

  "This war isn't the same at all. My chaps don't go behind enemy lines

  and count bivouacs like you did. Well, they do, but that side of

  things is much less important this time. Nowadays we just listen to

  the wireless."

  "Don't they broadcast in code?"

  Terry shrugged.

  "Codes can be broken. Candidly, we get to know just about everything

  we need these days."

  Godliman glanced around, but there was no one within earshot, and it

  was not for him to tell Terry that careless talk costs lives.

  Terry went on: "In fact my job is to make sure they don't have the

  information they need about us."

  They both had chicken pie to follow. There was no beef on the menu.

  Godliman fell silent, but Terry talked on.

  "Canaris is a funny chap, you know. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of

  the Abwehr. I met him before this lot started. Likes England. My

  guess is he's none too fond of Hitler. Anyway, we know he's been told

  to mount a major intelligence operation against us, in preparation for

  the invasion but he's not doing much. We arrested their best man in

  England the day after war broke out. He's in Wandsworth prison now.

  Useless people, Canaris's spies. Old ladies in boarding-houses, mad

  Fascists, petty criminals ' Godliman said: "Look here, old boy, this is

  too much." Hetrembled slightly with a mixture of anger and

  incomprehension.

  "All this stuff is secret. I don't want to know!"

  Terry was unperturbed.

  "Would you like something else?" he offered.

  "I'm having chocolate ice-cream."

  Godliman stood up.

  "I don't think so. I'm going to go back to my work, if you don't

  mind."

  Terry looked up at him coolly. The world can wait for your reappraisal

  of the Plantagenets, Percy. There's a war on, dear boy. I want you to

  work for me."

  Godliman stared down at him for a long moment.

  "What on eardiwouldldo?"

  Terry smiled wolfishly.

  "Catch spies."

  Walking back to the college, Godliman felt depressed despite the

  weather. He would accept Colonel Terry's offer: no doubt about that.

  His country was at war; it was a just war; and if he was too old to

  fight, he was still young enough to help.

  But the thought of leaving his work and for how many years? depressed

  him. He loved history, and he had been totally absorbed in medieval

  England since the death of his wife ten years ago. He liked the

  unravelling of mysteries, the discovery of faint clues, the resolution

  of contradictions, the unmasking of lies and propaganda and myth. His

  new book would be the best on its subject written in the last hundred

  years, and there would not be one to equal it for another century. It

  had ruled his life for so long that the thought of abandoning it was

  almost unreal, as difficult to digest as the discovery that one is an

  orphan and no relation at all to the people one has always called

  Mother and Father.

  An air-raid warning stridently interrupted his thoughts. He

  contemplated ignoring it: so many people did now, and he was only ten

  minutes' walk from the college. But he had no real reason to return to

  his study he knew he would do no more work today. So he hurried into a

  Tube station and joined the solid mass of Londoners crowding down the

  staircases and on to the grimy platform. He stood close to the wall,

  staring at a Bovril poster, and thought: But it's not just the things

  I'm leaving behind.

  Going back into the game depressed him, too. There were some things

  he liked about it: the importance of little things, the value of simply

  being clever, the meticulousness, the guesswork. But he hated the

  blackmail and the treachery, the deceit, the desperation, and the way

  one always stabbed the enemy in the back.

  The platform was becoming more crowded. Godliman sat down while there

  was still room, and found himself leaning against a man in bus-driver's

  uniform. The man smiled and said: "Oh to be in England, now that

  summer's here. Know who said that?"

  TsTow that April's there," Godliman corrected him.

  "It was Browning."

  "I heard it was Adolf Hitler," the driver said. A woman next to him

  squealed with laughter, and he turned his attention to her.

  "Did you hear what the evacuee said to the farmer's wife?"

  Godliman tuned out and remembered an April when he had longed for

  England, crouching on a high branch of a plane tree, peering through a

  cold mist across a French valley behind the German lines. He could see

  nothing but vague dark shapes, even through his telescope, and he was

  about to slide down and walk a mile or so farther when three German

  soldiers came from nowhere to sit around the base of the tree and

  smoke. After a while they took out cards and began to play, and young

  Percival Godliman realized they had found a way of skiving off and were

  here for the day. He stayed in the tree, hardly moving, until he began

  to shiver and his muscles knotted with cramp and his bladder felt as if

  it would burst. Then he took out his revolver and shot the three of

  them, one after another, through the tops of their close-cropped heads.

  And three people, laughing and cursing and gambling their pay, had

  simply ceased to exist. It was the first time he killed, and all he

  could think was: Just because I had to pee.

  Godliman shifted on the cold concrete of the station platform and let

  the memory fade awa
y. There was a warm wind from the tunnel and a

  train came in. The people who got off found spaces and settled to

  wait. Godliman listened to the voices.

  "Did you hear Churchill on the wireless? We was listening in at the

  Duke of Wellington. Old Jack Thornton cried. Silly old bugger..."

  "From what I can gather Kathy's boy's in a stately home and got his own

  footman! My Alfie milks the cow ..."

  "Haven't had fillet steak on the menu for so long I've for-got ton the

  bally taste ... wine committee saw the war coming and bought in twenty

  thousand dozen, thank God ..."

  "Yes, a quiet wedding, but what's the point in waiting when you don't

  know what the next day's going to bring?"

  "They call it Spring, Ma, he says to me, and they have one down here

  every year..."

  "She's pregnant again, you know ... yes, thirteen years since the last

  ... I thought I'd found out what was causing it!"

  "No, Peter never came back from Dunkirk..."

  The bus driver offered him a cigarette. Godliman refused, and took out

  his pipe. Someone started to sing.

  A blackout warden passing yelled "Ma, pull down that blind Just look at

  what you're showing," and we Shouted "Never mind." Oh!

  Knees up Mother Brown... The song spread through the crowd until

  everyone was singing. Godliman joined in, knowing that this was a

  nation losing a war and singing to hide its fear, as a man will whistle

  past the graveyard at night; knowing that the sudden affection he felt

  for London and Londoners was an ephemeral sentiment, akin to mob

  hysteria; mistrusting the voice inside him which said "This, this is

  what the war is about, this is what makes it worth fighting;' knowing

  but not caring, because for the first time in so many years he was

  feeling the sheer physical thrill of comradeship and he liked it.

  When the all-clear sounded they went singing up the stair25 cases and

  into the street, and Godliman found a phone box and called Colonel

  Terry to ask how soon he could start

  THREE

  The small country church was old and very beautiful. A dry-stone wall

  enclosed a graveyard where wild flowers grew. The church itself had

  been there well, bits of it had the last time Britain was invaded,

  almost a millenium ago. The north wall of the nave, several feet thick

  and pierced with only two tiny windows, could remember that last

  invasion; it had been built when churches were places of physical as

  well as spiritual sanctuary, and the little round-headed windows were

  better for shooting arrows out of than for letting the Lord's sunshine

  in. Indeed, the Local Defence Volunteers had detailed plans for using

  the church if and when the current bunch of European thugs crossed the

  Channel.

  But no jackboots sounded in the tiled choir in this August of 1940; not

  yet. The sun glowed through stained-glass windows which had survived

  Cromwell's iconoclasts and Henry VIIFs greed, and the roof resounded to

  the notes of an organ which had yet to yield to woodworm and dry rot.

  It was a lovely wedding. Lucy wore white, of course; and her five

  sisters were bridesmaids in apricot dresses. David wore the Mess

  uniform of a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, all crisp and new

  for it was the first time he had put it on. They sang Psalm 23" The

  Lord's My Shepherd, to the tune Crimond.

  Lucy's father looked proud, as a man will on the day his eldest and

  most beautiful daughter marries a fine boy in a uniform. He was a

  farmer, but it was a long time since he had sat on a tractor: he rented

  out his arable land and used the rent to raise racehorses, although

  this winter of course his pasture would go under the plough and

  potatoes would be planted. Although he was really more gentleman than

  farmer, he nevertheless had the open-air skin, the deep chest, and the

  big stubby hands of agricultural people. Most of the me non that side

  of the church bore him a resemblance: barrel-chested men, with

  weathered red faces, those not in tail coats favouring tweed suits and

  stout shoes.

  The bridesmaids had something of that look, too; they were country

  girls. But the bride was like her mother. Her hair was a dark, dark

  red, long and thick, shining and glorious, and she had wide-apart amber

  eyes set in an oval face; and when she looked at the vicar with that

  clear, direct gaze and said "I will' in that firm, clear voice, the

  vicar was startled and thought, "By God she means it!" which was an

  odd thought for a vicar to have in the middle of a wedding.

  The family on the other side of the nave had a certain look about them,

  too. David's father was a lawyer: his permanent frown was a

  professional affectation, and concealed a sunny nature. (He had been a

  Major in the Army in the last war, and thought all this business about

  the R.A.F and war in the air was a fad which would soon pass.) But

  nobody looked like him, not even his son who stood now at the altar

  promising to love his wife until death, which might not be far away,

  God forbid. No, they all looked like David's mother, who sat beside her

  husband now, with almost-black hair, dark skin and long, slender

  limbs.

  David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last

  year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man

  his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark,

  ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had

  long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, as he was, and sensitive,

  which he was not.

  It was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid,

  comfortably off, backbone-of-England type families, getting married in

  a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.

  When they were pronounced man and wife both mothers were dry-eyed, and

  both the fathers cried.

  Kissing the bride was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought as yet another

  middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was

  probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages,

  when every manin the tribe was allowed to well, anyway, it was time we

  got properly civilized and dropped the whole business.

  She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked

  champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of

  caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the

  photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well ... But it could have been

  worse. If it had been peacetime Father would have hired the Albert

  Hall.

  So far nine people had said, "May all your troubles be little ones,"

  and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, "I want to

  see more than a fence running around your garden." Lucy had shaken

  countless hands and pretended not to hear remarks like, "I wouldn't

  mind being in David's pyjamas tonight." David had made a speech in

  which he thanked Lucy's parents for giving him their daughter, as if

  she were an inanimate object to be gift-wrapped in white satin and

  presented to the most deserving applicant. Lucy'
s father had been

  crass enough to say that he was not losing a daughter but gaining a

  son. It was all hopelessly gaga, but one did it for one's parents.

  A distant uncle loomed up from the direction of the bar, swaying

  slightly, and Lucy repressed a shudder. She introduced him to her

  husband.

  "David, this is Uncle Norman."

  Uncle Norman pumped David's bony hand.

  "Well, m'boy, when do you take up your commission ?"

  "Tomorrow, sir."

  "What, no honeymoon?"

  "Just twenty-four hours."

  "But you've only just finished your training, so I gather."

  "Yes, but I could fly before, you know. I learned at Cambridge.

  Besides, with all this going on they can't spare pilots. I expect I

  shall be in the air tomorrow."

  Lucy said quietly: "David, don't," but she was ignored.

  "What'll you fly?" Uncle Norman asked with schoolboy enthusiasm.

  "Spitfire. I saw her yesterday. She's a lovely kite." David had

  consciously adopted all the R.A.F slang, kites and crates and the drink

  and bandits at two o'clock.

  "She's got eight guns, she does three hundred and fifty knots, and