by Craig Thomas
He lifted his head, kissed her. Her mouth rubbed against his, her tongue prised open his teeth. There was something diametrically opposed to their earlier selves between them now, something uncomfortable, vivid, almost violent. She had retreated as a person, become merely physical. He stood up, pressing against her, moving her towards the bed. She stepped back for a moment, smiling, and undid the tie-belt of the dress, and the buttons, stepping out of it as it dropped to the carpet. Then she pressed against him again, moving her hips, her arms pressing his sides, fingers splayed and slightly clawed against his back.
He moved her slightly sideways, then they declined on the bed slowly, statuesquely, their limbs interweaving with a slow, rubbing passion, as if the skin of one savoured that of the other. He unhooked her brassiere, tugged at the restraining tights and panties with the same half-frozen, intense slowness, while she unbuttoned his shirt, unzipped his trousers.
She caught sight of their splayed, intertwined bodies in the mirror of the dressing-table, just once as they neared a mutual climax. His trousers were comically round his ankles. Then she lost all objective awareness for a time, even the awareness of engineering their love-making, of confirming her control of him. He thrust into her eagerly even as she decided that in his case sexual passion was a sufficient substitute for love — he would, at least temporarily, believe himself in love with her, be malleable — and she gave herself to replying to his eagerness, lifting her hips so that her legs gripped his sides. The necessity of performance became an imperative she could not quite cold-bloodedly control.
* * *
Moynihan picked up the telephone with a lover's eagerness. He had sat on in the darkening Bloomsbury room long after Lobke had departed, waiting for one call, suffering the unwilled images coming out of the dark of her body twisted about McBride's white torso.
"Yes?"
"Claire—" He caught his breath. He hated, now that she had diminished his imaginations by calling him, the delight that had leapt under his heart just as she spoke; hated the sharp jealous pain the first ringing of the telephone had recalled; hated the dependence her body, her attention forced upon him; hated the superiority she seemed to acquire over him.
"Well?" He tried to sound casual.
"He's asleep."
"You wore him out, I suppose?" The sarcasm didn't seem to have any ability either to hurt her or restore his self-satisfaction.
"Naturally. But I didn't ring you to tell you that." He could sense the laughter, like a cold chill against his skin. He had no recollection of his own love-making with her, no physical identification with her. Even her voice was thin and distant.
"No?" Better. Lighter, surer tones now.
"Don't be stupid, Sean. Just listen. He might wake up, and come in."
"Yes," he snapped.
"He's interested in a minefield, in the St George's Channel, and in a minesweeping flotilla — he seemed to think it's leading somewhere. Are you any the wiser?"
"No, I don't know a damn thing. That pig Lobke was here earlier — you've seen the news. Those bastards in Dublin are coming to London — they're going to sell us down the—"
"I've no time — he's awake. As soon as I have anything concrete, I'll call."
"Take care—" he began, even as the connection, broken, purred in his ear. Another moment, and he would have added something more revealing, more committed. I love you—
Stupid. He slammed down his receiver, the anger bubbling like nauseous indigestion or heartburn.
November 1940
The three men walked abreast along the glass-littered pavement, stepping carefully over the trailing hosepipes, averting their gaze from the occasional blanketed forms, preferring the grim neutrality of ruined buildings and the gaping dark interiors of shops. A naked tailor's dummy lay sprawled through the glassless window of one shop, grotesque and mocking. McBride, alone of the three of them, seemed distracted from Walsingham's conversation by the rubble, the drawn and haggard faces, the lumps under the grey blankets, the stench of burning, the wet pavements. A stranger from a distant country, he felt out of place, disturbed and obscurely angry.
A typing pool sat in chairs arranged behind desks like a class of children. Behind them, their offices had crumbled in upon themselves, with grotesque diffidence and good manners only spilling a few crumbs of masonry and brick into the street. A balding, self-important man with half-glasses and a small, yellowed moustache was checking their work fussily between bouts of dictation to his secretary. His desk was larger than those of the typists, and virtually undamaged. The clatter of typewriters, the droning of the man's voice and the occasional rumble of traffic beyond seemed to satisfy Walsingham, and the three of them became a tight little group in animated discussion.
"Charlie, you're greedy, you want everything," McBride said, his voice belying the grin on his face.
"Michael, my boy, you're the one to get it from the Germans, if anyone can—" Gilliatt felt an outsider in the conversation, a visitor observing the verbal and facial games of a married couple; a semaphore he barely understood. He was taller than the other two, and this seemed a further distance.
"Hell, Charlie. Brest is tight as a virgin. Guernsey was easy — but not this. You want army and navy stuff, and you want it in twenty-four hours. It's not on, Charlie."
"I think it is. You'll be picked up at the drop, ferried to the Plabennec area. All I want is proof that new divisions have been moved in there — in Brest, all I need is proof that the U-boats from Guernsey are sitting there, awaiting their passengers."
A telephone rang, startling all three of them. The man in the half-glasses picked it up from his desk. He seemed suddenly aware of them, and turned his back as he answered his call. The telephone lead snaked away from his desk along the street, Gilliatt noticed for the first time. He felt the little incident to be quite unreal, and realized also that the dialogue between McBride and Walsingham was similarly lacking in reality. He had anaesthetized himself against it, unwilling to accept his situation.
"Charlie, you just haven't got the contacts in France to pull it off. This isn't a two-man bob rushing down the Cresta run. I need a team."
"I have the contacts—"
"You trust them? You've tested them, tried them out?" Walsingham shook his head. "Your honesty does you no credit at all, Charlie!" McBride grinned again. Gilliatt almost felt the man's facial muscles were completely beyond his control. Or perhaps it was mockery? Certainly, Gilliatt's impression of Walsingham was that he disposed of questions of human safety very easily if they came between him and his objective. Yet he knew that McBride was going to accept his orders, whatever qualifications he felt. He had not, as yet, entirely expended his gratitude at not being put back behind a desk in OIC.
"I get good intelligence from them," Walsingham asserted.
"Then ask them to find out for you."
"I need your assurance—"
"So much for the reliability of these Frogs, Charlie. You don't trust them to be right this time, mm?"
Walsingham shrugged. "I want you to go tonight," he said.
"You piss off, Charlie. Peter here and me, we'll discuss it, and see you back at the office. How about that?" Walsingham appeared to Gilliatt to be nonplussed for once. Then he nodded, almost curtly, turned on his heel and walked away. Gilliatt and McBride watched his determined stride until he turned a corner into the Strand. Then McBride looked up at Gilliatt, studying him with a suddenly intense look.
"Well, Lieutenant Peter Gilliatt—" Gilliatt suddenly looked down at his civilian jacket and trousers as if they belied his rank. "And what do you think to that?" McBride nodded in the direction taken by Walsingham. Gilliatt smiled. There was a charm, possibly specious, about McBride that was irresistible at that moment. Dark, medium build, good-looking in a slightly untrustworthy way, McBride was a strange and perhaps unreliable species. But Gilliatt found himself warming to the man, found within himself a penchant for future recklessness that he suspected was trans
mitted from the Irishman.
"I — don't know. You're the expert on Lieutenant-Commander Walsingham — what do you say?"
"Charlie is scared bloody stiff, young fellow, I know that much."
"How come?"
"He never panics, always prepares. You think he's reckless with lives, mm?" Gilliatt, surprised at McBride's perceptiveness, nodded. He noticed that the fussy little office manager was doing his rounds of the typing pool once more. A rather blowsy young blonde caught Gilliatt's eye. "Charlie's never been reckless with my life before, Peter — if he's started now, then he's very worried about something, that I know for certain."
Gilliatt ignored the blonde, who by now had smiled at him, much to the irritation of the man with the nicotine-stained moustache and the half-glasses. Gilliatt saw a girl bringing out a tray full of mugs and cups of tea from the shattered interior of the offices.
"Stove's still working, Mr Hubank," she called out.
"Thank you, Gloria." He seemed displeased that the routine of his office-in-the-street would now be interrupted. As in a classroom, work was already dissolving into chatter.
Gilliatt looked at McBride. "You don't think we could survive this little jaunt, then?"
He saw McBride weigh him, confirm something to himself.
"Gloria's stove is still working, and it's business as usual here. How long would that last, do you think, if the Germans had a second front in Ireland?" Gilliatt shook his head. "Not long. There's plenty of people in Ireland who'd help the Germans, and a lot more who'd accept them. And there's nothing the British could do about it. Now, operatives are not supposed to think about things like that. That's Charlie's job, and he's scared stiff. You know it could happen tomorrow!"
"So, you'll go?"
McBride looked around him. An ambulance passed, bell noisily demanding attention, but he seemed more drawn by the typing pool chattering in their tea-break.
"They had bananas yesterday, but by the time Mum got there, he'd sold out, the miserable old Jew. She says she won't go there again."
"Got a cigarette, Sandra?"
"Smoked your ration, now you want to smoke mine. Bloody cheek!"
"He said he was doing hush-hush work, abroad and that. He might not come back, see—"
"And you let "im? You are stupid, Norma!"
McBride turned back to Gilliatt.
"Not a lot there you'd consider dying for, is there?" He laughed. "But then, I don't do it for anyone but myself, do I now?" He rubbed a hand through his hair. "I'll be on the plane tonight, parachute strapped on tight. Why don't you come along for the ride? I'll look after the two of us, sure I will!" The comic brogue, the evident recklessness made McBride a stereotype for a moment.
Gilliatt shrugged. "Why not?"
October 198-
Admiralty records were stored in half a dozen places around London still awaiting transfer to the Public Records Office at Kew. McBride had gained, via the office of the Secretary to the Admiralty, access to each one of the records offices as an historian whose latest project was a study of naval warfare in the North Atlantic and the Western Approaches during 1940 and 1941. His academic background was impeccable, his best-selling status in America no handicap. He had a different coloured pass for each of the various offices, but he had returned to the converted primary school in Hackney where he had worked the previous day and which housed minesweeping, anti U-boat, and convoy duty records for the duration of the war as well as the offices of some signals branch of the navy. McBride did not bother himself with considering this department's function or legitimacy, beyond a certain comparative amusement at a converted primary school's claims to security over the massive CIA complex at Langley.
The records were kept in classrooms which had been expanded by knocking down interior walls, then filled with shelving, metal and wooden. A complex filing system, an officer close to retirement and two civilian clerks, a small reading room that might once have been the staff room of the school, and a kettle with which he could make coffee for himself comprised his surroundings.
He was allowed free access to the files, since it had been decided years earlier that all still-classified material should receive priority removal, then this repository could be opened to researchers. McBride was not looking for classified material, merely for the indications, the half-obscured footprints, of something classified; the legitimate fingers and toes of a secret body.
He put down his copy of the Daily Telegraph without reluctance. He'd glanced at it on the tube train — another IRA bomb in the Midlands which had caused him to idly wonder whether he might not even have met or passed or spoken to someone in the IRA while he was in Ireland, and two IRA arrests in London. A front-page picture of the Ulster Minister, Guthrie, waving to the cameras, accompanied by a crowd of people. He could not take an interest. He was American, not Irish.
As he hefted the first of the chosen files into the tiny reading room — a male clerk looked in, nodded and wished him a good morning — he was thinking of Claire Drummond. Now, he thought with a self-satisfied amusement, his lover. The second time, after dinner when they'd had more to drink and the food had been good and they'd talked round and round it, it had been even better. He felt himself harden now as he recaptured the image of her face above his, her slow lowering of herself onto him, her breasts just out of reach of his mouth until she wanted him to kiss them—
McBride was, he admitted to himself, besotted with the woman. He wanted to be with her now, not here with the long-dead past, the musty-smelling files and the limping footsteps of the disgruntled naval officer echoing along the corridors from time to time. Yes, he wanted her again. He'd always thought of himself as a man of limited, even minimal appetite. But he wanted her now, he'd wanted her when he awoke but she'd dismissed the idea with a laugh—
He deliberately rid himself of the thought of her, and the pleasant sensation in his genitals, and opened his notebooks, matching his previous day's notes to the relevant section of the file. Movement orders for November 1940, Western Approaches Command. A stiff card prefaced the clipped-in flimsies of the orders, on which ruled card was a digest of the orders in strict chronology. He pressed open the unyielding file at the orders concerning the minesweeping flotilla led by HMS Bisley, Gilliatt's ship. He remembered for a moment Gilliatt's grieving daughter, then recalled the thought that had been on the lip of his consciousness as Claire had walked into his room.
What was it? Time, time—
The sealed orders that had governed the sailing of the flotilla were not available to him, but a hand had scrawled St George's Channel — sweep, probably unofficially, in the margin of the record. Added by someone with a tidiness of mind that defeated security. Bisley and her flotilla had been absent from Milford Haven for—?
No, he couldn't quite—
He got up, filled the kettle from the cold water tap over an old enamel sink in the corner of the former staff room, plugged it in, and spooned instant coffee granules into a chipped mug. Something, something—
He tried to recollect his naval history, a short paper he had written perhaps eight years before on submarine activity in the Western Approaches. It had been an attempt to debunk an official British naval history he had received for review. Time, time?
The kettle boiled as he wondered. Absently, he poured the water into the mug, stirred and sipped at the scalding coffee, then carried the mug back to the table. The room was cold, didn't get the sun until afternoon. He put down his mug, rubbed his hands, and took a map from his briefcase. It was not an Admiralty chart, but he measured off distances with a ruler knowing it was sufficient. The minefield to protect the St George's Channel and the Bristol Channel was—
He marked it in roughly, then found Milford Haven. He estimated the flotilla's speed, the duration of the sweep, the return to Milford.
And then he had it. A small, vivid excitement that became swallowed almost immediately by a sense of the work still to do, but still apparent.
Bis
ley's flotilla could not have carried out any kind of sweep and have returned to Milford within the times recorded in the file. Sailing time, and time of return were both recorded, and were much too close together. He flipped over flimsies eagerly, almost tearing them. Yes, Bisley and the rest of the flotilla — no, no! Bisley had returned to Milford, the rest of the flotilla had returned later. The flotilla would have had time to sweep St George's Channel, but Bisley would not. And there was no record of damage or fault that would account for her sudden return.
He thumbed through the movement orders, searching for the docket he had found the previous day. Yes, there it was. Bisley at anchor for three days before her captain returned. Then— yes, a week later the flotilla was ordered to a sweep of Swansea Bay, where German aircraft had dropped mines across the harbour mouth under cover of an air raid.
He picked up his coffee, sipping at it, making brief, hurried darts around the room, circling the table. St George's Channel swept — it was a British minefield, a defence? Why? Bisley returning early, alone—
He put down the coffee, and left the room.
It took him an hour to find the appropriate files, with the assistance of one of the civilian clerks, a grey-haired woman who seemed to regard him malevolently because he wanted access to files that had not been thoroughly reorganized and cross-referenced. Eventually, she found him two bulging, dusty box-files, and he took them back to the reading room. She huffily shrugged off his profuse thanks.
His hands were dirty, his clothes dusty, but immediately he cleared a space on the table and opened the first of the box-files. A mess of scraps of paper, notebooks, personnel forms, promotions, reassignments, casualties — the uncollated material from the office of the Department of Minesweeping filed under MILFORD HAVEN in faded type on a grubby gummed label on the front of the box-file.