England Expects (Empires Lost)

by Jackson, Charles S.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she replied softly, sniffling a little as he realised that she must also have been crying. “I’ve known where I stood with you for quite a while, and that’s fine: I just can’t stand to see you going through this…”

  “I didn’t know what else to do!” That admission alone was painful. “If I’d told them what was going on inside my head, they’d have never left me in charge of Hindsight at all, let alone come back here with all of you. I had to go… there was nothing left for me there.”

  There was a long silence as neither could add to that remark, and Thorne eventually found the pause unbearable. Reaching out with his right hand to his small, bedside table, he activated the iPod that lay there along with the tiny pair of speakers attached to it. The music of an Australian rock band called Cold Chisel began playing, the selected song painfully appropriate to Thorne as he realised which one it was… a song from their Circus Animals album of 1981 called Forever Now. Beginning midway through the song as it did, the lyrics seemed all too poignant under the circumstances.

  “I remember them,” Eileen said warmly, thinking back. “You used to play them all the time when we first met.”

  “I’d just left Australia to live in another country,” he grinned faintly at the memory. “I badly needed to remember where I’d come from... remember what I’d left behind.” He paused momentarily, then added: “I’ve been playing them a lot lately...”

  “We all need to keep remembering… we have to!” Eileen voiced her own strong feelings of displacement and unease then; Thorne was only one of many at Hindsight who were having difficulty assimilating the culture of an unrecognisable past. Thorne suddenly burst into tears once more, burying his face in his hands.

  “I can’t remember what she looked like!” He moaned in anguish, the sound tearing at Eileen’s heart. “I wake up sometimes missing the feel of her body against mine, or of her hair against my face… I remember how that felt, but all I can remember now when I think of her is how she looked in the casket… a ghost of what she really was…!”

  Eileen rose from her chair in an instant and moved to sit beside him on the bed. Cradling Thorne in her arms, she pulled him to her until his face rested against her shoulder. He clung to her tightly, just needing to feel someone else’s presence... anyone at all at that moment.

  “You can’t wind back the clock, love,” she whispered into his ear, crying again too as he sobbed against her chest. “I know how cruel that sounds when you think of what we’re doing here, but that doesn’t change anything. With a very few exceptions – Alec and Richard, and maybe one or two others – these people in our unit are the only friends we’ve got. They’re likely to be the only ‘family’ we’ll ever have now who’ll ever understand what we’re going through, or what we’ve left behind.” She ran her hand gently through his hair and kissed the top of his head. “I wish I could give you back your memories, but I can’t… no one can.”

  “I just don’t understand it,” he breathed between sobs. “I loved her so much, yet even in the dreams, all I can see is that ‘death mask’… never her real face. I don’t know what to do...!”

  “You wake up each morning and get on with what you have to do until the day comes when it doesn’t hurt any more,” She said softly with the dark, sorrowful air of someone with more experience than they’d care to admit. “The first thing you’ve got to do is let some of it go, or you’ll never get rid the pain, and you’ll end up like my father…”

  “How…?”

  “You let your friends help you if they can, and don’t shut them out just because they can’t.” She paused for a moment. “You were right this evening when you said I hadn’t lost anyone… I haven’t… not the way you have, anyway.” She smiled faintly. “I’ve had some casual relationships along the way, but it’s not easy when you’re following the military lifestyle, and the only one I ever really cared about out of all of them was you...” She almost chuckled at that. “It’s not easy finding someone you have something in common with when your hobbies are military hardware and technical engineering, you know...”

  “Maybe I should’ve tried harder,” Thorne shuddered, thinking of the past and for once coming up with more pleasant memories. “We sure as hell had a lot of things we liked doing together... more than Anna and I, I think sometimes...”

  “Oh rubbish…!” Eileen disagreed gently, lifting his head in her hands so they were looking straight at each other in the faint glow from the iPod’s tiny screen. “You two were as perfect for each other as any couple I’ve ever seen! She was a fine woman, and you both deserved to be together.”

  “Then what do I do?” It was a strange thing that although it had been so difficult to talk about originally, it was almost easy to do so, now that the problem was out in the open and he was confiding in an old friend.

  “Maybe you just need to live each moment as it comes for a while,” she offered, caressing his cheek lightly and sending an uncertain shiver along his spine. “Work the past out of your system.” She smiled softly then, and Thorne thought he knew what she was talking about.

  “I – I don’t think I can feel anything like that... for anyone... I don’t know...”

  “No one’s telling you to be in love with anyone else… not yet, anyway. I’m not saying that’s how I feel anymore either: that was something I got out of my system a long time ago. No one’s going to replace Anna in your heart, but that doesn’t mean two old friends can’t get together once in a while for old times’ sake. It might not be love, but sometimes friends need each other, too.”

  She kissed him then, full on the lips, and conflicted as he was he didn’t pull away. He’d awake early the next morning to find Eileen asleep and pressed against him in the confines of that single bed. Tears would fall once more, just for a moment, this time more as a reaction to the long-missed sensation of companionship than of anything else, but as they lay there with their bodies entwined, it would also be the first in five successive mornings Max Thorne hadn’t woken because of either hangover or nightmare.

  Davies, who by sheer coincidence wound up billeted next door to his CO again, couldn’t give any reason for waking up suddenly in the middle of the night. No memories of nightmares or any dreams at all lingered in his thoughts, and he was left with no more than a general feeling of unease. He sat up, and it was a few moments before he remembered where he was, sighing as he checked his watch and groaning softly at the time.

  In the silence that followed, muffled sounds began to filter through to his consciousness and through the wall near the head of his bed. At first he thought there must’ve been soft conversation going on in the quarters next to his, and he frowned at what kind of discussion might be going on in the CO’s room at such a ridiculously early hour. He lay back on his bed once more, hands behind his head, but as the moments passed, Jack came to realise that the sounds on the other side of the wall, which had become decidedly rhythmic in nature, were due to a lot more than mere ‘talk’.

  “Oh, that’s just swell… that’s just Jim-fuckin’-Dandy!” Davies growled softly, shaking his head half in annoyance and half in grudging admiration of Thorne’s apparent good fortune. As the unmistakeable sounds continued, building somewhat in volume and intensity, he made a mental note to at a more opportune time suggest to his CO that perhaps he could move his bed to the other side of the next room.

  There was no real effort in guessing who else was present in the room – Eileen was the only other woman they’d even seen on the base, and he could hardly begrudge the pair a little time to put the events of the past few days out of their minds. He knew Thorne was carrying some serious emotional baggage, and he also knew the pair did have a history… albeit one that’d been in the distant past. He rolled on to one side and hoped they’d at least have the decency to be reasonably quiet about it.

  It soon became apparent he had no suck luck…

  West India Docks, Isle of Dogs

  Tower Hamlets E14
, London

  Rupert was gone now… tucked away in his private quarters on HMS Repulse along with the precious gold he was safeguarding across the Atlantic. It would’ve been very unusual for the young man to have still been at Brandis’ apartment so near to midnight anyway, yet the place now somehow seemed empty and lifeless all the same. Rupert Gold was one of only a very select few he’d had anything close to constant contact with for the better part of ten years, and the pair had developed a close professional friendship during that time.

  Brandis had done his best to create the appearance of optimism while his PA was present, but now he was alone, he had to admit he was definitely feeling something akin to a sense of abandonment. It was fortunate in a sense that he had plenty to keep him busy, and Brandis in any case wasn’t the type to dwell on misfortune. He generally found positive activity to be a far better direction in which to channel any misgivings or melancholy, and there was plenty more hard work still ahead of him once he left England.

  He stood at the filled washbasin of his apartment’s bathroom late that night, staring into the mirror above it for a moment before filling his hands with a lathering of shaving soap and smearing it liberally over his cheeks and chin. It took some time, and several applications of soap before he’d covered the entirety of his bearded cheeks, chin and throat and decided he was ready to pick up the safety razor and begin the substantial task of shaving most of it off.

  Against the wall to his left beside the mirror, two small photographs were pinned with thumb tacks. One was of a former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, taken not long after the turn of the century, while the other was of Brandis himself, and both showed an image of a middle-aged man that was clean-shaven save for a rather bushy, dark moustache that completely covered each man’s upper lip and extended well past on either side of the mouth. Brandis began slowly and took his time as he worked: it was vitally important the face in the mirror before him matched the style of the faces in the photographs as closely as possible.

  His face seemed completely different by the time he’d finished the job, and a pair of exhausted eyes stared back at him in the mirror above mostly clean-shaven features. He’d managed a reasonable approximation Rinsing the excess shaving soap from his face and neck, he allowed a vague grin to emerge for a moment as he dried himself off once more. Dropping his towel where he’d taken it from on the bench beside the sink, he picked up a small bottle of Old Spice aftershave and slapped some onto his cheeks, enjoying the fresh feeling on his skin.

  “Time to say goodbye eh, James?” He muttered softly to himself, pausing for a moment as if actually expecting an answer.

  Brandis left the bathroom a moment later and walked back out into the main living area, moving across to take a seat at his desk wearing just trousers and a white singlet. A small, uneven pile of papers lay there before him, and he took one last chance to peruse them, cycling through each piece in his hands before slipping it to the rear of the cluster and moving on to the next. Every piece of official documentation relating to his identity as James Brandis was there: passport, drivers licence, birth certificate, school diplomas, trade certificates and others… the sum of a single human being in one collection of papers.

  Brandis stood and carried the documents across the room to the fireplace. It was a cold night, and a small fire crackled pleasantly there, its glow adding to the room’s otherwise relatively dim lighting. He looked down at the papers in his hands one more time before carefully reaching out and letting them fall into the fire. They began to burn instantly, the colour of the smoke changing momentarily as they curled within the flame and quickly became ashes. He stood for a moment longer, as if saying farewell to the identity they carried with them before returning to his desk.

  Seated once more, he reached beneath the desk much as he had the night he’d revealed the gold to Rupert, and this time he again released another secret compartment. This time it was a tall, narrow section of the desk’s left side that hinged from the rear and popped outward to reveal a single, shallow section within. A single thin, leather-bound satchel lay at the bottom, and he leaned down to collect it, placing it on the desktop. The open panel slipped easily back into place with the pressure of two fingers and a soft, reassuring click as it locked once more. Brandis unhooked the toggle and string that held the satchel closed and peeled back the flap, a little apprehensive in the anticipation of what he was about to find. He hadn’t set eyes on the thing in the better part of forty years, and he was nervous that perhaps his memory had deceived him and his work at the bathroom sink had been all in vain.

  It hadn’t of course, and as he delicately lifted out the documents held within he was rewarded with a pristine new British passport right at the top of the pile. He opened it for a moment and was relieved to see that the small black-and-white picture held within was almost identical to the manner in which he’d just shaved his features. Feeling much better, he placed the passport aside and took himself back through each piece of new identification in turn, refreshing his memory. The final document was an official death certificate that had already been partially completed in the name of James Randolph Brandis. The date of birth was listed as November 22 in the year 1860, but the date of death remained blank… the only piece of information yet to be entered.

  Always pegged you as a murderer… The words formed unexpectedly in his head, but held no surprise for all that: he’d been expecting them, after all.

  “I’d have thought you’d at least have had the decency to come and say goodbye to ‘poor old James’,” he returned with a faint, dry smile.

  Never got on all that well with James, truth be told, Phil… The reply came after a short pause, as if there’d actually been a moment’s thought put into the statement. So many things we didn’t agree on…

  “Dickhead,” he observed softly with a chuckle and a soft shake of his head, that single, coarse epithet as effective as anything else he might’ve said.

  Taking a fountain pen from one of the desk drawers, he tested it once on a piece of scrap paper before carefully entering that last detail in laboriously slow and precise writing: ‘Eighteenth of August, Nineteen Hundred and Forty A.D.’ Once he’d finished, he placed the document aside to dry properly and perused some of the other pieces of new identification he’d pulled out of the satchel. The passport still lay beside him on the desktop, and embossed across the front of it for all to see was the name Phillip Stephen Brandis.

  Home Fleet Naval Anchorage at HMS Proserpine

  Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands

  Monday

  August 19, 1940

  They’d been allocated a small office for use as a briefing room in a single-storey building near the Ratings’ Mess. With simple wooden tables and chairs, and a hanging movie screen against one wall, it was no more than a few metres square but was more than sufficient for the unit’s purposes in the short term. After a hot shower and a hearty breakfast – his first in a while – Thorne was in a strange mood that next morning as Trumbull found him alone in the room, an hour before a scheduled special briefing. Thorne was seated at a lone chair at the far end of the room with his guitar in his hands, an open photo album and a cup of steaming coffee placed together on the table beside him.

  “Here already… and I thought I was early...!” Trumbull began as Thorne looked up, nodding in greeting. “You called the meeting this morning?”

  “Yes,” Thorne nodded once more, barely glancing up as he plucked gently at each string in turn and made a serious attempt at tuning the instrument. “Got something to discuss with you guys regarding the Saturday raid.” He frowned as he tried another note and again adjusted one of the tuning keys.

  “Did you patch up your disagreement with Eileen?” Trumbull changed the subject without a pause. “I’d hate there to be any bad feeling between two people who’ve been friends as long as you have.”

  “Yeah,” Thorne began, almost coughing on the answer to that question as it caught him a little off gu
ard. “Yeah… we… worked out our differences earlier this morning…” Thorne answered uncomfortably, rubbing at his eyes and trying not to crack a smile that was both ironic and, truth be told, a little self-satisfied. “I apologised, and we... came to an agreement of sorts.”

  “Good.” Trumbull nodded firmly, blissfully unaware and completely happy with the reply he’d received.

  As he finished one last adjustment on the guitar, Thorne finally felt happy with the result and gently strummed a few chords, the notes almost magical to Trumbull’s ears. Throne was also quite pleased at the sound, and was inspired to concentrate a little harder as he glanced over at the photo album and decided what to play next. Taking a deep breath, he gathered his thoughts and wriggled his fingers for a moment before beginning a melody he’d not played in a number of years.

  The simple notes that issued from the guitar in that otherwise silent room mesmerised Trumbull much as he’d been the last time he’d heard Thorne play, so many weeks before. This time however, rather than just an instrumental piece, the Australian also decided to sing, and Trumbull found the lyrics equally intriguing and captivating. The words of Dire Straits’ moving love song, Romeo and Juliet, echoed softly within the room and filtered out into the hall through the open doorway, Thorne’s slightly raw but pleasant singing capturing a similar mood to Mark Knopfler’s original and unmistakeable style.

  As the song played, Trumbull took his eyes away from the instrument in Thorne’s hands just long enough to pull out a nearby chair and take a seat, and neither man noticed as another three naval ratings and a sub-lieutenant working in nearby offices appeared in the open doorway and looked on, having been drawn there by the unusual music. Thorne knew nothing of what was happening beyond the guitar as he played, his eyes shut tight as he lost himself in the words and music of a song that had once held great significance in his life.