‘Unless you’ve had access to the BBC, other war news you won’t have had is that, in June, Hitler invaded Russia.’
The shouts of incredulity were so deafening that Tinker began barking as if the house was burning down. When Kit could again make himself heard he said, ‘The most recent news is that although the Germans are at the gates of Leningrad and Moscow, neither city has been taken as yet.’
‘And Egypt?’ Sholto asked urgently, with Daphne and Caspian in mind. ‘What is the state of play there?’
‘We’re holding our own. Rommel is no nearer to marching into Cairo than he was in May.’
The sense of relief in the room was profound.
Kit took a tobacco pouch, pipe and a box of matches from his jacket pocket and said, ‘What is the situation here, Lewis? Is Kalamata your own and Sholto’s joint headquarters?’
‘No. Sholto’s headquarters is a cave a few days’ march to the west, on Mount Ida. My base is the sacred cave that Yanni found. From a security angle, it’s ideal in that only members of my archaeological team know of its existence, and because its tunnel system is enormous. It’s not ideal, though, in that there is only one way up and one way out of it. If it was to be found, escaping from it is virtually impossible. Which is why Sholto and I are both in agreement that his headquarters on Mount Ida would be a much better place for the wireless to be based.’
Kit tamped down the tobacco in his pipe. ‘And approximately how many people are there in your resistance group, and how many men in Sholto’s?’
‘Twenty-five in mine. Thirty in Sholto’s. The number of men we are able to call on is far bigger and impossible to head-count. In the mountains it’s entire villages.’
‘And you maintain contact with them via their local leaders?’ The question came from Nick Virtue.
Lewis nodded. ‘The Cretan name for a leader or a chieftain is a Kapetan. In this sector the most influential Kapetan is Antonio Tyrakis. Antonio is one hundred per cent pro-British and one of the biggest landowners in this part of Crete.’
Kit flashed a grin across at Nick. ‘Sadly for you, you’re not likely often to meet any colourful Cretan Kapetans. As a wireless operator, you’ll be in a foxhole glued to your radio set twenty-four hours a day.’
Aware of that, Nick burst into rueful laughter.
That he and Kit were on easy, familiar terms with each other was obvious. Noticing it, Kate was pleased. Kit’s natural reserve was something most people found difficult to crack, and as he and Nick Virtue would be spending mammoth amounts of time in each other’s company, that they got on so well was a relief to her.
Kit said now to Lewis, ‘What do you see as being a first SOE priority?’
‘The men who were left behind when the evacuation fleet sailed. It’s impossible to know the numbers, but there were certainly a couple of thousand, and probably double that figure. The bulk of them are now in POW camps, but hundreds avoided capture and are being sheltered and fed by mountain villagers who, when discovered doing it, pay with their lives. The sooner we can arrange with Cairo to get these men away by boat, the better. The other priority is straightforward intelligence-gathering. How many ships are entering the harbour at Heraklion and Réthymnon and then leaving fully loaded with equipment and men for North Africa. How many planes are flying into the airfields, carrying fresh troops from Germany. Which stretches of coastline are being mined, and which are still mine-free. Which landing places on the south coast are not yet patrolled by German units, and up-to-date lists of all those that are.’
‘Do you have any Cretans placed in German garrisons where they can pick up and pass on information?’
‘We do – and we also have someone in the Villa Ariadne, which is where the divisional commander has taken up residence.’
Kit was visibly impressed. ‘Is this brave bloke someone I would know from my days at the Villa?’
Remembering Kit’s past relationship with Nikoleta, Lewis hesitated and then said, ‘It isn’t a he, Kit. It’s a she. It’s Nikoleta.’
Kit choked over his pipe. When he could speak he said, deeply shocked, ‘And you put a woman – you put Nikoleta – in a position where her activities could be discovered at any time? Where, if they were, she would pay with her life for them?’
‘No one put her in that position, Kit. She acted on her own initiative.’
‘Who,’ Nick asked, deeply interested, ‘is Nikoleta?’
‘Nikoleta is my sister.’ Christos rose to his feet. ‘She is a great patriot.’ He walked across to where, on the wall and below an icon of the Virgin Mary, there was a shelf with several photographs propped on it. ‘See,’ he said to Nick, picking up one of the photographs and walking back to the table with it. ‘This photograph of her was taken on Dimitri and Aminta’s son’s baptism day.’
He handed Nick the photograph.
Sholto, who had never met Nikoleta, but who had heard about her from Daphne, held his hand out. After looking at the photograph and murmuring appropriate words of admiration, Nick passed it on to him.
It was of Scarlett O’Hara.
For Sholto, time halted.
Dizzyingly he thought he was delirious again, and then reality kicked in and the dizziness was replaced by euphoria. Scarlett hadn’t been a product of his delirium. She was real. Not only was she real, but she was part of Lewis’s resistance group. Somehow, some way, he was going to see her again. Determination flooded through him. He was going to see her again, if it was the last thing in life he ever did.
Chapter Thirty-Two
APRIL 1942
Despite her constant anxieties about Sholto, Ella and Kate – and especially with regard to Kate – Daphne knew that by living in Cairo she had scooped the jackpot. The unspeakable horrors and misery that the rest of Europe were suffering were not being inflicted on Cairo. In Cairo there were no food shortages. Street-market stalls creaked under luscious-looking oranges and lemons. Baskets of beans and maize fronted grocery shops. There were vegetables in abundance: cabbages and cauliflowers, leeks and asparagus. Groceries that were nothing but a memory in war-torn Britain, such as butter and sugar, were available everywhere, as were figs and dates and cloudy green grapes.
The smallest, cheapest apartment came complete with a houseboy and cook. The apartment Daphne was renting in Garden City was neither small nor cheap, and came far more lavishly staffed. To supervise it, she had persuaded Adjo to leave his present employer and, as Caspian’s nanny was still with her, she had no domestic worries.
She was also one of a small, elite group, for there were very few British women still living in Cairo, the army having evacuated military wives to South Africa more than a year ago. Only women with clout and arrogant stubbornness, such as her friend Vanessa, and those there officially, such as members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, were still enjoying a city teeming with British, Australian, New Zealand and South African troops, all eager to party in a place that, thank to years of British colonialism, was made for partying.
Daphne who, through no fault of her own, had had no contact with Sholto for close on a year, partied – and often did so royally, for as Lady Hertford she automatically found herself on Egypt’s royal family’s guest list – something that, whenever she met up with him, amused Sam Jowett immensely.
Her friendship with Sam didn’t amuse Vanessa, who never socialized beneath her class. ‘Honestly, Daphne,’ she’d said several times. ‘Being seen having coffee at Groppi’s with an RAMC officer is getting you talked about. Randolph thinks the two of you are having an affair.’
Randolph was Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s son. Vanessa thought him as handsome as a film star, but Daphne didn’t care for him and didn’t give a fig what he thought.
‘Sam,’ she’d said to Vanessa for the umpteenth time, ‘is a friend. Our shared experience in the depths of hell, when the Hotspur came under enemy attack, has bonded us for life.’
It was true. And the more coffee-morning meetings she and Sam had, l
ike today, at Groppi’s, the more convinced she was that Ella had made a great mistake in breaking off her engagement to him. If Sam also thought Ella had made a mistake, he never said so. He always spoke of her with deep affection, but what quickly became obvious was that Sam was that rare breed, a one-woman man – and now that he was married, the woman in question was his wife.
Their conversation nearly always revolved around whatever was going on in their very different lives. Sam was as intrigued about British Embassy garden parties and soirées at the Abdin Palace as she was about the city’s red-light district – something Sam unhappily knew a lot about, as several of the city’s VD centres came under his medical supervision. Despite her hectic social life, Daphne still managed to devote time to the causes that had been close to her heart when she had previously lived in Cairo, mucking out stables at the Brooke Hospital for Horses and Donkeys like a Land Girl, only hours after coming home from a party at Princess Shevakier’s; and raising money for the city’s Anglican orphanage at every chance she got.
Sam was vastly interested in the latter and spent as many of his off-duty hours as possible at the orphanage, teaching the older boys how to play cricket. He was just as interested in Caspian, who, at nearly four years old, was as eager to learn how to hit a ball with a bat as the orphanage boys were.
Another shared subject of conversation was the Tetley family. Troops in Egypt were able to send and receive mail to and from England, and Sam wrote once a month to the Tetleys and always shared with Daphne the letters he received from them.
Always they talked about Crete and the people left behind there. Because she had left the island without knowing where Kate was, or what could possibly have happened to her, it was Kate that Daphne worried about most, but today she couldn’t bring herself to speculate again as to why Kate had vanished off the face of the earth during the last days of the invasion. All such speculation was pointless. All she could do, where Kate was concerned, was pray she was still alive and, on an island under enemy occupation, safe.
‘I wish I’d travelled to Crete before the war,’ Sam said suddenly, breaking in on her thoughts. ‘I did have the opportunity. When we were engaged, Ella suggested I visit her there. She wanted to show me Knossos and the dig she was working on, on the plateau above Kalamata.’
Daphne adjusted the seductive tilt of her straw hat so that it gave her eyes more shade and said with her usual directness, ‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘I’d just begun working at a medical practice in the Yorkshire Dales and taking time off so soon wouldn’t have gone down well. And I’m ashamed to say that, in not going out to Crete, I was trying to pay Ella back in her own coin.’
‘Meaning that she wasn’t exactly returning to England every chance she got?’
He nodded, and then said with unexpected frankness, ‘When Ella ended our engagement and told me she was going to marry Christos Kourakis, I was utterly shattered. I couldn’t believe it. For months I thought my world had come to an end and that I’d never get over loving her, and then . . .’
‘. . . and then you fell in love with Jenny.’
The tension that had been in his shoulders whilst he’d been speaking of Ella eased. ‘Yes,’ he said with a grin. ‘I did . . . And I also realized that what had happened between me and Ella had happened for the best.’
He took a packet of Woodbines from the pocket of his khaki bush-shirt, offered her one and took one for himself.
When he had lit her cigarette, and his own, he went on, ‘When the war is over, I’ll be back to being a country GP. A lot is expected of a GP’s wife. She’s an unpaid secretary and receptionist. At home the phone is always ringing; messages always have to be taken. It’s a full-time job and it isn’t a role Ella – even if she’d given it her best shot – would have been happy in. Just as I’m a doctor and couldn’t imagine being anything else, Ella is an archaeologist – and an archaeologist whose work will nearly always take her abroad. I don’t know what kind of accommodation we would have come to, or what kind of marriage we might have had, but it wouldn’t be anything like the marriage I have now with Jenny. Jenny’s work has always been in a medical practice and she is as committed to my job as I am.’
They were seated at a table in Groppi’s tree-shaded garden. A couple of New Zealand officers entered it and, although it was a quiet time of day and there were lots of tables empty, seated themselves at the one nearest to them.
Sam knew why they had done so. In a city where the ratio of men to women was hundreds to one, and where the majority of women were in the armed services and obliged to wear hideous lisle stockings, the sight of Daphne in a white crêpe-de-Chine shirtwaister, its skirt falling softly around shapely sheer-stockinged legs, was enough to make any red-blooded man position himself where he had the best possible view of them.
As long as their attention didn’t annoy Daphne – which it very clearly didn’t – Sam was happy to ignore them. Any hint of disrespect, though, and things would be different. Just because he was in the RAMC, and not a fighting regiment, that didn’t mean he couldn’t be intimidating. His broad shoulders had ensured that he’d played full-back in both his school’s and his university’s rugby teams, and the motto ‘None Shall Pass’ was burned into his psyche.
He’d surprised himself by suddenly talking about Ella so frankly, but now he’d begun being frank, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t continue in the same vein, although this time with Daphne, not Ella, as the subject matter.
Although Daphne chatted to him about the restaurants, clubs, charity events, polo matches, balls and functions at the Abdin Palace that she attended, she never named her escort or, as he strongly suspected, her many escorts. British women in Cairo – especially if they were as spectacularly beautiful as Daphne – were spoilt for choice when it came to men, and he was well aware how easily buttons came undone in Cairo, and what a blind eye the British turned to marital unfaithfulness when under a hot sun and far from home.
Normally he would have regarded Daphne’s private life as being absolutely none of his business, but he’d met Sholto – albeit under the fraught circumstances of the imminent evacuation – and had liked him. If word got back to him of the racy life Daphne was living in Cairo, Sam didn’t think their marriage would have much of a chance of surviving and thought that if it didn’t, it could well be something Daphne would bitterly regret.
He said, ‘Word is that Royal Navy submarines have dropped more SOE men and wireless operators on Crete; when they return, they’re packed to the gunnels with some of the troops who, since missing out on the evacuation, have been living hand-to-mouth in the countryside.’
Daphne, whose eyes had slid in the direction of one of the two New Zealanders, smartly snapped her attention back to him. ‘Does that mean it may be possible to send and receive mail?’
‘I doubt it. What it does mean, though, is that new SOE officers going in will be meeting up with Sholto, and Cairene gossip is bound to get relayed.’
She frowned. ‘What point are you trying to make, Sam?’
He said with a bluntness equal to her own, ‘Three of the most talked-about women in Cairo high society are Brigadier Marriott’s wife, Lady Vanessa Dane and yourself. And the subject most under discussion is who the three of you are having affairs with.’
Daphne stubbed her cigarette out. ‘Well, Sam. That’s a question easily answered. Momo Marriott is having an affair with Randolph Churchill. Vanessa is having an affair with Major-General Dalziel, who apparently isn’t as boring in bed as Vanessa’s husband. Who I sleep with, or don’t sleep with, is a private matter. What I can tell you is that, unlike Momo and Vanessa, I don’t indulge – and never have indulged – in full-on love affairs.’
Sam didn’t know whether to be relieved or, at her indication of happy-go-lucky promiscuity, more shocked than ever.
‘It’s behaviour that could still lead to a divorce when your husband finds out – and he will find out.’
‘I hope he do
es,’ she flashed back spiritedly, ‘because what you don’t know, Sam, is that ever since we married, Sholto has been constantly unfaithful to me. I was pregnant with Caspian when we married. If we hadn’t had to get married – and between his father and mine and the Foreign Office, Sholto didn’t have much say in the matter – then I think things would be different. As it is, because our getting married was none of his choosing, he’s taken the line that he doesn’t owe me any faithfulness. And what you so obviously don’t know about the British upper classes, Sam, is that adultery by both partners is quite often accepted as being nothing out of the norm; what isn’t accepted is divorce. That being the case, there is no possible fear of one.’
It was a concept of marriage so alien to his own that Sam felt quite out of his depth. ‘But what if you fall seriously in love with someone else; with someone who is too important to you to remain just an affair?’
‘Oh, I shan’t do that. It isn’t possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why? Because I felt like that for someone once, and it isn’t possible for me to feel like that again.’
He didn’t ask her who the man had been, and she was glad. She’d known that she’d shocked his northern Methodist sensibilities enough, as it was. She didn’t want to run the risk of losing Sam’s friendship when she told him that the only man, other than her husband, that she’d ever fallen seriously, crazily in love with was a German – a German now fighting for Hitler in a field-grey uniform and jackboots. A German whose safety she prayed for daily, just as fervently as she prayed for Kate’s and Ella’s and Sholto’s safety. A German that her heart ached for, and one she knew she had little hope of ever seeing again.
Hot needles stabbed behind her eyes and, so that Sam shouldn’t see how close she was to tears, she turned her head swiftly, looking once again in the direction of the New Zealanders. This time she did so unseeingly, her thoughts full of Helmut: wondering where he was; what country he was fighting in; and if he was thinking of her with the same intense longing that she was thinking of him.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 36