She gave me a look that was tender and pitying, the look a harrassed mother gives a little boy who had suggested that the family money troubles can be solved by emptying his moneybox.
“That might be the answer if the problem was confined to the womb, Jan,” she said. “You asked for the facts and you’re entitled to them, so here they are. Any kind of operation would be a risk as far as I’m concerned. Foster-Hayne told me my heart wouldn’t stand up to a major op.”
This was a shock that I couldn’t ride out, not then, not just like that, as if she had told me that the water-pipes had frozen, or that somebody down the road had had an accident and broken a leg. I stared at her but in her eyes I read only concern for me. There was no fear, just a deep and communicated sadness.
“Are you absolutely sure about this?” I managed to croak at last. “I always thought you were as strong as a horse! You’ve always behaved as if you were! You’ve never had an illness that I know about!”
“It surprised me, that part of it,” she said, “but don’t waste time quarrelling with Foster-Hayne’s opinion. He knows his business, Jan. He’s been consulted by members of the Royal Family in his day.”
“But why? How?”
“Drip said I had rheumatic fever when I was three. I didn’t even know about it until I asked her and that’s probably the basis. The kind of life I was leading until I caught up with you again did the rest, I imagine. It’s the other half of the bill, Jan.”
It was obvious that she had contemplated telling me all this for a long time. She had had leisure to select words and phrases but the care she had used in choosing them, in trying to reduce the facts to a trickle was wasted effort on her part. I had first to fight the rush of panic, the feeling of slipping through a hole in the bottom of life and clawing at anything to check my descent. I tried very hard to do this and after a few moments of floundering I believe I succeeded for it seemed to me that everything depended upon my doing so, on my relating the various factors and marshalling them into some kind of order. Diana’s womb had been violated by the use of clumsy instruments. Diana was unlikely to conceive another child. Diana could have a formidable sounding operation to put matters right, but Diana also had a weak heart and might die at any time and from any source of aggravation! Those were the links in the chain leading us into this impasse and how the hell could I ever find my way out again?
Diana’s voice came to me as though from a distance.
“We mightn’t have so long, Jan, and it seems stupid to waste even a part of that time. That’s why you have to arrange for me to come with you or at least follow on the moment it can be arranged!”
This was worse than anything she had said before. This was a perfectly monstrous suggestion and I shied away from it like a horse throwing up its head at a flapping tarpaulin.
“No!” I shouted, “no, Di, not that! For God’s sake let’s nurse our capital, not squander it like a pair of lunatics!”
I expected her to react passionately to my denial, to storm and beg and plead and reason, but she did not, she sat musing, a grass stem between her lips, as though pondering something utterly unrelated to what we were discussing. At length she said, composedly:
“You don’t think my plan is logical, Jan?”
“No, of course I don’t!” I bellowed, wretchedness and confusion making me sound pitiless, “it’s the silliest bloody suggestion you ever thought up and it isn’t even possible! Do you imagine they would turn you loose over there again? You, whose face has been plastered over every newspaper in the country, a person known to half the Quislings in France with a detailed description in the files of every police officer in Occupied Europe? What good would it do? If what you tell me is true how long would you last, even if you weren’t recognised and slammed in gaol within hours of arriving? Can’t you see there is only one thing we can do?”
“Well, Jan,” she said, patiently, “and what’s that?”
“Forget this fixation you’ve got about a family and nurse your health, at all events until after the war when we can set about finding the real answer together! We have to ride, it out, quietly and sanely, to play it safe for your sake, my sake and Yvonne’s sake! I should want to see all those specialists and talk to them one after the other, I’d want to explore the entire bloody background, every inch of it you understand, and then do the best thing that suggested itself! I’m going to do that, d’you hear? I’m taking over here and you’ll do what you’re told, everything you’re told and I’ll double check that you do!”
The sadness left her eyes and she smiled.
“Very well Jan, you do that,” she said meekly. “I don’t remember promising to love, honour and obey but it was implied I imagine. It was just an idea, I get them from time to time but they don’t always work. I’ve had some pretty feeble ones in my time as you can testify!” and she got up, shaking the grass from her skirt. “Now suppose we begin by going over to Heronslea and telling Drip as much as we think she ought to know?”
“We’ll do that,” I said, “and after that I’m going to write a long letter to that Foster-Hayne, whoever he is. We’ll see him together and if I’m not a hundred per cent satisfied we’ll go up Welbeck Street and Harley Street knocking on the doors like a couple of hawkers!”
I said this and meant it but I was not by any means as sure of myself as I sounded. For one thing I was disconcerted by her surrender. It was utterly unlike her to abdicate in this fashion but I had had more than enough for one day and was glad to tell myself that by talking to Drip we were beginning to nibble at the problem. Drip had known about the rheumatic fever and might come up with some more information. She would doubtless fuss and flutter but afterwards she would do anything she could to help and I trusted her as I had never trusted anyone. Drip had been in on my problems from the very beginning.
As we recrossed Big Oak and entered the larch cover leading down to Heronslea, Diana took my hand.
“We’ll make it sound as trivial as possible Jan, but afterwards, for the rest of the time we’re together, will you promise something? Will you not refer to it again or not until the last possible moment? It’s Saturday now and you’ll be leaving first thing Monday. You can phone Foster-Hayne and try for an appointment early in the week. Wednesday is his private patients day and I could come up then. If there’s time that is!”
“There’ll be time,” I said savagely, but there wasn’t.
There never is for the really essential engagements.
Chapter Eleven
I SUPPOSE it would not be right to say that Diana and I never enjoyed luck. We had our breaks and throughout our long association we took full advantage of them, but sooner or later, usually sooner, the sheer, bloodyminded cussedness of life snapped at our heels, and then we were fugitives trapped in a sea of treacle. We always found a path that led out of the morass but soon we were back in again, calling directions to one another and blundering about until we managed to touch hands and make another attempt to find solid ground. It was this way throughout the next ten days.
We made the appointment with Foster-Hayne and because of the special circumstances he agreed to see us the following Tuesday. His receptionist made it sound as if she was personally reprieving a condemned prisoner and one felt she expected to hear a sob of gratitude over the phone.
To keep the appointment we arranged to travel up on the first train on Monday. On Sunday afternoon, however, a wire arrived instructing me to report back to unit “immediately repeat immediately”. Ordinarily I should have ignored this but the kind of job I was engaged upon always gave one an uncomfortable feeling that people’s lives might depend upon sticking to the rules. In any case, it did not seem to matter all that much so I caught the night train and arranged to get in touch with Diana as soon as she arrived in London the following day. In the event this proved impossible. I was despatched on a special three-day demolition course within half-an-hour of arriving back in camp and was driven straight into a security belt where ev
ery serviceman and civilian was incommunicado. Outward mail was forbidden and there was a sentry on the only available telephone.
I cursed and raged but that was the limit of my protests. There was absolutely nothing else I could do about it and I pictured Diana hanging round the hotel waiting for my call, or trying to contact me at my base unit where everybody derived enormous pleasure from being unhelpful to civilians.
I took the course, a concentrated study of how to operate a new kind of explosive which was an improvement on the small plastic mine then coming into general use. It had been designed for saboteurs and from what I could see was likely to be very effective. In addition to being extremely destructive it was easily portable. A man could carry half-a-dozen in a knapsack.
On the Friday morning I raced back to town and called at the hotel en route. Diana had been there but had left, presumably to return home. She had probably got some inkling of what was happening and had given me up as a bad job. Foster-Hayne’s receptionist told me our appointment had been cancelled early Tuesday morning. This time she addressed me as if I was a professional assassin.
Before reporting back to base I phoned Heronslea. Drip told me that Diana had left as arranged on Monday but was not yet back. I guessed then that she was on her way home and there was nothing to do but kick my heels until her train got into Whinford Junction and then allow another hour for her drive back to Heronslea. I made another tentative appointment with the specialist for the following Wednesday but I had no great hopes of being able to keep it. Then, murderously bad-tempered, I reported back to base where the Air Commodore informed me that I was to travel to France that night!
Diana’s train should have got into Whinford Junction about seven and she could have been back at Heronslea by eight, providing she got a taxi or a lift. There was no branch line train to Whinmouth after seven-thirty.
My own deadline was eight-forty-five and at eight-thirty I phoned again. Diana had still not arrived. In desperation I went on to the airfield and climbed into the Lysander. By this time I was so depressed that I did not reflect upon my destination. The aircraft could have headed for the Arctic Circle, or crashed head-on into Windsor’s Round Tower for all I cared and this mood did not lift until I saw the landing lights of the French reception committee. No man ever went into action with a bigger chip on his shoulder.
The first person I met as my feet touched the soil of France was Raoul de Royden who embraced me, French fashion, as the Lysander roared away and little figures darted past me in the darkness staggering under the cannisters of arms and explosives that I had brought with me. In less than three minutes we were in an open truck and being driven through the woods and as we bumped and lurched along the track the urgency of my personal problems slipped away like a bunch of lodgers unable to pay their account. It was as though I was suspended between two worlds, that of Diana and Sennacharib and this strange, active darkness that was alive and menacing and yet, in some ways, as reassuring as a stronghold. I turned my back on my worries with the heavy resignation of a man taking his last walk to the scaffold. I made up my mind that I would never see Diana again in the flesh and that I would die here within a few days but when we did meet again it would be in the spirit, over the larch tops of Heronslea coverts or on the swell of Nun’s Bay and that here we would at last merge into the scents and soil and russet-clothed slopes of the few squares miles that had made us so dependent on one another. There would be no more stresses, no partings, but fulfilment in timelessness.
Perhaps the tablets I had taken en route had something to do with this fancy which might have continued indefinitely had I not, on leaving the lorry at what seemed to be a good-sized farmhouse, been attacked by a sickness that was so violent that Raoul was obliged to support me by the shoulders. After the retching my head cleared and the sense of being dead and disembodied gradually left me. Raoul helped me into the building and sat me down near an open window, waiting without comment while a woman brought me some coffee in a two-pint mug. I drank the coffee and it did me a great deal of good. When I had emptied the mug Raoul said:
“I am glad you came tonight, my friend. If it had been tomorrow you would have been thrown to the lions!”
He swept his hand in a wide circle and I noticed for the first time that we were surrounded at a respectful distance by a circle of about half-a-dozen men, every one of them clutching some kind of firearm and all looking down at me with expressions that ranged from mild astonishment to disgust. I had been so distressed by the nausea that I had failed to take note of them. They were a desperate-looking bunch. I noticed one fellow particularly, a broad-shouldered, bearded ruffian, with a sub-machine gun braced across his bandoliered chest. He looked exactly like an illustration of a Mexican bandit in a Boys’ Magazine, complete with slouch hat and top boots. He was the one who looked scornful but I discovered later that this implied no special criticism of me, it was his habitual expression.
Raoul looked sharply from the men to me and decided to ignore my lapse.
“As it is, I can give you one hour. Then I must be gone and these others must disperse. It is stupid to congregate near a dropping zone. Ordinarily we would have parted company at once.”
He said something in very rapid French to the circle of men and the only word I caught was “cannister.” They reacted at once. The bandit sat down by the stove and lit a pipe and all the others vanished like a chorus of pantomime robbers. The woman who had given me the coffee went out after them and shut the door.
I glanced at Raoul and noted the startling change that had taken place in him during the ten months that had passed since he engineered our flight from Paris.
In the glow of the single oil lamp his hair looked almost white. He was much thinner than I remembered and his spareness accentuated his height and emphasised a slight stoop. The skin of his face was taut, so stretched that it gleamed like ivory when he crossed the lamplight and one could see the movement of the bones underneath. His expression, when I looked at him closely, reminded me of the blankness one sometimes sees on the face of a ventriloquist manipulating his dummy and feeding himself with gags. One way and another he looked as if he had been through a very bad time indeed.
“You can ignore Simon,” he said, “he is inclined to deafness and he’s a Walloon. He won’t understand very much of your French.”
He sat down on the bench beside me and took out a map and a brandy flask, spreading the map on the table and taking a long swig at the flask.
“You had a briefing about the repair train?” he asked, and when I nodded, “It is planned ten days ahead, a week on Monday, unless we get a cancellation. We usually do. London is very free with its cancellations. They sometimes cost lives over here. You will be in command and Simon is your deputy!” He went on to explain details of the locale and some of the more obvious hazards, the amount of explosive that would be needed, the various points along the line that should be reconnoitred before the ambush was arranged. He spoke sourly but rapidly, as if he was in a great hurry to be gone and when he came to discuss the men recruited for the job a note of bitterness entered his voice.
“It is essential to have someone fresh to direct the strike,” he said, “most of these fools would let the train pass while they settled their own differences! Simon is the best of them but he’s a Communist and one never knows what secret orders he has been given. You will have twenty to thirty men with you and they belong to at least four separate groups. Several will be Communists and perhaps half-a-dozen De Gaullists. The rest are locals, good enough at a pinch and necessary because they know the terrain, but if you run into trouble don’t rely on them, they are amateurs!”
I had a look at the map and asked him questions that seemed to me relevant and necessary. He brushed most of them aside and told me that Simon would find a man to take me along the line as far as the depot and that it was useless to discuss further details until I had made the tour. It was also hopeless, he said, to attack the depot itself. The Germans ha
d a guard company stationed there and the only possible chance of wrecking the train would be when it was actually en route to a break in the line.
“The sole object of this strike is to prevent the train getting to the tunnel after it has been blocked! Keep that in mind and don’t let any of these clowns persuade you to do anything else. They will try but you must ignore them. Only the tunnel matters. If the train goes out to repair routine breaks in the line after an air attack, let it pass and return. No matter how great the devastation in this sector it always goes back to the depot at sunset, they never risk leaving it in the open.”
“Why the hell doesn’t the R.A.F. hit the depot and be done with it?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t ask that my friend, if you had seen where they keep it overnight,” he said, and rose, extending his hand.
I was dismayed by his hostility and perhaps more so by his apparent lack of interest in anything but the job on hand. I might have been a stranger to him and Diana might not have existed. He had not referred by so much as a single word to the death of Rance or Yves or to our escape a year ago, or to anything at all except the waylaying of the railway breakdown train planned for the following week. He had not even commented on the war situation generally or the possibility of expelling the invader from France. What concerned me most, however, was his lack of interest in plans for a withdrawal.
“Assuming everything goes satisfactorily how and where do I lie up?” I demanded.
“The De Gaullists in Charmont St. Père have that in hand,” he said, “or should have. It is their responsibility. Simon will be in touch with them and you will probably get your instructions next week. In the meantime this is your base.”
I had to leave it at that. He was not the kind of man with whom one could argue about personal insurance. I said, half apologetically:
“Diana and I are married now. She has heart trouble and isn’t too well, Raoul! Did you know?”
“I knew you were married,” he said, and then, with what seemed to me an almost shameful effort to appear more friendly: “I hope you get through it in one piece, Jan! I don’t expect to, I’ve already had more luck than any two men deserve!”
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