The two scouts breasted the slope one behind the other, their exhaust fumes tainting the upland air. We let both of them pass and they chugged on down the short stretch of straight road towards Raoul’s ambush. Thirty yards in their wake the first armoured car levelled out and changed gear, its silhouette passing before us like the snout of a primaeval monster heaving itself out of the murk. Close behind, at intervals of about fifteen yards, came the canvas-topped lorries, a guard with an automatic rifle sitting beside each driver and two more on each tailboard.
At first sight of the coal-scuttle helmets I heard the little Jerseyman hiss and I reached out my hand to steady him for we had received strict orders to hold our own fire until the convoy had been halted in front. So the six lorries trundled by, traveling at about fifteen miles per hour, for the climb had been steep and as each vehicle topped the rise it faltered for a moment as the driver groped for his gears. Then, at the tail of the procession, came the second armoured car and finally one more motor cyclist.
The rearguard was exactly level with us when the first grenade was flung at the leading car more than a hundred yards down the road. Within seconds of its detonation the Sten guns of Raoul’s party went into action and flashes of orange lit up both sides of the road. Then, as I fired my own burst at the last motor-cyclist, the Jerseyman’s Heath-Robinson bazooka boomed off at the car and the shock of a direct hit lifted its near-side wheels from the ground so that its bulk seemed to prance before crashing down on the road surface. Before the bazooka could fire again the Germans were pouring a murderous fire into the scrubland immediately behind us.
I saw my man crumple over his handlebars as his motorcycle bucketed round and roared across the road straight into the low bank, mounting it and throwing its rider backwards across the road to within a few feet of where I crouched. After that all was smoke, confusion and outcry, with grenades exploding on all sides and above their roar, the rattle of small-arms and machine-guns.
The bazooka charge had hit and damaged the nearside turret of the armoured car but it had not killed the crew. Their machine-gun was now firing at point-blank range and as our men stood up to hurl grenades at the stationary vehicle they were cut down in a swathe. It was Paul the Jerseyman who silenced this gun, abandoning the bazooka and running straight in under the blister of the car to level his automatic rifle at the men on the turret. Perhaps the gunners were not killed by the Jerseyman’s volley but died in the swirl of flame that suddenly shot upward and outward from the shattered vehicle. Only one man succeeded in scrambling down, landing in a heap at my feet and I shot him through the body before he could scramble upright.
Then, from immediately beyond the blaze, I heard something that made my flesh crawl, an agonised and continuous screaming from the prisoners in the lorry and forgetting everything I ran past the burning car towards the hindmost vehicle and rushed headlong into a German who was standing with his back to me pouring Tommy-gun bursts into the interior of the van.
It took me a moment or so to understand his intention. It seemed such a stupid and incongruous action, to stand still with his back exposed and shoot into the laced-up canvas of the hood. Then, as I understood what he was doing, I lost all reason, flinging down my gun and grasping him with both hands and at the same time hurling myself backwards so that we rolled together under the tailboard. The German landed on top of me but was helpless in the grip I had on his throat.
How long we wrestled there I cannot say but it could have only been a matter of seconds before our struggles carried us against the offside wheel and I was able to improve my grip by thrusting my fingers between his chin and helmet strap, forcing his face against the fishtail of the exhaust pipe. The pipe was red-hot and his violent heave as he touched the metal separated us for an instant. In that second I was able to draw my knife and stab him through the neck but before he was dead I was on my feet again, screaming for lights. It was just as Raoul had stated, I was engaged in a purely personal war and I forgot that the battle was still raging further down the line or that grenades were still exploding beyond and behind me as attackers converged on the vehicles.
From the moment of the first explosion to that when I had disposed of the man under the lorry and run the length of the convoy to the slewed-round armoured car at the head of the procession was probably no more than three minutes. In that space of time the battle was won although odd, sniping shots and the roar of an occasional grenade continued for five minutes more.
By then every German in the convoy had been accounted for and the last two, who eluded the Jerseyman’s group and began to run back down the hill, were killed by a long burst from a sub-machine gun posted on the other side of the road.
Just then the moon sailed out behind a bank of cloud and the stretch of road could be viewed from end to end, a long, untidy string of vehicles, its tail-end lit by the glow of the blazing armoured car and at the summit of the car the doll-like figure of a man half in, half out of the turret. I heard Raoul shouting and turned back towards my end of the convoy, stumbling over bodies and calling Diana’s name aloud. Men and women began to emerge from the lorries, some of them still screaming, others laughing and shouting as they rummaged among the dead for the keys of their handcuffs that linked them two by two. Somewhere in this ghoulish mob was Diana but for the moment I was too shocked and breathless to conduct a search. Away at the back of my mind, pinned there by fear too awful to be faced, was a certainty that she was lying in her blood behind the curtains of the last lorry, killed by the fire of the man I had stabbed to death under the tailboard. Raoul found me at last and seized me by the jacket, shaking me savagely and telling me to help restore some kind of order into the chaotic scene. He had to shout at the top of his voice for the din was now deafening and everyone seemed to be running in different directions and cursing those who got in their way.
Slowly, section by section, partial discipline was restored and we began a half-hearted search of the lorries hustling those who remained inside into the open. Headlight masks were prised from lorries that had been backed across the road and the beams were directed on the centre of the road. The screaming and the shouting died away to be replaced by a continuous murmur as grotesque pairs shambled into the circle of light, joining the few prisoners who had already freed themselves. I shouldered my way into the groups, staring at every face but Diana was not among them.
Ignoring Raoul’s shout I turned away and ran to the last lorry beside the burning armoured car. It was as light as day down here and the debris of the engagement lay all over the road. Here was the man I had killed, the two other men I had shot and just beyond them a group of five Frenchmen killed by the opening burst of the car’s machine-gun.
I hardly glanced at the bodies. Tearing aside the remnants of the canvas hood I peered inside, calling and calling. Another dead German lay on his back on the tailboard and behind him was a huddle of figures piled one on top of another like carcasses in a slaughter-pen. One or two still moved, making feeble gestures with arms or legs and another, sitting with his back against the partition, called out to me in an agonised voice.
“Is there a doctor there? A doctor, for the love of God!”
Raoul had pursued me and now I wrenched his torch from his hand, tossing bodies this way and that and flashing the beam on each face. In the furthermost corner I found her, handcuffed to a tubby little corpse clad in the clownish pyjamas of a political prisoner and splashed from neck to waist with his blood and her own.
I remember being aware of the terrible stench of the lorry and then of plucking helplessly at the short length of chain that linked Diana’s wrist to that of her companion. After that I must have fainted for the next thing I recall is sitting with my back against the low bank with Raoul forcing a flask against my teeth and repeating the same words over and over again, like an incantation.
“She is alive, my friend! You hear me? Alive I say! Emerald is alive, Jan, do you hear?”
Slowly, through a roaring tide of r
evved-up engines and the babble of voices, his words penetrated my brain and I grabbed the flask and gulped down mouthfuls of the raw spirit. Beyond us the partisans were already making ready to depart. Our own transport had been brought up and the German lorries were being driven off the road and ditched. The space beyond the glowing armoured car was being used as a clearing centre for our wounded, fourteen of them laid in a row and behind the bank on which I lay men were burying the dead, German and French, in two common graves. I could hear the chink of spades in the flinty soil and the burial parties passed and repassed, dragging bundles wrapped in tarpaulins taken from the trucks.
I looked across at the wounded, some of them sitting up, with fresh bandages showing white against the murk of the moor, a few lying still under German greatcoats. Farthest from me, at the very end of the line, the light of the burning car flickered on a great mop of chestnut hair.
With a great effort I pushed myself away from the bank and lurched over, Raoul following, the flask still in his hand.
“She will live, Jan!” he repeated. “They will give her every care at the convent and no one will come for her when we get her there. They are busy saving themselves from now, I promise you! I promise this, my friend!”
I hardly heard him. Kneeling there in the road I let my hand run through her hair, lifting it away from her waxen face. She was breathing in great, shuddering gasps, like a person plucked from a winter sea and the unit doctor walked down the line and glanced at her, balancing a hypodermic syringe in his hands. Raoul sighed and walked away. Couples came and lifted the men beside her, easing them gently over the tailboards of make-shift ambulances and covering them with the clothing of the dead.
“Will you go with her, Capitaine?” the doctor asked, presently. “She is not in pain, not now. You could sit in front and hold her in your arms perhaps?”
I gathered her up, wondering at the smallness of the effort required and the doctor reached out and steadied me as I swung myself over the tailboard and wedged myself against the canopy. Beyond, along the entire stretch of road, the purposeful bustle continued, lights bobbing, men calling softly to one another, gears groaning and tyres crunching under the fitful moon but to me it all seemed to be taking place on the edge of a dream, or as though I was looking down on it from a great height. The weight of Diana on my knees was so trifling that I might have been carrying a small parcel wrapped in cloth.
As the ambulance turned and moved off down the hill I slipped my hand inside her blouse and felt the beat of her heart. She stirred very slightly and then settled back, her breath becoming shorter and less audible. I held her closer in a desperate effort to offset the bumps in the road.
Chapter Fourteen
ONCE I had worried about the prospect of her undergoing a single operation. Now I had to sanction a series and they were performed not to save her life but to prolong it, season by season, sometimes, it seemed to me, month by month. Yet her heart survived them all and she became “a case”. They even wrote about her in “The Lancet”.
After her fourth operation we took her back to Heronslea and settled her in the large bedroom of the west wing that had once been her mother’s.
It was September again then, the first September of the Peace, and summer lingered in the curving row of beeches that marched down to the Shepherdshey road. There was, as yet, no hint of autumn in the coverts behind the house and the sky over Nun’s Head remained blue for more than two months. Only in the west, beyond the wide estuary of the Whin, was there an occasional promise of November gales and the days of soft, seeping rain that would precede them. We pushed her bed against the tall, recessed window so that she could look south and west across miles of red ploughland to the sea.
She had changed a good deal during her last and longest spell in hospital. Before that, and during her periods of waiting, she had been restless, usually rational and reasonably patient but sometimes deeply depressed and fighting hard to conceal it. Now her fretfulness had been ironed away by drugs and she had won through to a kind of disciplined tranquillity. She smiled naturally once more and seemed to enjoy what she read during the periods I was occupied elsewhere.
When she was settled I returned to London and pulled strings to hurry my discharge, ultimately jumping the queue on the pretence of farming. I had no intention of farming, indeed, I had no plans at all beyond fighting for Diana. Everything else was of little consequence but even I found it impossible to extract a straight answer from the various doctors and specialists who visited her. Each seemed guardedly baffled. Some said one thing and some another. Some hinted that she might not only survive but walk again; others that although the spinal wound had healed the two bullets had caused so many complications that even a partial recovery was very doubtful. None gave her more than a few years and one said the best we could hope for was that she would recover sufficiently to use a wheeled-chair. After over a year of this I became gruffly impatient with the entire medical profession and took to relying on my own guesses, gloomy or less gloomy, according to my needs.
All this time Diana and I exchanged very few words about her health or future. When we were alone we talked about other things, Yvonne and the children, books and furniture, anything to mask what was always uppermost in our minds. It was like a game, each seeking to bluff the other and both knowing that every word we uttered was a deception. As I say, however, all this changed when she came home after the final operation, the one that was designed to remove bone splinters and give her a chance to build up her strength for a more extensive probe in the distant future.
The day I was demobilised I came back to Heronslea in a mood that was neither relief at being free to resume normal life, nor dejection that I had paid such an appalling price for victory. I had learned by this time to settle for monthly reprieves. Diana was still alive and I was thankful for that but I found no pleasure in the kind of things that amused those about me, the bonfires of blackouts, the promise of an end to rationing, the annihilation of the wretched perverts who had pushed Western civilisation over the edge. I could feel no relief in the end of it all, I could only continue to blow on the tiny flame deep in my heart and hope that some day, a year, ten years or twenty years ahead, a miracle would enable Diana to climb the long slope of Teasel Edge to our cottage or cross the larch coverts to Big Oak Paddock and Folly Tower. As long as the flame was there I could keep a sense of proportion.
I went into the big kitchen and found Drip supervising the preparation of the children’s supper. The Peace had not done much to reduce the population of Heronslea. All the Spanish children were still there, with a dozen waifs Raoul had collected and sent over from France, the orphans of men killed in half-forgotten skirmishes on lonely roads, or the children of poor devils who had died in Dachau and Belsen. There were one or two British children who had come to us as evacuees but had no homes to which to return and there was a Danish couple, a boy and a girl, whose father had been one of our best agents before he was betrayed and shot at Tromso. It was a miniature League of Nations and in some ways a more hopeful one than its predecessor.
What was going to happen to these strays when our five-year lease ran out was problematical. Diana’s critical condition had absorbed me completely and I hadn’t given the matter a thought. If Drip was depressed by Diana’s helplessness she did not show it but prattled on about how pleased Diana would be to see me and how I might surprise her with the seven o’clock supper tray.
I took the tray and trudged up the broad, curving staircase, my twelve-year-old daughter Yvonne skipping along at my side. She had Youth’s contempt for illnesses and I could not help feeling how closely her attitude resembled that of her mother’s at the same age. Diana could never stand invalids or sick rooms and excused her impatience by declaring that her vitality was an affront to the bedridden.
As we went along the corridor I stole a sidelong glance at the child beside me. She had the odd gait of the Leighs and my own big bones and dark complexion but basically she was
her mother all over again, engaging, yet displaying a kind of savagery in her determination to swim clear of human woes.
Diana was sitting up in bed reading an anthology of British and American verse. I had noticed during my flying visits that she turned more and more to poetry. She said she found it difficult to concentrate on novels and she had always been bored by magazines and newspapers. When we entered the room she marked the page and put up her lips to be kissed. Her face was much thinner and she seemed terribly fragile but I was delighted to notice that her hair had at last regained its former lustre and displayed no trace of the barmaid rinse that had clung to its roots all the time she had been in and out of hospitals.
I noticed the inner change almost at once. There was a stillness about her that I had never seen before and it lay deep in her eyes, like a soft light shining at a distance. She held my hand while she joked with Yvonne about the Spanish boy Manuel, who continued to shadow our child like a big, sombre dog and was madly jealous of anyone else who showed her the slightest attention.
“Has he proposed again?” Diana asked, half-seriously.
“Yesterday! When we were fishing off the Whin sandbanks!” Yvonne told her, gaily.
“Ah, I never had a proposal in a boat,” said Diana, winking at me. “Almost everywhere but never at sea. Isn’t that so, Jan?”
I mumbled something about the night we had run away from home and taken refuge on Nun’s Island.
“Nonsense!” said Diana firmly, “you were terribly glum that night! You were scared stiff that someone was going to arrest you for abduction and I never believed we’d get there! I don’t think we should have if the tide hadn’t been ebbing and you couldn’t possibly have sculled back to Whinmouth!”
She dismissed me for a moment and talked to Yvonne about Sioux, her aged hunter, now content to amble about the small paddock dreaming of the days when he could have cleared the white rails at a bound.
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