by Lawton, John
‘There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea,’ he said, and Cal knew he was trapped for the duration of the English Tea Ceremony.
§ 49
Vera cooked as well as her mother. Cal had no idea what it was, but there was plenty of it. A dash of meat somewhere, he thought it might be mutton, but healthy portions of carrot and lentil. All the same it was a spartan meal, in that neither Stilton nor his wife nor the lodgers came down to eat, and the awkward recriminating and self-recriminating gathering around the kitchen table consisted of Cal, Kitty, Vera, Rose, her husband Tom, the roundly pregnant Reenie, and the boy Tel.
Cal aimed for neutrality, as heads bent over plates in what he could only think of as an angry silence.
‘Is Pilot Officer Micklewhite on duty?’ he asked of Reenie.
Reenie and Rose were the tearful ones, always on the verge of grabbing a handkerchief and dashing from the room. Reenie looked up at him, eyes red-rimmed.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Maurice – I meant, I guess Maurice is on call?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He can’t get away, you see. They could scramble any time.’
And in saying this the implication of her own words came home to her. She sniffled and dug around in a pocket for her hanky.
Vera’s voice cut through the sniffles.
‘You’ll have to move back now. You know that, don’t you?’ Cal wondered to whom she was speaking, but Kitty answered all the same.
‘Wot? Wot do you mean?’
‘I mean you, fancy pants. You’ll have to move back. I can’t manage this house on me own. It’s time you recognised that you can’t shirk your responsibilities no more.’
‘Wot? Me? Why me? Why not Rose or Reen?’
‘Why you, ’cos you’re the eldest, that’s why. Besides, they’re married. They got blokes and kids of their own to look after. I can’t look after me mum as well as Dad and Tel.’
Tel chipped in, ‘You won’t ’ave to look after me. I don’t need no looking after. I’ll be in the Navy next year.’
Then both the sisters turned on him.
‘Not bloody likely!’
‘Wot?’
‘You’re going nowhere,’ said Kitty, aiming at him with her fork. ‘Hasn’t this family lost enough already? You can just wait till you’re called up, and even then you won’t have to go. Not after this. It’d be cruel to take you as well as Kev and Trev. If you join the Navy now it’ll break your mother’s heart.’
‘That’s not fair!’ – the cry of younger siblings everywhere. ‘You’re making me stay at home just so you can go on swanning around up West.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it. I work up West. Bow Street ain’t exactly the Mile End Road, you know. I can’t roll out of bed and be at work ten minutes later! Will you lay off. Will you all just lay off! I am not moving back, and that’s final.’
Vera gathered up plates, an oversized show of bustle, as much noise as she could make. And when she’d dumped everything in the sink, she faced Kitty across the width of the kitchen and uttered the single word, ‘Bitch.’
Kitty pushed back her chair and yanked open the kitchen door. Cal sat nonplussed. He’d never seen anything like this. In his family it simply didn’t happen. His sisters would never call each other a bitch, they’d simply point out that one was being boring – the greatest sin the family knew of, to be boring.
‘Calvin!’ Kitty said from the doorway.
Out in the street it was already dark.
‘Will you take me home?’ she said.
‘To Covent Garden? Sure. I’ll get us a cab at the end of the street.’
‘No. I meant to your place. To Claridge’s.’
‘To Claridge’s?’
‘I can’t stay here. Not with that lot. And I don’t want to be on my own. So just take me home with you, will you.’
‘Am I ever going to see where you live?’
‘You wouldn’t want to, really you wouldn’t.’
§ 50
Afterwards. Lying in the bed. Lights out, windows open, curtains flapping. A single sheet pulled over them, Kitty with her head on his chest, one hand splayed across his belly. Cal said ‘Are they always like that?’
‘Like wot?’
‘Angry.’
‘Oh, that. Yeah. I think it’s the only way Vera and Tel have to show emotions. Like they don’t have the vocabulary for all the others, so they use the one they know. Vera’s as cut up as the rest of us, but it’s the only way she’s got to show it, to take it out on Miss Greenlees and me and young Tel.’
It was the most analytic statement he had ever heard Kitty make.
‘Doesn’t let you off the hook though, does it?’
‘You mean I lost me temper too?’
‘That . . . and the fact you can’t bear to be there.’
‘If you lived with ’em you’d know.’
‘I do know. I told your mother much the same thing while you were in the kitchen with Vera. She asked me why I joined up. I told her, not in so many words, but I told her I’d done it just to escape my family. It’s not unique to the English. You joined the cops, I joined the army. Amounts to pretty much the same thing, really.’
Kitty propped herself up on one elbow. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew she was looking at him.
‘You slyboots,’ she said.
‘Slyboots.’ He weighed up the phrase.
‘Answer me this, then. You wear them bifocals – specs to read – specs to look at objects more than about thirty feet away – how did you ever get into the army in the first place? You can’t be better than A4 with peepers that bad.’
He was wearing his glasses now. He’d put them back on within a minute or so of rolling off Kitty. He could get by without them and a lot of the time he had to – but he could see her the more clearly with them. He’d made love to her out of focus – in the afterglow he rather wanted to be able to see her. He put his specs on much as most men lit up a cigarette. Unconsciously he pressed a finger to the bridge and shoved them an infinitesimal fraction further up.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘I cheated.’
‘You cheated!?!’
‘I had a friend sat the eye test a little ahead of me. He has what’s called an eidetic memory. You know what that is?’
‘No.’
‘Means he sees things as pictures and takes them like a camera. When he wants to remember something he just summons up the picture. Anything from the arrangement of flowers in a vase to pages of print. He can hold thirty thousand words of text in his head, without even thinking of them as words. He just sees a block of images.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘He sat the test two hours ahead of me. Came out, drew all the eye charts for me and I learnt them by rote – the hard way. Passed A1.’
‘That’s amazing. I never met anyone like that.’
Cal had, he’d known two people with that gift. One was Billy Blick, who’d helped him into the army. The other was Wolfgang Stahl.
§ 51
In his room in a London lodging house, Stahl could not sleep. He lay on his cot oblivious to the noises of an uneasy household of single, displaced men – grunting, arguing, farting, fighting – the walking wounded of life, not war – and stared at the ceiling. Image after image flashed onto it, the family trees of battle formation: Army Group North, von Leeb, 21 Infantry Divisions; Army Group Centre, von Bock, 32 Infantry Divisions; Army Group South, von Runstedt, 63 Infantry Divisions. If that didn’t put him to sleep he’d start on the Panzers.
§ 52
Cal was woken by the ’phone. Eight thirty. Walter time. Except that it couldn’t be Walter. Not today. It was. He shook Kitty.
‘Get up. For God’s sake, get up!’
‘Wossmatter?’
‘Your father’s here.’
‘So?’
‘This time he’s coming up.’
Cal tugged her naked into the bathroom, resisting all the way. He turn
ed on the taps.
‘What are you doing? Leggo!’
She jerked free of him, and he slammed the door with his backside, pressed against the panel.
‘Stay here. The noise of the water should smother any sound you make. Just stay here!’
He slipped out, dashed around the bedroom. Pulled on his robe. Gathered the scattered clothing Kitty had peeled off and thrown down the night before. He shoved the bundle at her through the bathroom door, but she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in.
‘We don’t have to hide.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You do. Or would you rather your father found us like this?’
‘Like what? Calvin – I’ll be thirty this summer. He can’t possibly think I’m a virgin.’
‘Do you really want what he might think to be confirmed this way?’
They could hear Stilton knocking at the door now. She lowered her voice.
‘They can’t nag me about not being married at twenty-nine and expect me to be a virgin, now can they?’
‘Get dressed and stay quiet. I’ll get rid of him.’
He opened the door, feigning sleepiness, when even the hairs on his head stood to attention.
‘Walter?’
Stilton pushed past him. Pacing the middle of the room. Antsy in a way Cal had never seen him before. Then he seemed to sniff the air. Oh, God, Cal thought, what is it – her scent, or worse, the reek of illicit sex?
Stilton snapped to, plonked himself down in one of the bucket chairs by the window. ‘We’ve work to do,’ he said. ‘Things we both forgot.’
Cal stood still. Pretended to scratch his head until he realised that this could only make him look like Stan Laurel.
‘Walter, are you sure this is a good idea? Isn’t this a little too soon?’
‘Work’s the best remedy I know of. I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me.’
‘The family, Walter. Aren’t there things to be . . . to be . . . arranged?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like . . . a funeral?’
‘You need bodies for a funeral. My lads are five hundred fathoms down in the Atlantic.’
Of course – it was a stupid remark.
‘Walter, would you give me a few minutes to get myself together?’
‘Aye – I’ll read the morning paper. But chop chop all the same.’
In the bathroom Kitty had settled into the bath and was soaping herself lazily, a hand gliding the length of one arm, cupping one breast, nipple up, lips pursed to blow bubbles off it and create one of the simplest pleasures known to man – soapy tits. Cal wished he could ignore this, wished she’d stop what she’d started. He sat on the lavatory seat, eyes on her body, mind struggling back towards the remote outposts of common sense.
‘D’yer get rid of him?’
‘Er . . . no, he’s staying. I’ll have to get dressed and go out with him. You’d better stay here until you hear me slam the door.’
‘And . . .’
‘And I have to shave.’
‘You can’t go out all icky-fluffed from bed. Why don’t you get in with me? I’ll soap yer todger.’
‘Kitty. You just lost two brothers. Your mother’s up to her eyes in grief. Your father’s in the next room telling me he wants to bury himself in his work . . .’
‘Yeah. But we’re still alive, aren’t we? I think you should get in with me. I think you should get it while you can.’
‘Is that your life’s motto in a nutshell, Kitty?’
‘Pretty much. You getting in or not?’
Cal said nothing. Whipped the razor across his face, brushed his teeth, dearly wished he could piss in front of a woman, but found he couldn’t, went back to his bedroom and threw on his clothes.
‘I remembered,’ Walter was saying. ‘We never got round to what our man had in his pockets.’
Cal took an envelope out of the desk drawer and set it on the round table in front of Stilton. Stilton put on his reading glasses and spent five minutes peering closely at the late Peter Robinson’s documents.
‘What conclusion did you reach?’ he asked.
‘Walter, could we discuss this over breakfast?’ said Cal.
Stilton looked at his pocket watch. Cal had hit him where it counted.
‘I don’t see why not,’ he said.
There was a clunk from the bathroom. Cal ignored it. Stilton did not appear to have heard. Cal slammed the door after them as loudly as he could. Stilton glanced at him but said nothing.
With a cup of coffee inside him and six floors of steel and concrete between him and Kitty, Cal felt much more like answering questions. Through a mouthful of toast and marmalade, Walter asked the same one again.
‘What did you make of it all?’
‘They sent a two-man team. We got lucky. The man on the roof was an assassin, just the same as Smulders – sent to kill Stahl. Only this one they landed from a U-boat on some bleak stretch of coast, rather than send him in pretending to be a refugee. Could be they hoped we’d be so taken up with Smulders we’d never notice this one. He called himself Peter Robinson, by the way.’
‘Aye, I saw. Forensics reckon there was nothing about his clothing to suggest he was German. British labels. Phillips replacement rubber soles on his shoes. An Ona condom still in its foil packet lost in the lining of his jacket. Home and Colonial linen handkerchief. Remains of London bus tickets in the dust in the bottom of his pockets, a bit of old Fry’s chocolate paper stuck to ’em. They’d kitted him out down to the fluff. What did you reckon to the paperwork?’
‘I’ve never seen an ID card. But the Germans are first-rate at this sort of thing. If Robinson was sent by the Abwehr, and I might add that is only one possibility, then Canaris’s back-room boys would have seen to it he got the best.’
Stilton swilled tea, Cal stared at him, wondering if he really had taken the one possibility at face value. Privately, Cal thought it much more probable that Admiral Canaris knew nothing of these men, that they had been sent by Heydrich.
‘Oh, they’re very good,’ said Stilton. ‘You ever seen food coupons?’
‘Clothing – yes. Food – no. I eat here or I eat out. In either case, off the ration.’
Stilton passed him the ration book.
‘Are they obviously bad?’ Cal asked.
‘No, no. They’re not. They’re good. Thing is, they’re too good. Ration books are inky and messy. The perforations have gaps where they won’t tear. This is perfect.’
Cal looked at it, without any clear notion of what he was looking for.
‘You mean they slipped up?’
‘You tell me?’
‘They wouldn’t. If they’d seen a current British ration book they’d have copied it exactly.’
‘And if they hadn’t?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘ID cards don’t change. The ration book’s changed a few times – when the ration changes, or at least when they add a new item to it, it does. Cheese went on only a week or two before you got here.’
The wistful, sad look of a trencherman denied passed across Stilton’s face.
‘Meat went down to a shillin’ per person. I ask you – a bob’s worth a week.’
Cal nodded, trying to fake sympathy with a man who regularly ate two breakfasts. Stilton picked up his thread again.
‘Could be the Abwehr can’t keep up. Can’t get hold of ’em as fast as we can print ’em.’
‘I still don’t follow.’
‘I think our chum bought it here. I think it might be the one thing he couldn’t get in Germany. I think it’s a local forgery.’
‘Why? Why would anyone fake food coupons? Seems like a lot of trouble for nothing.’
‘When you’ve been here a while, Calvin, you’ll eat your words. And when you’ve been on the British diet for a while, you’ll think your own words a damn sight tastier than a sausage made up of the worst scraps in a butcher’s shop and a handful o’ sawdust. O’ course there’s villai
ns forging coupons. They’re like anything else in a society made up of scarcity – a tradeable, and therefore a nickable and fakeable commodity.’
‘You mean we’ve got a lead?’
‘I’m pretty certain we could find the bloke who made this ration book. But that doesn’t lead us to Stahl, does it? Just lets us follow the trail back to Robinson.’
‘Or,’ said Cal, ‘to the point where his trail crosses Stahl’s.’
‘Eh?’
‘Hasn’t it puzzled you how easily Stahl and Smulders found one another?’
‘If they found one another . . .’
‘Indulge me a little longer, Walter. We’ve proceeded for a week or more, now, on the assumption that Stahl killed Smulders. If we hadn’t we would not have found Robinson, would not have mistook him for Stahl. We thought we were following Stahl.’
‘Go on.’
‘Stahl found Smulders before Smulders found him because he’s using the German network.’
Stilton raised a bushy eyebrow at this but said nothing.
‘He’s using what he knows. It’s a terrible risk, but if he wanted to stay underground it was what he had to use. All the contacts the Germans have in London. At least all the contacts he knew about – and of course, Stahl being Stahl, he’d have made it his business to know.’
‘I don’t like the sound of this . . . this . . . network.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Walter, I don’t mean Germany has infiltrated on the grand scale. I’m not talking about a vast, secret Fifth Column. I’m talking about sending agents abroad with a few names, someone who might give them a room without too many questions, someone who can fake a ration book. That’s all.’
‘I know what you mean. I just don’t like it. Short of a network of spies, you’re saying Jerry picks up on that element in society that’ll do anything for half a crown and a bag of peanuts – they’re using the scum of London, the forgers, the tea-leafs, the dips I spent most of my early days locking up. I’ve seen some right villains in me time, but I’d’ve said most of ’em were patriotic when push comes to shove. And push came to shove at Dunkirk. We’ve had our backs to the wall ever since. I’d like to think there was a scrap of decency even in the worst of men.’