Mary was struck by the tired shadows about his eyes and she squeezed his hands and moved closer: ‘I’m sorry, Douglas.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘Have you spoken to Fleming?’
‘No. Did he mention my report?’
Mary shook her head. Lindsay frowned and said after a moment’s thought: ‘I’ve learnt something more today.’
She tensed a little.
‘No, all right,’ he said quickly, ‘I won’t talk about it now.’
For a few seconds there was an awkward silence, then he pulled a scrap of cardboard from his pocket: ‘Your brother sent me this. It’s from Helmut Lange.’
She turned the piece of cigarette packet over to read the message, scribbled in a small neat hand.
Thank you for helping me. Please thank lovely lady. Sorry.
‘He remembers “lovely lady”,’ said Lindsay with a broad smile, ‘It must have worried your brother.’
‘Why does he want to thank us?’
‘I think he regards me as his rescuer. As for you, he’s struggling with the old certainties – Fatherland and Führer – and you reminded him there are other choices.’
‘I only met him for a few hours.’
Lindsay squeezed her arm playfully. ‘And in those few hours . . . perhaps it was your eyes.’
Mary pulled a face at him. ‘And the “Sorry”?’
‘Ah, well in the end it didn’t work.’
‘Work?’
‘He hasn’t the courage to follow his conscience.’
‘Did you want him to?’
‘He might have been useful.’
‘I thought you liked him.’
‘I do.’
Lindsay began to propel Mary gently by the elbow towards the Royal Albert Hall.
‘What are we going to hear?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
They bought a programme in the foyer: Elgar and Beethoven – the Fifth Symphony – Rachmaninov and Wagner. The hall was almost full already and a little too warm. The audience seemed younger, less grand than before the war, and judging by the faces and uniforms more international. They took their seats in the stalls and Lindsay reached across for her hand: ‘I’m surprised about the Wagner, Hitler’s so devoted to him.’
‘Keep the war out of the concert hall,’ said Mary with a smile.
But it was advice she failed miserably to follow. No matter how hard she tried, her thoughts broke free of the music, drifting from the hall to the war. She felt a little guilty, as if she was letting the orchestra down. Lindsay was shifting awkwardly in his seat beside her, clearly struggling to concentrate too. She felt sure his thoughts were full of interrogations and codes and the new piece of information he was bursting to share with her. Perhaps it was naïve but she hoped he would forget the whole thing. It was an obsession, dangerous for both of them.
Lindsay dropped Mary’s hand. The Albert Hall was bursting with applause.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ he shouted across at her.
‘Oh yes, especially the Wagner. What about you?’
‘Oh yes, the Wagner.’
The chattering, cheerful audience swept them from the concert hall and on to the pavement. Most people were walking west towards Kensington High Street and the Underground, the sky in front of them yellow and orange, strewed with deep grey cloud. Blackout was at a little after eleven.
‘We could have some supper,’ said Lindsay.
‘Where? No, it’s all right, I don’t feel very hungry.’
He turned her shoulders so she was facing him: ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Fine, honestly.’
‘Would you like to come back to my flat? I can make us something to eat.’
Mary hesitated. Fleming had said: ‘Careful.’ She wanted to be with Lindsay but perhaps it was better to wait until the dust he had kicked up had settled a little.
‘Please.’
‘I think . . .’
‘Please.’
‘Yes, all right,’ she heard herself say.
Lindsay took her hand and led her from the concert crowd in search of a taxicab. They found one parked outside the American Ambassador’s house in Princes Gate. It was a short journey round Hyde Park Corner into Piccadilly, the city drawing down its blinds, retreating into darkness. Mary stared silently out of the window, frustrated and surprised by her own weakness. The cab passed the sad shell of Wren’s modest masterpiece, St James’s Church, turned right into the Haymarket, then on into St James’s Square, where it pulled up outside a tall smoky-black brick house in the south-east corner.
‘My home,’ said Lindsay almost apologetically.
‘I’m sure it’s very nice.’
‘It’s gloomy.’
At the top of the stairs, Lindsay opened the door and turned on the light to reveal burgundy walls and a heavy mahogany hall table.
‘Mother’s choice,’ he explained.
Mary walked slowly around the small sitting room, picking up family photographs while Lindsay made them some tea.
‘I spoke to my mother last night,’ he shouted from the kitchen. ‘She needed cheering up so I told her about you.’
‘Why did she need cheering up?’
It was some time before he answered, but when he did:
‘I told her I was in a little trouble. She was upset. She thinks I should keep my head down – she does.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’s busy with the war effort: his company is turning out munitions now.’
Lindsay brought the tea into the room and they sat together on his mother’s uncomfortable sofa.
‘But my mother was pleased to hear about you.’
‘I’m glad. Are you close to your mother?’
Lindsay began to laugh.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.
‘Does your question have something to do with Dr Freud?’
Mary laughed too: ‘Well, you’re clearly a troubled soul.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said quietly. He put down his cup and reached across for hers: ‘The Navy, your brother, cups and a hard sofa – all very troubling . . .’
She let him pull her towards him and they kissed, slowly at first and then deeply, passionately. And after a time Lindsay led her through to his bedroom where they stood before the blue London night, kissing and caressing with growing urgency. Then he bent to lift her dress up and over her head, her hair falling loose about her shoulders. She stood there, self-conscious but trembling with excitement as he bent again to slip her pants down her thighs and then down her calves. And she could hear his breath sharp and short. Reaching under her hair, he pulled her head gently towards him. They kissed again, intense, wild kisses, until she broke free and pushed him away. And slowly, deliberately, she sat on the edge of the bed, and then she lay back on the bed, raising and parting her knees.
Later they lay quietly together, naked, wet with perspiration, her cheek against his chest. She could feel its easy rise and fall and the steady beat of his heart. And from time to time he leant forward to kiss and smell her hair.
‘You’re beautiful.’
Mary turned her head to kiss his chest, then said: ‘I’m not but thank you.’
‘Please allow me to be the judge.’
They were silent for a minute or so before Mary said: ‘I don’t want them to send you away, Douglas.’
‘Oh you’ll find somebody else,’ he said breezily.
She raised herself quickly, a cross frown on her face: ‘Why did you say that?’
‘Sorry. A silly joke.’
She stared at him as if challenging him to say more.
‘It’s just that I love you,’ he said, ‘. . . and I don’t want you to leave me, and I suppose I wanted to hear you say you wouldn’t.’
Mary bent again to kiss him passionately on the lips and his arms tightened about her. She lay there on top of him, her loose black curls falling to the pillow about his face, and she whispered: ‘I wo
n’t, you goose.’
‘Good.’
‘I shouldn’t have to tell you, but you doubt everything.’
‘Myself most of all.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, Dr Henderson.’
She slipped off him and on to her back: ‘If I were a medical doctor I might say, “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone.”’
She paused for a moment, then said: ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with your background, your family, and this whole codes thing is part of it now, isn’t it? But you don’t need to prove anything. You’ve already distinguished yourself.’
‘Would you love me if I hadn’t?’
‘Honestly, Douglas . . .’
But Lindsay turned to place a finger on her lips: ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Look, I want to tell you about the Culloden.’
Mary reached across and with her thumb began to smooth the deep frown that was wrinkling his brow. ‘If you’re sure you want to,’ she said softly. Lindsay’s face suggested he was anything but sure.
‘You should know,’ he sighed and he rolled on to his back again to stare into the mahogany darkness.
28
‘
S
he wasn’t much of a ship. The bridge was open to everything the Atlantic could throw at us. No matter how careful you were, the sea found its way down the back of your neck into your oilskins and into your boots. I joined her at Portsmouth on the tenth of May 1940. I’d been told the captain was a Tartar but I was confident we would muddle along somehow. I was wrong.’
Lindsay turned to look at her: ‘I need a cigarette.’ He swung his legs off the bed and padded across the room to his jacket which had been carelessly thrown on a chair beneath the window. Mary watched him as he took a cigarette and lit it, his neck and chest flickering in the lighter flame. He settled beside her again, sitting upright against the bedhead.
‘I remember Commander Cave’s first words to me were, “More horsemeat from the universities?”’ Pritchett Ernle-Erle-Cave; he considered himself to be among the nobility of the sea. His father was an admiral but the brains skipped a generation. After thirty years’ service Cave was lucky to be the captain of a vintage destroyer. He cursed like a stoker. I think he must have been the rudest man in the Navy and unfathomably ignorant. The Admiralty dusted him off at the beginning of the war and gave him Culloden. I sensed in my first hours aboard that she was an unhappy ship.
‘We missed Norway, Dunkirk and the fall of France. We muddled along that summer, escorting convoys in and out of the North-West Approaches. There was no hierarchy of misery at first. Cave treated everyone with equal contempt but then I did something very foolish. In an unguarded moment I mentioned my mother to one of the other officers. I don’t know why, it was something I had learnt not to do at school. A couple of days later Cave walked into the wardroom beaming from ear to ear and asked if I would care to join him in the captain’s cabin. He asked me about my family and was incensed when I refused to answer. After that, he brought it up time and again, anything and everything to do with my family, Germany and the war.’
Lindsay paused for a moment to look down at Mary: ‘But this isn’t only my hard-luck story, Cave made it unpleasant for all the officers. You know he must have been a very lonely man.’
Mary reached for Lindsay’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. In turn he lifted hers and, opening her fingers, kissed her palm tenderly.
‘A lot of ships were lost in the summer but our convoys were fortunate. Merchant ships began to call us “the lucky Culloden”. And then convoy HX.70. I can remember the face of our Canadian sub-lieutenant John Parker very clearly. We’re leaving Liverpool, passing into the swept channel and Johnny’s excited because he’s met a nurse called Grace. There’s a big grin on his face. He was nineteen, a lawyer preparing for the Toronto Bar.
‘Four escort ships with Cave as senior captain in command of the group. We met the convoy north-west of Rockall Bank on September the fourteenth, some three hundred miles from home, a grey Atlantic sky and sea, the wind like a knife, nine columns of four ships five miles wide, all struggling to hold their station. Cave spoke to the Commodore of the convoy on the wireless and I remember the little-boy excitement in his face when he was told that five ships had been sunk the night before. With the convoy travelling at no more than six knots it was a racing certainty the enemy was still in contact. I swear it was the happiest any of us had seen him. His moment of glory had come, his chance to prove the Navy wrong after years of being passed over.
‘All gun crews at action stations before sunset. I remember a thick white strip of moonlight rippling across the sea to the horizon and I could sense the enemy close by. Fear. Then at a little after eight o’clock it began. There was suddenly a small bright yellow light on the starboard side of the convoy. We weren’t sure what it was at first and we were under Admiralty orders to maintain wireless silence for as long as possible. Cave tried to signal the other escorts with an Aldis lamp but there was no reply. Then one of the merchant ships hoisted a red lantern and . . .’
‘A red lantern?’ asked Mary.
‘Torpedoed. And a few minutes later, there was an enormous explosion in the heart of the convoy: a tanker some two miles from us, a blazing mass of white flame, smoke rising in a huge column hundreds of feet into the sky. Then, on the far side of the convoy, another burst of flame and then another and another.
‘As we approached the tanker, we could hear thump, thump, thump against the sides of the ship as if a giant sea creature was trying to batter a hole in our hull. Cave shouted, “Go and see what that is, Number One.” The ship slowed and I made my way down to the fo’c’sle. The sea was heaving with timber, heavy wooden pit props. Then one of the crew shouted, ‘Over there, sir, look’, and there was a collection of little red lights dancing on the water, tossed towards us by the swell. We must have passed within a couple of hundred yards of them. I couldn’t see their faces but I could hear them: ‘Help, help, please God help . . .’
Lindsay reached over to the bedside table and lit another cigarette, smoke curling to the ceiling. Mary felt suddenly tense and cold and conscious that it was late, the still time between two and three o’clock when the night is at its darkest. In the silence she wrapped the sheet more tightly about herself. Lindsay did not look at her, but after a couple of minutes he began to speak again, quickly, harshly: ‘But I can’t blame Cave for leaving them, the convoy was under attack. We threw Carley rafts and promises, “We’ll be back.” But we didn’t go back. And then we were closing on the tanker. The sea was calmer about her, heavy with a sticky blanket of oil, and in places it was on fire. The ship was burning from stem to stern, the bridge just a twisted shell. We weren’t that close but I could feel the heat and hear the whoosh and roar of the flames, and the smoke was a billowing, choking black mountain even against the night sky. The convoy scattered. The Commodore must have despaired of the escorts and with good reason, never mind the enemy; we hadn’t even managed to make contact with each other. Honestly, it was a shambles, really a total shambles.
‘I’d returned to the bridge to find Cave in an impotent rage, cursing the other escorts and his own crew. It was a little after eleven, and I remember thinking, “Oh God another four or five hours of this.” Of course, we know now it was one of Dönitz’s first pack attacks and there were four, perhaps five, U-boats chasing in and out of the convoy. They were all there, the U-boothelden – Otto Kretschmer, Prien, Mohr . . .’
‘Mohr?’ said Mary with surprise. ‘Mohr attacked the convoy? When did you find out?’
But Lindsay ignored her question: ‘We zigzagged to and fro for more than an hour, firing round after round of star shell over the sea in the hope of catching sight of a U-boat but we didn’t see anything, we didn’t hear anything. The Asdic detector was useless, just an empty echo . . .’
‘They were on the surface,’ said Mary.
‘And it was quite obvious to me that we were wasting
our time. By now we’d fallen five or six miles behind the convoy. I drew this to Cave’s attention and he exploded. I was forgetting my place, he said, I was questioning his judgement, thirty years’ experience he said. The U-boats were forgotten, I was now the enemy. It was a very unpleasant scene. My God, he’d more important things to worry about than me, but it was panic, he’d lost control. We weren’t “lucky Culloden” any more. Then there was a terrific flash on the port bow, followed by another column of fire and smoke and that put an end to his diatribe. It was obvious even to Cave that we were searching in the wrong place. We went chasing over to the burning tanker, the men still at their stations, cold, tired, frightened. As we approached, we could see by the light of the flames another ship close by, a large freighter with her deck and cargo lights burning. She was listing heavily to port. We put scramble nets over our sides with a couple of burly ratings at the bottom to help survivors aboard but we didn’t find any one – just empty life jackets. I remember a small explosion somewhere deep inside the freighter, a sound like breaking glass; it blew the hatches off and there was a shower of wet ash from the funnel. The sea was in the engine room. The lifeboats were out there somewhere but Cave was anxious to rejoin what was left of the convoy. It was almost three o’clock and the sea was rough and getting rougher. By then we felt helpless and rather ashamed. Cave had a face like thunder. He used to glare at you from under dark bushy eyebrows. I remember glancing about the bridge that night and everyone was concentrating hard on the horizon, desperate not to catch his eye. For a moment I was barely able to contain myself, I had this mad, mad urge to laugh out loud.
‘We overhauled the main body of the convoy and the other escorts just before dawn. The Commodore’s ship was among them but he had no more idea than we did how many ships had been lost in the night. One of the other destroyers had picked up two hundred survivors, some of them in bad shape, and Cave gave her permission to leave us and make best speed to Londonderry. He sent the other escorts to round up stragglers and we were left with the rump. I shouldn’t think our presence was very reassuring.
The Interrogator Page 16