Love For An Enemy

by Love For An Enemy (retail) (epub)

  She’d lowered one eyelid as she said it – the one her uncle couldn’t see. Mitcheson thinking behind his set, drinks-party smile: My God, what a lucky man I am. Accosted by Hakim, then – with his smarmy smile – ‘You are a submarine captain, sir, I understand…’

  * * *

  It was a quiet evening as well as an early one, at the Monseigneur. Only one moment jarred, and was still in his mind when finally he was able to take Lucia home. Solange had said something about her sister’s birthday dance, and Hakim asked her, ‘Is Ettore on your guest-list?’

  It wasn’t only the question itself, it was the sly glance at Lucia as he’d asked it. Solange had darted a look at her too, then turned quietly back to Hakim as if she knew she’d blundered: and Lucia’s own quick reaction – reflex, almost, an escape – ‘Ned, let’s dance to this?’

  ‘You know, I don’t believe he is.’ Solange making herself sound casual. ‘In fact I’m fairly sure he’s not.’

  ‘Ah.’ Another smirk in Lucia’s direction as she got up; Mitcheson was already on his feet: thinking that whatever this was about, it was an embarrassment to Lucia and Solange wasn’t happy with it either. Hakim purring: ‘I suppose it would be Candice’s choice – since it’s her birthday…’

  Lucia had a hand on his arm as they went down the steps to the sunken dance-floor. He told her, ‘Your uncle’s not inviting any Italians. I asked him.’ She turned into his arms. ‘With a bunch of us there – well, it’s easier. Considerate of him, really.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Her cheek against his jaw. ‘We don’t have to stay much longer, Ned – d’you think?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than take you home this minute.’

  Hakim was sure to be a friend of Ettore Angelucci’s, he guessed. By his own account he was a buddy of Bertrand Seydoux’s, and one knew that Bertrand and Ettore were boon companions. That embarrassing moment could therefore stem from no more than Ettore having mentioned to the others that he and Lucia had had a row. Like any other closed, introverted society, its staple diet would be trivialities and social gossip of that kind. Best to put it out of mind. Although in the gharry on the way out to her flat, even holding her close and with the aroma of Je Reviens beating the whole amalgam of other fragrances from the Alexandrian streets, it was still there, a vaguely spoiling factor… The core of it, he thought, had been the Italian element – anti-British, therefore anti Lucia’s association with Ned Mitcheson. Angelucci’s non-Italian chums being perhaps less positively anti-British but still politically ambivalent – standing by older personal loyalties but also – certainly the slimy ones like Bertrand and Hakim, and maybe even the majority of them – aware of the distinct possibility of an Axis victory, the Afrika Korps’ triumphal entry.

  That would be the background to it, he guessed. Near enough. Angelucci would know the Seydoux family were giving a dance, and excluding him and his compatriots in favour of the Royal Navy: in particular this fellow Mitcheson who was squiring an Italian girl. It would sting the little bastard to the quick. That was about as much as there’d be to it – and to hell with the lot of them. All that mattered was here, in his arms: eyes a soft gleam in scented semi-darkness, lips open, welcoming.

  * * *

  Currie told him that Ark Royal had flown a squadron of torpedo-bombers into Malta and now returned to Gib. The battleship Rodney had been with her, flying the admiral’s flag since Nelson had been damaged in the recent convoy operation. Also that two cruisers – Aurora and Penelope – with accompanying destroyers had established themselves in Malta as Force K, to continue the disruption of supply routes to the Afrika Korps.

  This was at the Sporting Club, beside the pool after an hour of squash. Currie seemed to know it all: presumably saw the Staff’s signal logs. Mitcheson asked him: ‘So when will you be putting in a bit more sea-time? Or have you shot your bolt, now?’

  ‘We’ve been out a lot, damn it!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure…’

  ‘And you seem to be stuck into the fleshpots well enough, I may say!’

  ‘Only had four days in last time. Major repairs, incidentally. We’re due for a breather, really.’

  Spartan’s crew, in two watches, were getting a week’s relaxation at an Army rest-camp down on the Great Lakes, and the fact this had been agreed to did seem to guarantee that this spell in harbour would last at least a fortnight, maybe longer. Which in its turn raised another question: whether such kindly treatment might be in preparation for longer periods at sea thereafter. If so, it could mean that the long-awaited desert offensive would be opening soon.

  He asked Currie, after a precautionary glance around, ‘When’s opening night for the great offensive, d’you know?’

  ‘If I did, I wouldn’t—’ he was checking that they were well enough on their own, too – ‘wouldn’t bloody gas about it.’ His stare was challenging. ‘Next question?’

  ‘All right – try this. Have you answered the Seydoux invitation yet?’

  ‘Yes, I have. And we’ll meet at Simone’s at eight – right?’

  Lucia would be at the Seydoux’s all afternoon, helping with preparations. Matt Bennett and young McKendrick would be joining them at Simone’s too. Teasdale was at the rest-camp with the starboard watch of the ship’s company, and Barney Forbes had elected to remain on board as duty officer. Dancing wasn’t in his line, he’d told Mitcheson. ‘Certainly not that formal stuff.’

  ‘But it won’t be all that formal, Barney.’

  ‘Too much so for yours truly, anyway. Rich Frogs, all that…’

  Currie said: ‘Your girl doesn’t approve of Simone’s, I gather.’

  ‘Oh?’ Managing to look surprised. ‘Doesn’t she?’

  ‘If you didn’t know it, why don’t you ever bring her there?’

  ‘Hasn’t been occasion to, that’s all. Why d’you think so, anyway?’

  ‘Solange told me. Lucia thinks Simone is some sort of whore. “Scarlet woman”, Solange calls it.’

  ‘Does she, indeed.’

  ‘And Simone is nothing of the sort!’

  ‘Well – Lucia’s never expressed any such view to me. You may be right, but—’

  ‘Just because a few tarts happen to use the place. Their choice, not hers – and she’s not going to throw away perfectly good custom, is she.’ Currie shrugged. ‘Anyway, her husband’s due back soon.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mitcheson smiled. ‘Well, bad luck!’

  ‘Damned awkward for her, actually.’ He glanced round again, and dropped his voice. ‘There’s a beauty-parlour place she goes to. Actually a lot of Alexandrian society women use it. One of the specialtiés de la maison is – incidentally, they talked her into it, it wasn’t her idea…’ He lowered his tone still further. ‘She let them pluck her pubic hair into the shape of a heart. Rather fetching, actually.’

  ‘Rather painful, I’d imagine.’

  ‘How she’ll explain it to her husband, that’s the problem.’

  ‘Easy. Tell him she’s had it done specially for his homecoming.’

  ‘Well, that’s the obvious thing – what I suggested. But she says he wouldn’t believe it in a million years.’

  ‘I can tell you the answer, Joss.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’ll send him an anonymous note, tell him you did it.’

  * * *

  He’d written to Elizabeth by this time, and mentioned that he’d become involved in a certain amount of social life ashore – very hospitable civilians, quite a lot of dining and dancing. As well as squash and swimming. So his ‘free’ time had been unusually full. He was sorry he hadn’t written as often as he’d used to do; but what with that and the fact there was so little one could get past the censors anyway…

  She’d read between the lines, he thought. It wasn’t a solution in the long term, but he felt better for what seemed to have been at least an approach to coming clean.

  * * *

  The dance went off well enough. Mitcheson wasn’t
at his brightest, having had the news that day of the loss of one of the T-class boats who’d been on her way home for refit. All that was known for sure was she hadn’t reached the Malta base, for which like all submarines in transit through the Med she’d been packed with cargo. The guess was that she’d been mined. But he danced with Madame Seydoux, and with the birthday girl and with her sister; and finally, for the rest of the evening, with Lucia – whom he’d met and danced with in this house exactly eleven weeks earlier.

  ‘What’ll we be doing in eleven months, d’you think?’

  The band was playing ‘Embraceable You’. Facing this question which was impossible to answer, he thought how blinding an effect the war had. In one month’s time, let alone eleven, you might be anywhere: you might also be dead. As witness today’s sad news – and that of Tigress, and a dozen others whose names one could have reeled off instantly without any effort of recollection. He murmured, ‘War could be over by then, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘No. To be honest – no. But how can one tell?’

  ‘Do you think we’ll out-last it, Ned?’

  ‘You and me, our—’

  ‘D’you think when it’s over we’ll still—’

  ‘Yes.’ Straight answer to yet another unanswerable question. Straight wishful-thinking. ‘We must.’

  ‘If we could – we might have a chance. D’you think?’

  Those golden eyes… And another answer he didn’t have – if what she meant was what he thought she meant… He hedged: ‘Imagine – if we could’ve guessed eleven weeks ago that we’d be here and having a conversation like this one—’

  ‘But I knew!’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  Bertrand sliding past, with a short, plain girl – Hakim’s sister. Bertrand aloof, ignoring him and Lucia. He was barely his father’s son, Mitcheson thought: unless the father was outstandingly double-faced. But that was peripheral: what mattered was here in his arms, her body close against his. Remembering that that night he’d actually apologized to her at one stage for his own physical reaction to this same closeness. Now, he’d only have apologized for its absence – if that had been conceivable.

  * * *

  Josh Currie, dancing with Solange – who was quite a few inches taller than him, in her heels – did a double-take on something she’d just said.

  ‘You mean Lucia had an affair with Ettore Whats’it?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean anything of the sort. I mean they saw a lot of each other, that’s all. He’s very popular with girls, a lot of them envied her, you know?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Not especially. No. But—’

  ‘What kind of men attract you?’

  ‘Are you fishing, Josh?’

  ‘No – but I’m interested—’

  ‘Oh, good!’

  ‘Seriously. What kind of men? That lad there, for instance? You’ve danced with him, I saw you – does he—’

  ‘Which?’

  Jock McKendrick – prancing around with one of the Greek cousins. Earlier, Currie had noticed him going strong with Candice. The Navy were wearing blues now in place of summer whites, and they were all feeling the heat in the big, crowded room. Solange shrugged: ‘He’s all right. Quite funny. Too young for me though. I think Candice quite likes him. That engineer, now – there, that one, his name’s Matt, it’s short for Matthew – he’s very nice. Married, unfortunately…’

  ‘So you like older men – right?’

  ‘But of course I do, Josh!’ Her eyes laughing into his, under the cloud of glossy-brown hair. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

  * * *

  The Cairo weekend – Friday afternoon to Sunday night – passed in a flash. Lucia’s mother was as charming as Mitcheson remembered her from their brief meeting at the wedding reception, and de Gavres was a lot less pompous than he’d seemed on that occasion. He was also interesting to talk to, with some special insight into Italian attitudes. Spanish, too – on the subject of Spain’s possibly coming in on the side of the Axis, for instance, he’d said there was an active anti-war faction, including a number of retired senior officers, diplomats and suchlike, who would hardly have been on the side of the Reds but weren’t died-in-the-wool Fascists either. They knew Spain had been bled white by the revolution, and wouldn’t necessarily benefit from joining in even if the Germans won; by and large their preference would be for an Allied victory. The greatest danger – de Gavres made the point as his own but it wasn’t exactly a novel concept – was if things went so badly for Britain, especially in the Mediterranean and the Western Desert, that Franco might see himself as becoming a heavy loser if he did not get into it. This led to an account of a conversation between Mussolini and Marshall Badoglio – his chief of armed forces and grandiosely styled Duke of Addis Ababa – in 1939. Badoglio had objected that the army was so badly equipped they didn’t even have shirts for the soldiers, let alone enough uniforms or weapons, and Mussolini had answered that he didn’t give a damn. He’d argued, ‘All I need is to have a few thousand men killed, so that I can sit at the peace table on the victors’ side!’

  Mitcheson had said: ‘He won’t though.’

  ‘You think not?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Well.’ A Gallic shrug. ‘I am a soldier, Commander, and totally committed to our cause. But I am also a realist. The Germans at this moment are only sixty miles from Moscow. They took Odessa last week, and Kharkov yesterday. In your country now the communists and their friends are screaming for the opening of a Second Front – a landing in France, they mean by this. But how could it be done while the U-boats still have the upper hand in the Atlantic – and the primary source of material is America?’ A snort… ‘I don’t believe in pipe-dreams, Commander.’ He’d pointed with his cigar: ‘Rommel’s just down the road there, you know.’

  In the two-day weekend there was a lunch and a cocktail party, drinks on the veranda at Shepheard’s, a guided tour of the town and an afternoon’s swimming at the Gezira Club. Mitcheson and Lucia had connecting bedrooms, with the key in the door on Lucia’s side for her to lock behind him when he left her in the early mornings to make his own bed look lived-in.

  They got back to Alexandria late on the Sunday evening and had supper at Nico’s, at Ibrahimia. He was officially on leave, didn’t have to be back on board before noon next day. In candle-light, over a checked tablecloth, he raised his glass to her: ‘Thank you for a marvellous weekend. I think your mother’s smashing.’

  ‘Well, I think so too, of course. And she’s been through very bad times, you know?’

  He nodded. ‘Even now, I suppose – with your brother in Italy – effectively lost to her—’

  ‘For a long time she was devastated. She still has – sad times. She says that if she let herself think about it, she’d be miserable all the time. So, she – closes her mind to it, that’s all. She likes you very much, Ned. She told me I should hold on to you tight!’

  ‘Good advice. I love it.’

  ‘How long do we have now?’

  ‘She’s broad-minded too, isn’t she? You’d think she’d rather you fetched-up with a Frenchman. Jules too, for that matter. But – what d’you mean, how long – no rush in the morning, if that’s what—’

  ‘I mean before you go away again. I know I shouldn’t ask, but—’

  ‘Can’t answer anyway. I don’t know.’

  ‘What really matters is when you’ll come back. Those are the out-of-this-world times – aren’t they? The first day – first night – when I know there’ll be at least some few days…’

  * * *

  Spartan sailed for patrol – her fifth from Alexandria – on 8 November, having had a full three weeks in harbour. Her billet initially was to be the fifteen-mile gap between the island of Ayios loannis and the islet of Kandelusia, on the route south from Leros.

  He didn’t see or telephone Lucia in the two days before departure. It was an enormous exercise in self-
restraint, to which he forced himself partly because Currie had asked him – in Simone’s, one early afternoon – whether Lucia would know or be able to guess when he was leaving for patrol. He’d told him no, she would not, and what was more they’d agreed that she’d never ask or expect him to tell her in advance. He’d almost hated Currie in that moment – for his suspicions and intrusion – and Currie had sensed it, told him apologetically, ‘Fact is – being straight with you, Mitch, no good beating about the bush – she was seeing a lot of our friend Angelucci before you came on the scene. That is fact. So – well, she might inadvertently let something slip out, eh? And we know about Angelucci’s involvement in their Patriots’ Association, whatever they call it—’

  ‘Nothing to slip out. And if there was, she’d keep it to herself. Third, even if you’re right about Angelucci and ancient days – which incidentally – well, all right, it’s possible, as you say I wasn’t on the scene – even if that’s true, she’s certainly having nothing to do with him now.’

  In fact, she would have known that he was going soon. It wasn’t necessary to make any kind of statement. Perhaps especially after having the longest period of time together that they’d had this far, on his last night with her she couldn’t not have known.

  10

  Ark Royal had gone. Torpedoed – four days ago, this was 17 November – but it was still a shock, as well as a loss the fleet couldn’t afford. Especially with all the desert – and Cretan – air bases in Axis hands. There wasn’t a single carrier in the Med now.

  Currie, on Queen Elizabeth’s quarterdeck – he’d come up through the hatchway on its starboard side, under the massive loom of ‘X’ turret – having sniffed the air, crossed over to the ship’s side above the gangway and peered over. No boat waiting for him: and there should have been, he was on his way to call on an admiral, for God’s sake.