‘Twelve or twelve thirty.’
‘See you then,’ she said and, pressing the photographs to her breast, made her way out through the dining room in search of a place to rest.
* * *
‘Absenteeism,’ Archie yelled into the telephone, ‘isn’t my responsibility. For God’s sake, man, how do you expect me to be able to tell just by looking at them if they will or will not drag themselves out of bed of a morning? I agree that some are obvious candidates for the funny farm but the co-relationship between sheer inbred laziness and being a raving nutter has so far escaped me. Now hold on, just hold on: I’m not accusing you of being a nutter, Mr Macdonald, and, yes, I do realise that you have a factory to run, but…’
Babs paused in her typing and squinted at Archie through the half-open door of the office. She enjoyed watching Archie working himself up into a paroxysm of indignation. Experience told her that quite soon he would begin to wax sarcastic with Mr Macdonald, who managed a small asbestos factory on the far side of Renfrew and who, war or not, stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence of unions or workers’ councils. Four days was the average tenure of new employees, and several had even had the gall – or the gumption – to return to the Welfare Centre to register their complaints in person.
Archie stood up, pushed away his chair, turned his back and brought his voice down to a rasping whisper; always a bad sign.
Babs leaned over her Underwood, eavesdropping unashamedly.
‘I will not,’ Archie hissed, ‘be talked to in this manner, sir. If you have a grouse about the quality of employees sent you by this office then I suggest you notify the Ministry of Labour who will, I’ve no doubt, be only too delighted to send round a team of Health and Safety inspectors to establish the facts behind complaints on both sides of the managerial divide.’ He paused and raised a hand to heaven. ‘No, Mr Macdonald, I said “managerial divide”, which phrase, as far as I’m aware, does not imply a threat.’
‘Excuse me.’
Babs had been so intent on listening to Archie that she hadn’t heard the street door open. She swung round, bashing her elbow on the Underwood, and blinked up at the woman who stood before the desk.
‘May I help you?’ Babs asked, rubbing her elbow.
‘Is he busy?’ the woman said. ‘Yes, I can see he’s busy.’
She was just a little older than Mammy, Babs thought, and had a delicate, powdery style that Mammy had never acquired. Archie had a textbook phrase for the social type to which this woman belonged: middle-class aspirants Archie called them. It struck Babs that the classification might have been coined with just this woman in mind.
She couldn’t imagine what the woman could possibly want in a recruitment office for she was clearly too genteel to undertake any sort of hard labour apart, perhaps, from flower arranging.
‘I won’t wait if he’s busy,’ the woman said.
‘Perhaps I can be of assistance,’ Babs suggested.
‘I’ll just leave him these, shall I?’ the woman said. ‘I’ll just put them down here and you’ll give them to him, won’t you, dear?’
‘Give him what?’
‘He left his sandwiches, such a rush this morning, went off without them, too conscientious for his own good sometimes.’
‘San— Oh!’ said Babs. ‘Are you—’
‘His mother, Archie’s mother, yes, just an old fusspot, I suppose you’ll think I am, but he gets so cross when he doesn’t have a proper lunch.’
Babs stared at the neat greaseproof packet that Mrs Harding had placed on the desk before her. She could have sworn that an identical package was tucked into the pocket of Archie’s overcoat in the cloakroom but she tactfully kept this information to herself.
The woman was still going on in a rushed little voice, so low and self-effacing that you had to strain to hear it, the sort of voice that would bore you to tears in no time. Babs was well aware that the sandwiches were only an excuse and that Mrs Harding had made the trip across the river not to ensure that her son and heir was properly nourished but to cast an eye on his female assistant.
Babs got to her feet and offered her hand.
‘Why, Mrs Harding,’ she said, laying on the treacle, ‘it’s a great pleasure to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you from Archie.’
‘Have you, have you?’ the woman said. ‘And you are…?’
You know bloody well who I am, Babs thought, and any second now you’re going to take out your lorgnette, put me under the microscope and start asking all sorts of impertinent questions.
‘Barbara Hallop.’ Babs offered her hand again.
Mrs Harding closed both her gloved paws over it. ‘The widow, yes, I’m so sorry for your loss, my dear, yes, it must be terribly hard to bear, losing a husband at your age, do you have children?’
‘Only four,’ Babs said.
Archie’s filial instinct came into play. He straightened, growing taller. The hand that held the telephone tightened until the knuckles turned white. He kept talking, though, kept right on haranguing the manager of Resins & Asbestos as he swung round and, noble as a stag at bay, glowered out at Babs and his mother cosily holding hands and chatting like dear old mates. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, he extended his left hand, balled the fingers into a fist and punched down on the telephone cradle, cutting Macdonald off in mid-flow.
He laid the receiver on its back on the desk and, with a smile that would have made Dr Goebbels proud, advanced out of the office with arms wide spread.
‘Mother,’ he said, ‘what an absolutely splendid surprise!’
* * *
The taxi-cab dropped them at the back of the Arsenal. They continued on foot up the Rua dos Remédios into the maze of lanes, and steep-stepped alleyways that made up the old Moorish quarter of the Alfama. They walked in single file on narrow pavements, Dominic leading and Christy bringing up the rear.
The old houses tucked back in secretive recesses blocked out the breeze from the Tagus, and it was hot now. Polly had chosen to wear a summer frock and cotton jacket. She was tempted to take off the jacket and carry it over her arm but Dominic wore a heavy black overcoat and Christy his reefer jacket and neither of them seemed to be feeling the heat.
She wondered if she was coming down with some vague inopportune malady that would defray the necessity of making decisions. She would, she thought, be perfectly happy propped up in bed in the airy high-ceilinged room in the Avenida Palace Hotel with Dominic or Christy bringing her cool drinks and fresh fruit, and bathing her forehead with a linen cloth.
Eight days at sea, and meeting Dominic again, had eroded her sense of reality and she felt as if she were drifting through the landscapes of a dream.
The blue sky was streaked with motionless wisps of cloud and slotted between the roofs of the houses she could glimpse the walls of an ancient Moorish citadel, the Castelo de São Jorge, high above. The tall buildings reminded her a little of the cluttered tenements of the Calcutta Road back home in Glasgow, except that they were draped with foliage and topped by flowering shrubs, and smelled not of beer and coal smoke but of sun-baked brick and spices.
There had been no sign of Jamie Cameron at lunch and Christy hadn’t turned up until the meal was almost over.
Polly had seized the opportunity to give Dominic all the news from home. In turn he had told her about the children. In fact she had spent the latter part of the morning kneeling in her room upstairs with the photographs spread out on the floor, struggling to recall what manner of mother she had been and why she had become so distanced from her children. She had never been able to see herself in them, to catch sight of her own childhood in those smug, scrubbed, scared little faces; nor did she find it even in the broad smiles and casual poses that Dominic’s camera had caught, for the children in the snapshots seemed more like likeable strangers than her own flesh and blood.
What had passed between Jamie Cameron, Christy and Dominic in Christy’s room in the Avenida Palace she neither knew nor
cared. She was in Dominic’s hands now. She would do just what Dominic told her to do.
Comical really, Polly thought, as she trudged up the steep stone steps, to realise that Mammy was at home fretting about hambones and mutton chops, that Rosie was focused on weaning an Irish foundling and Babs in finding jobs for misfits while she was about to meet with a man who might hold the fate of the Italian nation in his hands. It was all so fraudulent, so contrived, and yet, Polly thought, perhaps this is how agents and spies stumble into the game, nudged on not by pride and patriotism but by pettiness and petulance, by little bits of guilt and a great deal of greed; power too, she supposed, but unlike Dominic, she knew nothing of power or the damage it could cause.
‘You sure you know where you’re going?’ Christy called out.
Dom glanced round. ‘I’m looking for a red-painted wooden gate. The pension’s at the end of the garden behind it.’
‘Haven’t you been here before?’ Polly asked.
‘Only once, at night,’ Dom answered.
‘Maybe we should wait until it gets dark,’ Christy suggested.
‘Or ask someone,’ said Polly.
They came to a halt at a corner. Broken cobbles, drains, a trickle of clear water, washing hung out to dry on iron balconies; the lane dived off downhill. Above the corner, though, it broadened out into something that was almost if not quite a street.
‘You can’t ask anyone,’ said Christy. ‘If you do then the Nazis might be able to trace our footsteps and track Emilio down. Right, Dominic?’
‘That is a danger,’ Dom agreed.
Polly had an almost irrepressible desire to laugh. Nobody in the street remotely resembled her concept of a Nazi. There were a few women pushing handcarts, one or two old men seated on chairs outside their shops, and near the top of the hill a rusty three-wheeled vehicle with chickens in wicker crates piled up behind the driver.
She said, ‘What’ll happen to Emilio if the Germans do find him?’
‘They’ll kill him,’ Dominic said.
He kept his hands in his pockets, kneading a little bag of diamonds in each fist, clinging to them as if they were ballast.
What sort of racket could her husband hope to run in Portugal when he couldn’t even find a boarding house with a red-painted gate? She looked uphill at a fat-armed woman, not unlike Mammy, hanging over the rail of a balcony, watching them. Was she, Polly wondered, in the pay of the Nazis? She was just on the point of calling out to the woman when a head appeared out of the plane of the wall. It was there and then it wasn’t.
Polly blinked, unsure that she had seen anything at all.
She continued to stare along the line of the wall while the fat-armed woman leaned over the railing and unfurled a chequered tablecloth, flapping and shaking it with a snap of the wrists the way Mammy did with wet sheets.
Then the head was there again, the face of a girl.
‘Does Emilio have a daughter?’ Polly asked.
‘How would I know?’ said Dominic, irritably. ‘I’m supposed to be a diamond merchant, not a damned census taker.’
This time the head did not disappear.
The face, a very pretty face, was twisted in an expression of urgency and a slender bare arm shot out and the hand on the end of the arm beckoned.
High above, the fat-armed woman spread the chequered cloth across the ironwork and shouted in guttural French, ‘Ici, ici, vite, vite,’ and Polly, pushing Dominic before her, headed for the break in the plane of the wall and the red-painted gate that defended it.
* * *
‘Do you want it?’ Archie asked, pushing the plate towards her.
‘God, no,’ said Babs. ‘I’m stuffed.’
‘Well, waste not, want not,’ said Archie, manfully tackling the last of the boiled ham sandwiches. ‘The old bat knew perfectly well I’d brought my lunch with me. No, let me revise that ungenerous statement; she isn’t an old bat, not really. Actually, she’s just possessive. I mean I’m not supposed to realise how possessive she is. I’m supposed to be the archetypal spoiled-rotten son, fruit of her loins and apple of her eye, and just lap up all the attention in blissful ignorance of the fact that she’s doing me irreparable psychological damage and rendering me totally incapable of ever being a tolerable husband.’
‘She makes good sandwiches, though,’ Babs said.
‘She does, she does,’ Archie conceded.
‘She just came to have a squint at me, didn’t she?’
‘Old bat,’ said Archie, ruefully.
‘Is it true what she said?’
‘Is what true?’ said Archie, less ruefully.
Babs poked a forefinger into a clean handkerchief and carefully dabbed crumbs from the corners of her lips. ‘About the picture?’
‘Ah, the picture, yes,’ said Archie. ‘It’s just that old thing from Brockway’s Weekly that I happen to have lying around.’
‘Framed?’ said Babs. ‘Hanging above your bed?’
‘It’s a very small room, Babs, a closet really, a hermit’s cell.’
‘I’m not the Virgin Mary, you know.’
Archie laughed then, being a mannerly young man, covered his mouth with his palm and chewed and swallowed before he spoke again.
‘I’ll bet you’re not,’ he said.
‘You don’t light candles, do you?’
‘Candles? Oh, you mean under the— No, sorry, no candles. Been known to fire up the odd cigarette, if that counts.’
‘It doesn’t,’ Babs said. ‘It’s candles, or nothing.’
‘You’re very demanding.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Babs.
‘I’m not sure I want to.’
‘Liar,’ Babs said. ‘You do want to.’
He sighed, rubbed his nose with his wrist. ‘Am I that transparent?’
‘’Fraid so, Mr Harding, ‘fraid so.’
‘Oh damn!’ said Archie.
‘Have you never had a girlfriend before?’
‘Of course I have. Dozens – well, three.’
‘But none of them were good enough for Mama?’ Babs said.
‘Actually, it turned out I wasn’t good enough for them.’
‘Mama didn’t like them, in other words?’
‘Mama didn’t know about them.’
‘She knows about me, though?’ Babs said.
‘Alas, yes, she does.’
‘A world-weary old widow with four kids,’ Babs said. ‘The difference being that I’m not your girlfriend.’
‘True,’ said Archie.
Babs paused, then said, ‘Archie, are we flirting?’
‘I think we might be,’ he admitted. ‘On the other hand, it isn’t right or proper for me to flirt with you while you’re still in a period of mourning.’
‘So I’m not the Virgin Mary, I’m Queen bloody Victoria?’
‘You know what I mean,’ said Archie.
‘Aye, I do,’ Babs said, ‘and I appreciate it.’
‘In addition to which,’ said Archie, ‘I wouldn’t want to exploit the nature of our professional relationship.’
‘Our what?’
‘The fact that I’m the boss and you’re merely my assistant.’
‘Merely?’ said Babs.
‘Now you mention it, the statement is semantically inaccurate.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Babs said. ‘Are you finished?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
She took away the plates and cups and carried them into the cloakroom, washed them under the tap and dried them on a tea-towel. She closed the door with her heel and studied her reflection in the flyblown mirror above the sink. She fished out a lipstick and touched up her lips, then carefully undid the top two buttons on her shirt. She hesitated, considered, refastened one of the buttons and went out into the reception area again.
Archie was still seated at her desk, his chin cupped in his hand.
‘Archie?’ Babs said.
‘What?’
She placed a han
d on his shoulder and leaned into him. She kissed him on the mouth, rubbing her lips against his with a soft circular motion for a moment or two before she pulled away.
‘What,’ Archie said, ‘was that for?’
‘For being a good boy,’ Babs told him.
Then, seating herself at the Underwood, she rolled a clean sheet of government paper into the machine while Archie wandered into his office and quietly closed the door.
* * *
The Communist was nothing like Polly’s image of a dashing Italian freedom fighter. She had imagined a tall, bronzed, hawk-featured man, a more robust version of Marzipan, in fact, with brooding eyes and long black hair. Emilio had almost no hair at all, only a few thin strands plastered to his scalp. He was a rotund little chap no taller than she was. His sandals barely touched the floor when he seated himself on a worn horsehair sofa under the open window with the girl stationed cross-legged at his feet.
The girl was young, not much more than twenty. She had the manners of an English schoolgirl and a clipped, breathless accent that to a Scottish ear made her seem both fey and self-assured at one and the same time. She was dressed like a tinker in a stained ankle-length cotton skirt and a grubby blouse. Her shoes were a giveaway, though, very expensive hand-stitched country brogues.
She was far from reticent about her origins and not in the least ashamed of being the mistress of the fat little man on the horsehair sofa. Within minutes of their arrival in the room in the pension, Polly had learned that she was the daughter of Sir Raphael Williams, a former British ambassador to Rome, and that she, in her own words ‘had gone to the bad in the worst possible way’. She seemed proud of her fall from grace and rather to Polly’s disgust, stroked Emilio’s fat thigh while she served as interpreter and go-between.
The Italian had a voice like chocolate, thick, creamy and seductive, quite at odds with his appearance. He ignored the girl and addressed himself to Dominic. Now and then, though, Polly caught him looking at her, looking not at but through her as if he could see all her hidden charms beneath the summer frock. She wasn’t in the least flattered and if she’d had a little more command of Italian or French might have told him to keep his eyes to himself.
Wives at War Page 40