by Sam Bourne
This journey has been more elaborate than most, but that has not dimmed his confidence. Besides, he has his pal with him, his ‘comrade’ as Harry Knox would put it. They will be one hundred yards apart at all times, with Harry in front — but the important thing is that James will not be alone. James is the message-bearer, Harry the scout who will spot trouble, then either walk around it or walk away, thereby protecting them both.
But on this evening, it is James who has been unsettled by something he has seen. An older man in a creased grey suit walked past him twenty minutes earlier and walked past him again just now, heading in the opposite direction. There is nothing unusual about his manner or his appearance. But Jorge’s words, repeated a dozen times, are too firmly etched on James’s mind: ‘Nothing is a coincidence. If you see the same thing twice, run!’
He thinks of doing that but hesitates, anxious that, if they are being followed, the sight of him sprinting up the street will immediately confirm their pursuers’ suspicions. And what if only he, James, has been spotted? A dash to warn Harry will simply serve to expose his friend as an accomplice.
So he chooses to walk instead, to increase his pace only subtly, to make the gear change from steady to brisk. He has closed the gap to just a few yards when it happens. He feels it before he hears it, the rush of air behind his ear as the bullet races over his shoulder and into Harry’s back. His partner jerks upward, arcing his back, an oddly balletic movement, slow and graceful. As Harry begins to fall, there is a second shot directly into his head, exploding his face into a thousand pieces of flesh and gristle; the glass of his spectacles, lit red with blood, sprays into the air like sparks from a bonfire. A third shot and a fourth and James darts into a side alley, propelled there by instinct alone.
He stands there, panting heavily, his brain juddering over the image he has just seen: the head blown off, the head blown off, the head blown off. Harry there one moment, gone the next. The rain-shower of skin and bone.
He is digesting this when he realizes that his shirt is wet. Some of Harry’s blood must have landed on him. But under his jacket is a red patch, covering the left side of his chest. It takes him a while to realize that the stain is spreading. Oh, he thinks. That’s my blood. I’ve been shot.
Harry’s looking at him, tut-tutting over James’s wound and shaking his head, as if to say, ‘Who’s a silly boy, then?’ Until once again, his brain explodes. And again. And again…
James woke to his own scream. Immediately his hand reached for his left shoulder and, as always, it was wet. Not with blood, but with sweat. That dream, again.
It was light, which only added to his confusion. He was home, in the armchair, the whisky bottle close by. Was it still the afternoon? Had Florence left that morning? The clock on the mantelpiece said seven. But was it morning or evening? Had he dreamed his visit to the Bodleian, his underground encounter with a strange old German Jew and Rosemary Something by the river, shouting at him?
There was a rattling sound outside, muffled and indistinct. He leapt up, to see a shadow of movement shift across the doorway, visible through the stained glass. His heart leapt. Was that Florence, putting her key in the door? Had she come back to him? But there was no smaller, second shadow, no Harry…
He rushed to the door and snatched it open. No one there. He called out. ‘Hello?’ He heard a rustle, but whether that was a person slipping past the trees on this wide, quiet avenue or merely a breeze, he could not tell. He called out once more, stepping forward this time. But no one replied.
The smell of the air, the height of the sun, told him it was a new day. He had slept all night in that chair and they were still gone. It had been twenty-four hours now, twenty-four hours without them. Their absence was not some temporary aberration, a lost afternoon. It was, he felt now, solid and real. The thought of facing another day alone and then another and then another filled him with gloom.
But as he came back inside he caught a glimpse of one of Harry’s favourite toys, left abandoned on the living room floor: a wooden Noah’s Ark, complete with its own pairs of animals. Perhaps it had been too big to take, perhaps Harry had cried as Florence had prised it from his hands, explaining that there was no room for Noah on their long journey. Whatever had happened, the mere sight of it restored James’s determination. He would not be engulfed by despair; he would not give up. No matter what it cost, he would find his wife and child.
He decided to wash, eat and ready himself for the full-scale search. Sleep had given him the clarity to realize that his effort needed to be organized, that it should not begin with the random searching of nearby villages. He girded himself for the task ahead, taking care as he towelled himself dry not to shake his morale by looking too closely at the wreck of his shoulder in the bathroom mirror: collapsed and thinner than the rest of him, as if his chest simply petered out on that side, it was repulsive for him to contemplate. The wound had been treated in a hurry, in the crowded, overworked military hospital in Carabanchel, in the south-west of Madrid, near to where he had fallen. In time the city’s doctors would get used to such operations, as sniper fire became a favoured tactic of Franco’s Fifth Columnists. But on that night they had stitched him up fast, stretching the skin too tight and with little regard to appearances. The result was that the top half of his chest looked like a wall covered with paper from two separate and clashing rolls.
And all the while, as he foamed up the shaving brush and splashed on the hot water, he could not shake the odd feeling he had had since the moment he awoke, one akin to the sensation of being watched. The only reason for it was that faraway rattling sound the instant he had been pulled from sleep, that fleeting glimpse through the glass of the front door — and yet the feeling lingered, like a shiver.
His plan was to see Bernard Grey in college. He would ask him to deploy all his contacts in the Health Ministry running the national evacuation effort, so that they could rifle through their voluminous card index and discover which generous soul had taken in Florence and Harry Zennor. It could not be that difficult, not for a man like Grey, for whom Whitehall might as well have been just another Oxford college.
James parked his bike and guiltily received the greeting of the aged porter in the lodge, a nod he always translated as, ‘What the hell are you doing here, a man your age? Why aren’t you in the war like everyone else?’
To his surprise, the quad was covered with people, around a hundred and fifty men at least, standing in neat lines. The shock was that Oxford had no more strictly imposed rule than the prohibition on walking on the grass. You could steal another man’s essay and pass it off as your own; you could, in the immortal phrase, bugger the Bursar. But you could not, under any circumstances, tread on the trim green of the college lawn. Yet here that hallowed turf had been transformed into a parade ground and there, standing at the head of it, was none other than Grey himself.
He had heard about this but scarcely believed it could be true: that the Oxford South Company of the newly-created Local Defence Volunteers, made up chiefly of Royal Mail employees, had been put under Grey’s command. But here they were, row after row of middle-aged postmen taking orders issued not by a bullying sergeant major but by a white-haired philosopher, one whose voice was known to millions through his regular talks on the BBC Home Service. Heaven preserve them all if, come the invasion, these men represented the first line of defence.
Invasion. The word triggered a memory of yesterday’s ill-tempered exchange with Rosemary. She had been talking about invasion just before he climbed back on his bicycle and returned home, once he had switched off and stopped listening properly to what she was saying. Something about the countries that had fallen in just the last few weeks — France, Holland and Belgium in just a single day last month. Saying that Florence was convinced Britain would be next. Mr Churchill was doing a manful job of stiffening the nation’s resolve, but that was how most people felt: that there was a very good chance that, before long, there would be German boats landing
on England’s beaches and German troops walking on England’s streets. Was that why she had not gone to her parents’ house, because she feared Hitler’s men might come across the North Sea and march right into Norfolk? He began to wish he had listened to what the damned Rosemary woman had been saying.
James turned on his heel, avoiding the embarrassment of explaining why he was not among those on parade, and walked back to the porter’s lodge, this time going inside.
Another raised eyebrow semi-smile to the man on duty and straight to the pigeon-holes. Much less for him these days, now that term had finished. There was a letter inviting him to a lecture on birth control by Marie Stopes: Population Science and the Path to Radiant Motherhood. No, thank you. He wouldn’t go within a hundred yards of that woman, not since hearing that she had attended some conference in Berlin a couple of years after Hitler had become Chancellor. Completely unacceptable to lend aid and succour to the Nazis like that. The only exception: if you were going in order to poke a finger in the Germans’ eye, as Florence had done. But there were not many like Florence, not many at all.
A circular urging donations of books for prisoners of war via the Red Cross; a notice about new rules aimed at reducing coal consumption in college; a letter asking for revisions on an article he had written on group behaviour for the Journal of Experimental Psychology and, finally, at the bottom of the pile, a postcard from Florence.
There was no doubt it was from her. The handwriting was unmistakable; just glimpsing it was enough to make his heart squeeze. The same three words again: I love you.
He flipped it over to see the image, a photograph showing the construction of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s magnificent, unfinished church: they had visited it together during one of their long, meandering walks through Barcelona, the week they had met.
He turned it over to check the postmark. It had been posted last night. Thank God for the Royal Mail, carrying on as if there were no war on: with a first class stamp, it seemed they could get a letter to anywhere by the next morning. And this had not come from some village in the Oxfordshire countryside. This has been posted from Liverpool.
Liverpool? It made no sense. If she was worried about bombs, the last place to go was Liverpool — an industrial port so strategically indispensable it was surely close to the top of Berlin’s target list. She might as well have fled Oxford for London. It made no sense at all.
Then he spotted a detail that he had initially assumed was a mistake. Registering it now revived the shiver he had felt first thing this morning. The address Florence had written on the card was their home in Norham Gardens, not the college. Yet here it was in his pigeon-hole. It had been sent from Liverpool only last night; there would have been no time for the Post Office to have redirected it.
There could only be one explanation. Someone had moved it.
But who? And why?
Chapter Eight
He was halfway to the station before he realized he would have to make a detour back home to pick up some essentials, starting with money. Adrenalin pumped through his system. He passed the old stone buildings, with their gothic arches and medieval chapels, in a blur, his brain moving faster even than his body. There could be only one possible reason why Florence had gone to Liverpool: in order to leave it. It was no place to hide from the bombs; on the contrary, she had placed herself more directly in harm’s way by going there. Which meant she would be there for the shortest time possible before heading somewhere else. The obvious, closest destination was Dublin. Was Florence thinking it would be safer in neutral Ireland than in occupied Britain? Was this, then, her great fear — not bombs, but life under Nazi occupation?
The postcard had been sent last night. It was conceivable that she and Harry were still there, that with a bit of luck on the trains, he might just make it in time, catching them before they left. He would have a chance to persuade her to stay. The fact that he had chased her all the way to Liverpool would surely demonstrate how much he cared: what, after all, was the purpose of that postcard, except as a summons, urging him to follow her if he truly loved her? Of course she could have simply telephoned and told him where they could meet. But James preferred to see the card like a challenge set for a medieval knight, imagining that Florence had chosen to test him, to make him prove his devotion. He pictured their reunion: they would meet at the docks, Harry would hug him tight and she would instantly realize the folly of separating a boy from his father. Everything would be all right. Just so long as he could catch a train.
At the station, all was chaos and noise. Ever since they had removed the signs from the railways, the staff had to march up and down the platform barking, ‘Oxford, this is Oxford! Oxford, this is Oxford!’ (Was it really likely that German pilots would be able to read station signs from the air, especially in the dark?) The platform was crowded, with piles of baggage everywhere, doubtless belonging to soldiers on the move. Everyone seemed confused, especially by the special troop trains, which looked like the others and ran on the same lines but which were barred to the civilian population.
Eventually James found a clerk who told him that he needed to cross the bridge and wait for the next LMS train to Bletchley, due in twenty-five minutes. From there, the man — elderly, probably brought out of retirement so that the permanent holder of the position could do his bit for the war, a thought which triggered in James the usual spasm of shame — explained that he could catch the main line to Crewe, which should take two-and-a-half hours, and then change for Liverpool Lime Street. It would be a long, circuitous journey but James could see no alternative. He had considered asking to borrow the Greys’ car, but petrol was so scarce and the trek northward might not be any faster. To say nothing of all the explanations and gushing thanks he would have to produce.
Once on board, standing wedged between two young conscripts and their kitbags, the man apparently heading back to war after a spell of leave, he turned over the riddle of the postcard — addressed to one place, his home, and delivered to another, his college. Did that explain the sudden movement he had glimpsed this morning? Had someone intercepted his post, collaring the postman just as he was about to put the card through the door? But he was sure he had not seen two people, and there had been no sign of a postman when he had looked outside, let alone any lurking stranger.
But now he wondered. Perhaps there had been a stack of mail lodged in the letterbox and someone had taken it. Maybe that was the faint rattling noise he had heard, not the sound of letters being posted through the slot, but being pulled out. But who would do such a thing? It had achieved nothing except a delay, given that he had seen the postcard from his wife little more than an hour or two later. If someone had wanted to steal his post, then why not simply steal it: why go to the trouble of delivering it to an alternative address that very morning? Whoever had done it had clearly known plenty about him, including his college affiliation.
Or was this exactly what Rosemary Hyde — that was it, Hyde — had in mind when she accused him of going off the rails yesterday? Was he imagining things, constructing a menace that wasn’t there out of a simple mix-up with the morning post? He remembered the book: Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger. Was this an example of the very hyper-vigilance he had read about, little more than mindless paranoia?
The train had stopped, halted in a screech of metal and a cloud of steam for no reason he could discern. An argument was getting louder in the next carriage, an inspector telling a gang of servicemen to get out of the first class compartment. James felt himself tense. He couldn’t afford even the slightest delay. A minute lost here could be the difference between winning Florence back and seeing her go. He craned to look out of the window, where he could see the train’s fireman had jumped off the plate and was inspecting one of the engine’s wheels. James’s hands were beginning to tremble: come on, come on. And then, mercifully, there was a blast of the whistle and they were back on their way.
P
artly to keep his mind occupied, he constructed a list, refined and refined again, of people who might benefit from the switch of the postcard. As the train chugged through the Oxfordshire countryside, he went through them all, starting with the obvious category: those who were infatuated with, or covetous of, his wife, a category that would include most of the red-blooded men in Oxford and probably a fair smattering of Rosemary’s glorified Brownie pack, including the Brown Owl herself. He worked through each of them, paying particular attention to the myopic Magnus Hook, promoted up the suspects’ rankings for having seen James dishevelled and out of sorts the previous day: that would only have had to prompt a few questions in the right places for Hook to have discovered Florence’s absence. And then there was Virginia Grey, in the picture from the very start. Round and round he went, working through the carousel of friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Albert Wills, Professor of Natural Sciences and Florence’s head of department, had taken an instant shine to her: who knew what he, what they, might have been plotting in the labs? There was the slick-haired Leonard Musgrove, Chairman of the local Fabian Society and undeniably handsome. Damn. James had meant to check when the Fabians met, wondering if, by any chance, it was early on Thursday evenings. And what about Edgar Connolly, eminent biologist and vegetarian fanatic who had come to see Florence as something of a protegee? He was her father’s age, but that meant nothing; Oxford morality was not the same as the provincial variety he had grown up with. It could be any one of them.