Deep Water (15 page)

‘I’d better get rid of it! You know I came to take you two sailing?’

Justin came and sat next to him. ‘Do you know the creek beyond Grove Point?’ asked the boy, looking
closely at Mike, who merely nodded. ‘That’s where we went.’

‘French wine,’ said Leo, peering at the label on the bottle. ‘1940.’

Mike nodded briskly, no longer amused. ‘A friend brought it back from Dunkirk.’

After a silence, Justin said breathlessly to Mike, ‘We found the props you use when you paint on the French colours.’

Mike snapped, ‘You should have done what
Captain
Borden said, Justin. What my flotilla does is my business.’

‘D’you think I’d ever tell anyone?’ gulped Justin.

‘You made a promise and you broke it.’

Without speaking, Justin jumped up and ran out. Peter said urgently to Mike, ‘That was pretty hard on him. You’re his idol, you know. Finding out couldn’t have been easy.’

‘What do you suggest, professor?’ Mike’s tone was exasperated but remorseful, too.

‘You should talk to him.’

‘I guess you’re right. Oh hell!’

When Mike had gone, Leo burst out angrily, ‘He was horrible.’

Peter drank more wine. ‘Our secret service sends agents to France.’

‘I know that. I’m not stupid, dad.’

‘Do you also know that the Germans send spies over here – wearing English clothes and speaking perfect English? Maybe there’s one in this village.’

Leo said fiercely, ‘No spy’s going to hear me give anyone away.’

‘But you might tell other boys, and they might blab all over the place. There are hundreds of lives at stake. Mike has every reason to be worried.’

‘How did you and mum find out?’

‘Mum was told by the doctor’s wife, who’d heard from her husband. That’s how secrets spread.’

Leo had gone very white. ‘Would Mike be shot if he’s captured?’

‘It’s pointless to speculate.’

‘It isn’t, dad.’

‘It is,’ said Peter, closing his eyes.

Just then, Justin came in holding Mike’s hand. Almost at once, Justin launched into one of his self-confident, searching questions. How could Mike and his sailors stop the paint looking new and giving the game away?

‘Good question,’ murmured Peter.

‘But easy to answer,’ remarked Mike. ‘We throw iron filings onto the paint while it’s still wet, and then hose it down with salt water. A couple of hours later, the rust marks look as if they’ve been there for months.’

‘That’s really clever,’ remarked Leo.

‘We do our best.’

‘Hey! What’s this?’ Peter was startled to hear his wife’s voice. ‘Drinking in the afternoon?’

Andrea came up behind her husband, kissed him lightly on the temple and gazed at Mike as if at a mythical creature. ‘I thought you were some place else, Commander.’

Mike looked resigned. ‘Everyone in this room knows where, so don’t be coy about naming it.’

‘I’ll be as coy as I like.’

‘Mike kindly gave us this wine,’ said Peter, filling his glass and handing it to Andrea. She looked particularly pretty in a striped sweater and faded blue slacks. He tried to imagine that his own
destination
was Brittany, and immediately he felt great tenderness for Andrea. Facing the possibility of never seeing her again, he would insist they were left alone together so they could make love. Surely she would feel an answering tenderness. It came to Peter that the significance of adventure lay not in the thing itself but in the value it gave to the time before and after. Odd that he’d never thought of this before.

Justin came in from the garden holding a
paint-spotted
baulk of timber. He held it up for Mike’s inspection. ‘One look and everything was clear to me.’

Peter tried to think of a day when he too had discovered something that had changed everything. Not any of his scientific inventions; only meeting Andrea.

Mike took the plank from Justin. ‘I think I should have this. I’ll send someone for it.’

Andrea went out into the lane with Mike, just ahead of Peter, who wanted to take a closer look at Mike’s bike. He was surprised to hear her ask Mike something about his wife. He hadn’t realised the man was married. ‘Is she enjoying her vacation?’ Andrea ended lamely.

‘God knows,’ said Mike. ‘She came down here to talk about our divorce.’

Andrea stammered a confused apology: she’d had
no idea his marriage was over, blah, blah. Peter felt embarrassed for her. She wasn’t a village gossip but that’s what it had sounded like.

‘Small places are the devil for rumours,’ grumbled Mike, tilting his bike and flicking up the stand.

As Mike slung his leg over the machine, Andrea said, ‘Next time, why not call up before you come for the boys?’

‘Right’o.’ He held out a hand to Peter. ‘See you soon, Prof.’

‘I’m afraid I’m off to Falmouth this evening. We’ll meet on my return.’

Mike took another bottle of wine from a
compartment
under the pillion and gave it to Andrea before kick-starting his machine and roaring away. Standing beside her husband in the lane, Andrea smiled at him – quite sadly, he thought, but that seemed better than not at all.

After his father had been driven away, Leo thumped upstairs to his room in an ostentatiously unhappy way. From the sitting room, Andrea could hear faint snatches of song – Rose was crooning to herself while ironing sheets. Too tense to read, Andrea turned off the standard lamp and gazed out across the rough lawn to where the candles on the large horse chestnut glowed serenely in the deepening gloom.

How
in hell’s name had Mike been so calm? In the half-light, Andrea’s eyes took in the pale buff wallpaper, the dull green Wedgwood china on the mantelpiece, a Bartolozzi print by the door – what a bland and passionless setting for her longings. If Peter hadn’t followed them into the lane, Mike would have told her when to meet him, and she would not be in suspense now. How would she endure it if days were to pass and she heard nothing from him?

‘You’re sitting in the dark.’ Andrea jumped at the sound of Justin’s voice. He had come in so quietly
that she had not heard him until he was almost behind her.

‘Don’t
you
ever like being alone?’

‘Only to ambush someone.’

He switched on the ugly lamp beside her chair. ‘Guess what Mike told me?’

‘I can’t,’ she murmured, suddenly gripped by the absurd notion that Mike might have told Justin about his love for her.

‘He said when he gets leave he’ll come and see me at school.’

‘That’s really nice of him.’

‘It’s not really,’ objected Justin, ‘it’s because he likes me and
wants
to come.’

‘It’s still nice,’ she insisted.

‘He can’t see his own boy, so I’m the next best thing.’

‘His wife won’t let him see his son? That’s awful, Justin.’

‘He’s getting divorced just so she’ll have to.’

Andrea was shocked. ‘Mike told you he’s getting divorced just so he can see his son some more?’

‘Yup.’

The alarming possibility that Mike was
divorcing
, while still loving Venetia, slid snake-like into Andrea’s breast. The telephone rang as Justin was leaving, placing him almost beside the instrument at this crucial moment. Andrea snatched the receiver from him, only to hear Sally’s voice.

‘Andrea, dear, I’m telling all my friends not to speak to me at the funeral. I know I’ll howl if they do. Smile at me if you must, but not one word, please.’

Since Andrea had not yet learned from the vicar what music she was to play, she had managed to avoid worrying about the funeral although it was only two days away. Sally’s call forced her to imagine how it might be. John Lowther would probably drag himself to church, so people would think he’d forgiven his wife. Thinking about John made Andrea feel sorry for Peter, but not sorry enough to want to put off Mike.

By eleven that evening, Andrea was telling herself that Mike wasn’t going to call till morning. But just as she was getting into bed, the telephone rang. To reach it first, she ran downstairs in her nightdress.

‘Andrea?’

‘Mike?’ Feigned surprise in her voice.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re whispering.’

She giggled. ‘You’d be whispering, too, if you had two juvenile detectives breathing down your neck, and a maid who catches fish in her hands.’

‘When can we meet?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I can’t manage that. What about the day after?’

‘I’m playing at the pilot’s funeral.’

‘That’s fine. I hope to be there. Perhaps we shouldn’t leave together. What about going straight through the graveyard afterwards, and past the Great War cross. Then keep going till you find a lane on the right just after the butcher’s and the baker’s.’

‘And the candlestick maker’s?’

‘Just the first two.’

‘I guess it’ll have to do.’

She heard him laugh a little uneasily. ‘But you’ll be waiting?’

‘Of course I will,’ she replied, amazed with herself for being flippant when she was overwhelmed with happiness. His acknowledgement that they ought not to be seen together was the sign she had longed for. A sense of the inevitable made her head swim. From the lane, he would take her to a place where they could be alone – and after that, what would be would be. On her way upstairs, she met Justin leaving the bathroom.

‘Was that the telephone?’ he asked.

‘No, it was the fire department.’

‘Was it Mike?’ His tone was magnificently matter of fact.

‘No, it was not,’ she said emphatically, already wishing she hadn’t lied. But, despite his tender age, Justin really rattled her. How many times must he have seen his mother talking with the men who later became her lovers? Enough to have made him expert at reading the signs: their lowered voices and their looks; lustful expectation in the air like an intimate scent. Andrea vowed in future never to run to get the telephone, nor to sit in the dark.

*

So that she would have no doubts about where she would be meeting Mike, Andrea walked to his chosen lane before the service. As she entered the church, the vicar and his verger were putting in place tall trestles for the coffin to rest upon. As Andrea came closer, the vicar smiled approvingly, ‘I’m so
glad you’re not wearing a hat with a brim, Mrs Pauling. Miss Edgelow’s headgear once touched the candles lighting her music. She was lucky to escape with only minor burns.’

For the past two years, Andrea had been the organist at her girls’ annual carol service in an Oxford church; but, until now, she had never played a country organ powered by a human ‘blower’. Today, the pumping of air would be done by the verger, who came and sat next to her, placing
himself
, rather eerily, behind a red curtain. If he were to stop working the lever, a discordant wail would soon dwindle to a squawk. For her own part, Andrea knew all the chosen hymns pretty well, and had
practised
, on the school piano, the uplifting Buxtehude prelude selected by the vicar for the entrance of the coffin. With her back to the gathering mourners, Andrea could see them reflected in the mirror above her keyboard. When Sally and her husband entered together, the glass distanced Andrea a little from their pain.

Before the arrival of his coffin, she pictured James Hawnby as she had first seen him at Elspeth’s, with his girlish complexion and his nervous manner. Recalling this, she feared Mike’s calmness could only be a brave pretence. Andrea had doubted whether she would be able to recognise him in her small mirror, but, since he swept in at the centre of a tight-knit group of naval officers, she had no trouble. A dozen or so
RAF
pilots had entered just before him and were filing into pews near the chancel arch. It struck her as typical of Mike to choose to sit near the
back, a position which the air force ‘heroes’ would probably consider good enough for members of an unglamorous coastal patrol.

Obliged to give all her attention to the tricky
toccata-like
passages in the Buxtehude, Andrea glanced up at her mirror once only, just as the choir entered the nave, leading in the coffin. As the final notes died away, the vicar’s voice boomed out, ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …’

When she was not playing, Andrea’s eye was caught by isolated details: a shaft of magenta light shining through a stained-glass saint; the glowing sanctuary lamp. The hymns moved Andrea more than anything, especially when James’s
comrades-in
-arms carried out his coffin to Bunyan’s ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’.

She did not leave the church until almost everyone had gone. In the graveyard, she paused behind an eighteenth-century box tomb and was sad to see Sally standing well away from the graveside, presumably out of deference to her husband’s feelings. Sally’s face wore its usual emotionless mask of make-up. Mike and Tony Cassilis stood by an ancient yew. One day, they too might be buried here, if their bodies were ever recovered from the sea.

Soon after the coffin had been lowered, and the last prayers spoken, someone tapped Andrea on the shoulder.

‘Thank you for your lovely playing,’ murmured Mrs Jefferies through her veil. ‘One can only hope
the Almighty will look down kindly on the poor young man.’

‘You surely can’t think He won’t.’

‘I don’t consider adultery a peccadillo, my dear.’

Andrea walked away, repelled. Without meaning to, she caught up with Sally and her husband at the lych gate. Having promised she wouldn’t speak to her, Andrea took her arm instead.

‘At least he was happy on the day he died,’ sniffed Sally. ‘He knew he was loved.’ She clamped a handkerchief over her mouth to stop any sound emerging. Dr Lowther stared intently at the path.

‘Let’s talk tomorrow,’ murmured Andrea, not
trying
to follow them. Instead, breathing abnormally fast, she retraced her steps across the graveyard, past the Great War cross. Soon she was passing the bakery and the butcher’s on the corner.

Mike was not in the lane, but his motorbike was, propped under some flowering lilac. She thought how strange it was to be embarking on an affair wearing a dark coat and skirt. Stranger still to have little idea what
his
expectations were. Looking at his motorbike, she felt confused. Would she ride away on
this,
in a long skirt?

He came round the corner with his hat in his hand, looking formal and out of place in this rural lane.

‘Not a lot of fun,’ Mike declared, adding with a grin, ‘except for your contribution, and the little fellow’s next to you.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘He’ll be thrilled.’ Mike walked to his machine. ‘Ever been on one of these?’

‘So often they bore me dreadfully,’ she drawled, like an English debutante. Then, in her normal voice, ‘Never in my life.’

‘Don’t do that! For a moment you sounded like my wife.’ He touched the handles under the pillion. ‘Grab hold of these.’

‘I’ll have to pull my skirt up.’

‘Go on then. The road’ll be empty.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘A little place I know.’

‘Is it fearfully squalid?’ she simpered, as if a character from
Mrs
Miniver.

‘Fearfully,’ he simpered back.

‘I’ll close my eyes.’

‘And think of England?’

‘To my last breath.’

They were laughing quite spontaneously as Andrea struggled to get a leg over the pillion seat without pulling her skirt up round her waist. Since Mike’s back was to her, she didn’t feel embarrassed when the wind blew around her stocking tops and step-ins. The engine roared beneath them as trees and hedges blurred by. They plunged down a hill, and through a shallow ford at its foot. Andrea was intoxicated to lean, as he did, into each bend and to feel no fear.

Views of the estuary glimpsed through gates told her they were descending to the water long before they reached a secluded cottage in a cove. The house looked empty but not derelict, since the pittosporum hedge had been cut back.

The silence after Mike cut the engine echoed in her head until she heard the soft thud of waves
on the beach. He led her to the door and she was fleetingly aware of diamond-paned windows and lead drainpipes.

‘We bring our agents here before embarking them,’ he said, ushering her inside.

‘How many return?’

‘Some. I don’t know how many.’

Suddenly the house seemed melancholy – a last sight of England for a doomed group of men and women. The sitting room smelled musty and the walls were spotted with damp. On a round table some magazines were scattered, as if tossed aside by departing agents. She picked up a novel –
The
Remembered
Kiss
by Ruby M. Ayres. Would anyone want to read such stuff when facing a terrifying future? But would they want to read
The
Brothers
Karamazov
or extracts from the great philosophers? On a sideboard were packs of cards and various board games.

‘How long do they stay here?’ she asked, looking around at worn sofas and hideous floral curtains.

‘A couple of days; sometimes only hours.’

‘Then what happens to them?’

‘Since you know the main story, I can’t see that a few minor details will hurt. We whizz them from the beach to a gunboat which puts to sea. A couple of miles out, they’re transferred to one of Justin’s painted trawlers.’ He looked at her with concern. ‘Please don’t feel too sad about them. The risks they take are no worse than fighter pilots face.’

She smiled back at him. ‘And that’s comforting on a day like this?’

‘For us sailors it is.’ He moved to the door. ‘I thought we’d have lunch here.’

‘You’ve brought a man to cook?’ She was
horrified
.

‘Christ no. Wait here till I fetch a few things.’

After he’d left the room, Andrea felt confused. Why was he fussing about food? He ought to be in here still, talking, if not yet kissing her. Perhaps he was nervous. They’d only had the one kiss.
Remembering
it made her feel shaky. To stop herself feeling worse, she tried leafing through a copy of
Woman’s
World.
There were articles on make-up (‘Beauty is your Duty’) and keeping up morale (‘Beating those Black-out Blues’), and one called ‘Rebuilding Marriages’, with a sub-heading in a panel:

Andrea read: ‘What untold harm a foolish,
unthinking
woman can do with a scrap of paper, a pen and ink. So
don’t
tell him about your affair. Tear up your selfish confession and wait till the war’s over, when his mind will be at his disposal, not taken up by the business of fighting for life.’

When Mike returned, he was carrying a tray loaded with Brie and Camembert, presumably fresh from France, and also with bread and fruit and wine. He put down their lunch on the table and stood gazing at her.

‘How shall we do this, Andrea?’ The directness of the question surprised her. He noticed this, and said softly, ‘I meant do you want lunch now or later?’

‘I’d like a glass of water and then I’d like you to sit right here.’