Decoy (2 page)

‘No, to collect his medals. And one for his bro.’

She said ‘bro’ as a schoolboy might refer to his brother: obviously it was a familiar phrase in their family, and as an only child he felt envious for a moment.

A
mother
collecting her sons’ gongs? That was strange. Normally, if the sons were serving abroad the local commander-in-chief presented them; if in Britain, most probably the King. He looked round at her, and she nodded, but with pride rather than sadness. ‘Posthumous,’ she said quietly, ‘both of them.’

What medals, what service, what did they do? He would probably be at the next Investiture — a DSO for the
Aztec
affair, a DSC (so they told him) for this latest business. Should he mention it in case he saw her there? Yet if they met again what could one say to a woman who had given two sons in exchange for at least three medals?

‘Both were pilots. The elder was at Cranwell when the war started,’ she said. ‘The younger was Volunteer Reserve. The elder flew through the Battle of Britain untouched. Spitfires. He finally commanded his squadron. He was killed two months ago. Intruder operations. It is such a long war.’

Yorke nodded. ‘Their father?’

‘He died a couple of months after the second boy. Now this old wreck,’ she tapped a knee with the index finger of her hand, ‘is left to farm 15,000 acres in the Highlands. Sheep mostly.’

Again Yorke nodded: there was nothing to say. By now, at this stage of the war, it was a familiar story, whether the bereaved woman farmed 15,000 acres or took in neighbours’ washing. Death was very egalitarian.

‘That’s the ribbon of the DSO you’re wearing.’ Not a question, just an observation. The preliminary, he realized, to a reference to her sons. ‘The eldest boy was invested in that, and he was awarded a DFC, too. Twenty kills. An ace,’ she said.

He decided against mentioning that his DSO was the result of destroyer operations: she might ask details — although he thought not — but railway carriages were no place to discuss the
Aztec
affair, and the last business was sufficiently secret for even those in the know to keep silent.

‘You’ll be married?’

He shook his head. ‘Engaged, I think.’ As he was realizing how foolish the ‘I think’ must sound she nodded. ‘I know. My husband never proposed to me either: it was an unspoken thing.’

Then he noticed that dawn had crept up beyond the blinds, and soon the train had started rattling into the grubby suburbs of London. Grubby from centuries of soot: battered from months of the Luftwaffe. Bombs had bitten ugly jagged gaps in terraces of houses, and where incendiaries had arbitrarily gutted factories and churches there were only blackened boxes. After the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren had designed and built fifty-one churches, apart from St Paul’s. An appropriate time to remember an odd fact.

She was being met, so she did not need any help with her luggage, she said, thanking him, and adding gently that, until his left hand had healed more thoroughly, he should avoid carrying old ladies’ baggage.

And then he was being jostled along the platform. The small jagged potholes, as though someone had run amok with a pickaxe, were mementoes of the latest bomb splinters, and the bigger holes had been roughly touched up with cement. Ovaltine for Night Starvation, Peter the Planter and Mazzawattee Tea, Stephen’s Ink with its blue blot — the metal advertising signs were still high on the walls but rusty measles marks revealed where they had been peppered by bomb splinters.

‘Thetrennowstendinginpletfondsevingisthe…’ The ghostly announcement reverberated across the station like an incantation. Foreign troops and old ladies sipping tea in the buffet cocked their heads alike in a hopeless attempt to understand what was being said and looked puzzled, defeated by the electrically amplified Essex accent or a bureaucratic fool who had never learned about punctuation. Experienced British travellers looked warily at the arrival and departures boards, usually discovering their train was being treated with the anonymity it did not deserve, so that harassed porters had to brush aside the anxious inquiries with hurried gestures.

The locomotive at the head of their train gave a relieved sigh, as though it was going to sleep, and most of the passengers in front of Ned disappeared in a cloud of drifting steam. A small Polish officer, noticeable in his czapka and smartly tailored battledress, stood beside several suitcases and a kitbag, looking for a porter, as though off for a social weekend instead of joining a new unit after having fought his way across Europe, and only Ned noticed that he was wearing the Virtuti Militari, Pour le Mérite, the Polish equivalent of the VC.

A ticket collector waited at the platform gateway, although all tickets had been taken on the train, and behind him two military policemen, red cap covers making them stand out like dowagers at a garden party, eyed the passing passengers. On the watch for deserters, men absent without leave? As Ned approached, one nudged the other and stepped towards him, blocking his way and giving a wrist-vibrating salute.

‘Commander Yorke, sah?’

He has seen the Brigade at work, Ned thought. ‘Yes?’

‘Message from the h’Admiralty, sah. Would you telephone Capting Watts h’at once, sah?’

‘Very well,’ Ned said, ‘thank you.’ And realized he had no pennies. ‘Can you change sixpence?’

‘H’indeed, sah,’ the man said, diving into his pocket. Yorke realized that the military policeman had anticipated that Lieutenant Commander Yorke was bound to arrive bereft of pennies. As a sixpence was exchanged for copper coins each man eyed the other’s single medal ribbon. The military policeman had the Palestine General Service ribbon, indicating long service. Ned guessed that dilatory or nervous soldiers could offer few excuses to this MP that he had not heard many times before.

Ned squeezed into a telephone kiosk (wondering why they always smelled of urine even though the men’s enormous lavatory was nearby), pushed in two pennies, dialled WHI 9000, and then asked for the extension.

Captain Watts, head of the Royal Navy’s Anti-Submarine Intelligence Unit, was cheerful. ‘Thought I’d save you coming in. Today’s Thursday, so take the weekend off and start in again on Monday. You hoped you were finished with graphs, diagrams and statistics? Want to get back to sea duty, you say? Dammit, you’ve just
been
to sea! Anyway, this is an open line, so we’ll discuss that on Monday. Not that there’ll be any
discussion
. Well, Joan’s just put a note in front of me. Wish I could read her writing. Hold on a moment.’

Ned could picture Watts at his battered desk deep down in the Citadel, the new and supposedly bombproof operational centre next to the Admiralty building, sitting beside the Mall and looking like a Foreign Legion fort which had lost its desert and was manned by Tuaregs wearing bowler hats and armed with umbrellas. Joan, the Wren officer who was Watts’ secretary but who seemed to keep the Unit functioning, would be explaining to Watts with ill-concealed impatience.

‘You there? Yes, well, what Joan had written down in her execrable Roedean writing — ’ there was a pause, when obviously Watts had his hand over the mouthpiece, ‘well then, correction: it was Battle Abbey, she says. It seems to me she’s listed your social engagements for next week. She thought you’d like to make sure you had some clean collars and your shoes polished. Ready? Monday, here in the office; Tuesday, see the PM at teatime. That’s 5 p.m., so it means brandy time. You come with me. What about? This is an open line. Wednesday you work here like a peon. Thursday, Investiture. You can take two guests. Yes, yes, I’ve passed the word and she’s being given the day off. Friday, you’re back here, and you’ll be expected to stand us all a gin. Remind me to tell you about having a hook sewn on your uniform for Thursday. Why? Do you expect His Majesty to sew on the bloody medal? Only one hook, for the DSC. The DSO goes on a ribbon round your manly and well-scrubbed neck. That’s all for now. See you on Monday. You’ll be at Palace Street until then? Good.’

Ned put down the telephone. Any conversation with Captain Watts was exhausting because he had a quick enough mind to anticipate most questions and answer them before they were asked.

Mr Churchill on Tuesday, the Palace on Thursday. And he was home. Should he ’phone? No, he had a key, and if Captain Watts had made sure that Clare had a day’s leave from St Stephen’s Hospital to attend the Investiture with him and his mother on Thursday, news of his arrival would have been passed on. His left hand throbbed, as though there was too much blood in it. He had used it to hold the telephone, out of sheer habit, leaving his right hand free to write notes. Now it was slightly swollen, the skin purplish. Well, he had been warned to expect it.

Ned joined the queue outside the station.

He deliberately took his time paying off the cab, savouring Palace Street. The brick houses on one side, the malt smell from the brewery nearby. The brass doorknocker was polished (his mother refused to have a bell fitted: too shrill and unexpected, she said) and so was the letterbox. The cab driver flicked up the flag and drove off towards Victoria Street.

He carried his bag to the door, felt for his key and as he reached towards the lock, the door slowly opened. He pushed his way into the house and Clare was in his arms.

‘Your train came in
hours
ago,’ she said breathlessly.

‘It could have been late!’

‘But it wasn’t — I ’phoned the station.’

‘Is Mother home?’

‘No, she’s out until this evening.’

He picked up his bag. ‘I’d love a bath.’

She rubbed his cheek. ‘And you should shave first,’ she said, in a sentence which ended in a row of dots.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Carry on, Commander. And congratulations on the halfstripe. Oh Ned,’ she said and burst into tears, ‘it really
is
you!’

When he left the house on Monday morning after a weekend of the worst night bombing he had ever experienced — and made worse because Clare had to return to St Stephen’s on Saturday, beginning a week of night duty — it seemed that all of London must have been blown up or burned down. Daylight when it came seemed little more than faded night: black, grey and white smoke coiling up from burning buildings and drifting to join up in low clouds driven on by a west wind made him think of Pompeii, when three days had been black as night. The last days of London? No, it was so huge that it would take the Luftwaffe fifty years of night bombing to destroy it. What they were destroying were the buildings that made London unique: the Wren churches, the Queen Anne and Georgian houses, even the stone water troughs for horses, relics from Victorian charities. The House of Commons was gone; Members had to meet in the House of Lords now. Yet Westminster Abbey, St Margaret’s, St Paul’s, the Tower of London — all were still standing. And Big Ben. The light in the tower showing that the House was sitting was of course extinguished for the war. Curious how bombs missed the really ugly buildings…

He turned right, up Buckingham Palace Road. As in Palace Street, odd sandbags, the sacking burned so that the sand spread into low and blackened pyramids, showed where incendiary bombs had landed in the road and on the pavement, and been stifled by sandbags placed by brave men risking blazing magnesium. Brave and usually middle-aged and elderly men who by day went about their ordinary business, running a local tobacconist’s working in an office, acting as caretaker of a building. And women, too. Last night as he hurriedly dumped one sandbag on an incendiary in the road (after making sure none was lodged in the roof), a figure in an air raid warden’s tin hat had called out encouragement while tackling another bomb, and it had been a woman.

As he strode along it seemed only a few days ago that, fresh from hospital, he had first made his way through St James’s Park to the Admiralty to be given the task of finding out how ships in the middle of convoys were being torpedoed, apparently by phantoms. That had stayed a mystery until he went to sea in a convoy. Now, he wondered, what had Captain Watts in store for him? Nothing very exciting, from the sound of his voice on the telephone. Graphs and statistics of how many million tons of merchant ships were torpedoed last month, and how many million remained, and how long they would last at the present rapid rate of sinking and slow rate of construction.

There was the same old gardener in St James’s Park collecting scraps of paper, stabbing them with a spear made of a broom handle with a nail at the end and then putting them in the sack slung across his shoulders on a piece of rope.

‘Been away, then, guv!’

‘Yes. I see you’re still busy.’

‘Ah.’ He dug into a pocket as though he had been waiting to see Ned again. ‘You’re a naval man so you’ll be able to tell me what this is what I’ve just found.’

Yorke walked towards him and took the proffered brass-coloured cone.

‘Nose cap of an anti-aircraft shell.’

‘Can I sell it?’

Yorke laughed at the man’s uncomplicated approach. ‘Yes, I’m sure someone would like it as a souvenir.’

‘Not you, though?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘Seen too many, eh guv?’ The old man gestured at the medal ribbon and then, catching sight of Yorke’s left hand, exclaimed, ‘’Ere, you just done that?’

‘No, it’s quite a while ago now.’

‘Didn’t notice it a’fore when I used ter see yer,’ he said, almost suspiciously.

‘I was wearing a glove.’

‘Ah, ’counts for it, dunnit? ’Fraid it’ll put off the girls, eh?’

‘I suppose so. That’s how I felt then. Now you see I’m carrying my gloves!’

‘’Ave to, doncher? All part of the uniform. But take my tip, guv, don’t worry about the girls. Them as’d be put orf, they ain’t worth bothering with anyway. Wounded, was you?’

When Yorke nodded, the old man said, a complaining note in his voice, ‘You ain’t wearing a wound stripe. I ’ad two in the last lot, the proper war that was. Mortar bomb in the trench cut my legs up the first time. Got treated fer that in Boolong. Could see England on a fine day. Second one was a bullet — and a Blighty one, too! They sent me ’ome fer that and give me a pension, too. Wouldn’t fink I’m ticking over with one lung, wouldjer?’