Killing Ground (24 page)

“I hope you've not been waiting long?”

Howard signalled the landlord, who, like the two men by the fire, had been staring at the girl as if she had just stepped from the moon.

She said, “A gin would be nice.”

Had she been going to ask for a sherry, but remembered the last time it had happened in the Guvnor's living room?

“Of course.” Howard moved to the bar and then stopped dead. The newsreader was just ending. Just a small item, which in any daily paper would qualify for no more than a couple of lines: “The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce the loss on active service of HMS
Redwing.
Next of kin have been informed.” He did not remember paying for the drink. Only that he was seated again, the glass gripped in his fingers.

She took it gently, her eyes studying him anxiously. “What is it?”

“Redwing.
I saw her go. That last convoy. We managed to lift off some of her people.”

He stared at the wall but saw only the ship settling deeper and deeper alongside. Dazed, bleeding men being dragged roughly to safety.
Redwing
's captain on the bridge, his eyes blank
with shock. He stared at her hand on his wrist but did not feel it.

“Tell me.”

“I must have been at it too long.” He looked at her hand and wanted to hold it, to let it all flood out. But he knew she would pull away, that he would not be able to stop this time. “But I had this strange feeling—” He looked directly into her eyes. The colour of the sea. “It's impossible of course—”

He felt the slightest pressure on his wrist. “Try me.”

Howard said, “I think the torpedo was meant for us.”

She smiled and took her hand away as if she had just realised what she had done. “Well, thank God it missed!” She raised her glass. “I can't stay long.” She recognised his disappointment. “My friend Jane is standing in for me. I simply wanted to see you. To make sure you were all right. It must have been hell for you when you got back.”

“I saw what was left of the place. Mister Mills has done his best.” He smiled with sudden affection. “Bless him.”

“He's very fond of you, isn't he?”

Howard glanced round as the curtain swirled aside again and two soldiers thudded across the floor in their heavy boots, each looking quickly at the girl before discovering the dartboard on the far side of the bar.

She added, “I met your brother and his wife.”

“What did you think of Robert?”

He saw her start with surprise that he should ask her. But her reply was in her characteristic, direct fashion. “Well, I can see him as an admiral.” She smiled for the first time. “He's not in the least like you.”

Howard grimaced. “I suppose not.” It was strange, but he had never really thought about it. She was right. Robert was all one would expect of a regular officer. Very straight; but inclined to a stiffness their father had never needed.

When he looked again her smile had gone. She said, “Will you keep the old house?” She saw him nod and added wistfully, “I came to like it.” Then she seemed impatient, angry that she
could not hide her emotion. “Poor Lucy. But for me—”

Howard pulled the handkerchief from his breast pocket and put it in her fingers. “Don't even think it. They were together.

Each needed the other.”

He knew the landlord and the two men by the fire were watching intently, but did not care. They probably imagined they had met here in secret. Lovers, when neither was free.
Would that we were.
He said nothing while she dabbed her eyes, then studied herself in her compact mirror.

She said, “I'm a mess!”

He reached between the glasses and took her hand very carefully. As a man will hold a frightened bird, trying to avoid injuring it. “I'd like to see you again.”

She studied him curiously. “I can tell you mean it, and not for the reasons I'm offered from time to time. But it wouldn't work.” She smiled, as if to ease the hurt. “How would we manage? Have you asked yourself that?”

“Others do.” His voice was sharp. He was thinking of men who had tried to win her favours.
The young widow.
It happened often enough in wartime.

“Maybe.” She was still watching his face, looking for something, or someone. “I know I couldn't. Not again.” She glanced at her watch. “I must go. Really.”

He held her hand more tightly. “Don't you understand? I've been thinking about you ever since that day when the Guvnor—” He looked away. “Sorry, I didn't mean to drag it all up again.”

Then they were both standing, and in the small bar he could hear the clock ticking.

“It's my fault.” She freed her hand very gently. “Anyway, what should I do? Every time you say goodbye, it breaks your heart—didn't you know? That's why I'm soldiering on. I want to do something useful. Like you, and all the other people out there who are trying to win this damnable war!” She looked around at the intent faces with a kind of defiance which only made her appear more vulnerable. “We shall probably bump into one another
from time to time. My friend Jane and I are being transferred to Operations.” She hesitated, seeing the dying hope in his eyes. “Western Approaches, in fact.”

He stared at her. “Liverpool!”

She replaced her hat, then turned to face him. “Well, it's not too big a place, is it?”

He would have followed her but she said, “I've got my bike outside. You stay and have your drink. You've not touched it.” Then she said, “I shall miss your father, and if you're interested, I think you're exactly like him.” With the same touch of defiance she held up her cheek, and for those few unreal seconds Howard tasted her skin and the gentle fragrance of her hair.

He heard the outside door slam, the far-off wail of an air raid warning, and pictured her cycling through the darkness to the air station at Lee-on-Solent. He downed the drink in one swallow and picked up his cap.

The landlord nodded as he put the glass on the bar. They were in short supply too. Most of the pubs had the rule, “no glass no drink,” so that customers would refrain from gathering a little hoard of them at every visit.

“Nice lady, sir.” His eyes were full of questions. “Not married, I see?”

Howard wanted to leave, to think alone. He replied brutally, “She was. He was killed.”

Outside he paused to look at some searchlight beams wavering across the sky and to get his bearings. As he walked along the darkened road he was torn between despair and a lingering hope. Which, like the horizon and the night sky, had no clear division.

Howard returned to Liverpool after four days, during which time he visited the family solicitor, and spent a whole afternoon signing papers. Even in war there was apparently a lot to do when someone died.

He visited the communal grave, a sad little plot as yet without
a proper stone to mark the remains of the six people who lay there. There were a few dead flowers and a fresh bunch of chrysanthemums in a stone pot. There was a card, too, with her name on it. She must have gone there without telling him before she left for a few days' transfer leave. Mister Mills had told him that she had made him promise to keep flowers there until the stone was properly installed; that was something else Howard had signed at the solicitors.

At Liverpool it was raining when he arrived, and by the time he had been aboard
Gladiator
for an hour it was almost as if he had never been away.

Lieutenant Treherne had told him that the group was expected to sail in three more days, or that was the latest buzz. He also told the story of Bizley, who with his second stripe and promised decoration was becoming unbearable. There was also a new navigating officer, Sub-Lieutenant Brian Rooke, one of those rare junior officers from the lower deck who sought and won promotion by way of a scholarship. Most of the other lower deck officers were much like old Arthur Pym: years and years of service from boy seaman, up and up via the Petty Officers' mess and eventually to wardroom with just a thin half-stripe to show for the long, hard slog.

Howard saw Rooke in his quarters, a tough, round-faced man of twenty-four, with a blue chin which apparently defied the sharpest razor. He had a brusque, business-like manner, and his personal report left Howard in no doubt that Treherne's replacement would prove an excellent navigator, if they could hang on to him.

But he had one failing, a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. As Treherne had said with gleeful relish, “He thinks we're all turning up our noses at a poor ex-matelot!” Treherne had been thinking of Joyce at the time, and all her ideas of
posh officers.

It was just November when the group left Liverpool to shadow a large westbound convoy which was to be met by Canadian escorts in the usual way. The convoy was attacked by
long-range reconnaissance bombers, then U-Boats for much of the way; but using more aggressive tactics than before, Captain Vickers threw his group into the attack again and again and left the close escort to the corvettes. They lost just two ships, but severely damaged a U-Boat on the surface one night in mid-Atlantic. It was a probable kill. The return run from Halifax with a fast convoy of modern tankers was mauled once again by a U-Boat pack south of Cape Farewell. Once more Vickers impressed it on his escort captains to follow his tactics whenever possible. Drive the U-Boats under, and keep them there so that they could not overhaul the heavy tankers.

It was a record. When they reached the Mersey they had lost only three tankers. Three out of twenty-seven.

Perhaps it had been sheer luck, or maybe the German HQ had misunderstood the convoy's intentions. They might even have withdrawn some of their powerful force of U-Boats for refitting and repair before winter really hit the Western Ocean.

As
Gladiator
headed slowly up-river towards Gladstone Dock, Howard stood on the gratings beside his chair and stared at the mass of dockyard personnel and servicemen who thronged the jetties and moored vessels to watch their return, and then to his amazement, to cheer as if they were the victors.

Leading the group, Vickers's rakish
Kinsale
was blaring “D'you Ken John Peel?” on all her speakers, adopted by the rugged captain as their own hunting song. Howard left the ship in Treherne's hands and watched the welcome, very moved by what he saw and heard. It had never happened before.

He heard Rooke say, “Time to turn, sir.”

Treherne nodded. “Very good.”

Howard did not even have to look. There had been times when he had barely been able to snatch a catnap at sea. Afraid that a youthful and barely trained officer on watch would do something stupid, lose the next ship ahead in the dark or ram it up the stern by too many revolutions wrongly applied. Somehow, despite the changes, or because of them, they had become a team,
and no matter what happened on the next convoy or the one following that, this delirious welcome was a tonic after what they had seen and done.

As the destroyers made their careful turn, one of the Wrens on the signal station's verandah called, “They're coming, ma'am!”

Celia Lanyon removed her hat and took the proffered oilskin from a grizzled yeoman of signals; it came down to her ankles, but that did not matter. Out on the windswept verandah, the rain plastering her hair to her face, she felt the new excitement in the place, which she had never shared before. The flags soaring up and down, so bright against the grey sky and sombre town; the clatter of signal lamps; and then more cheers as the destroyer with
H-38
painted on her rust-streaked bow edged into view.

She found that she was waving and cheering too, without understanding it. They had called her a blue-stocking, standoffish, before Jamie had come into her life. But she had never been like this.

Howard turned to watch the yeoman clattering off yet another acknowledgement, his hard features outwardly unmoved by something he probably thought was empty optimism.

Well, perhaps it was. Howard stiffened. But this time it was different. He raised his glasses and trained them through the diagonal rain towards the signal station.

Even in the bulky oilskin, hatless and with her hair clinging to her face, he saw her immediately. He hesitated, then removed his cap and held it high above his head before waving it slowly from side to side.

Treherne called, “Stand by wire and fenders.” He glanced up at the captain, and gave a slow grin of understanding. Bloody good luck to him.

Ayres gave a nervous cough and Treherne leaned over the voicepipe.

“Stop port! Slow astern port!”
Just in bloody time.

Gladiator
was back again, and although there would be those who would grieve for the men who had died with the three
tankers, others would see this as a small break in the cloud.

Howard watched until the signal station was hidden from view. There was hope after all. Perhaps for them too.

In the same month of November two other events took place—unconnected, but they would prove more important than any of these men and women could appreciate.

There came to Liverpool a new commander-in-chief for Western Approaches, a tireless, dynamic and forceful admiral named Max Horton. He was neither a patient man, nor one who would accept defeat in any form while the convoys braved the Atlantic in all conditions.

The other event occurred in North Africa beside the Qattara Depression, near a place nobody had ever heard of. It was called El Alamein, where for the last time, at the very gates of Egypt, the battered Eighth Army turned and stood fast. Like the thin red line, some said. The retreat was over.

As Howard had thought. There was hope after all.

“S
TARBOARD
watch closed up at defence stations, sir.” Lieutenant Finlay's voice was sharper than usual, a sure sign that he was on edge about something. Lieutenant-Commander David Howard licked his lips and savoured the last cup of coffee until morning. It was midnight, the middle watch standing to their various stations while the destroyer rolled easily from side to side at reduced speed.