Oriental Hotel (21 page)

He was squatting on his haunches beside her as she looked up, still seeing him through a haze of tears. But as their eyes met, something vital sparked suddenly like the touch of a high voltage switch. As she felt it – a sharp, almost painful sensation following the line of brandy to her stomach and twisting deep within her – she froze.

His hand was on her arm; she had barely noticed before, but now it was suddenly as if that was conducting electricity too. Warmth flowed from his fingers to join the warmth within her and the ache of pain in her limbs became an ache of longing. But longing for what? she asked herself in confusion, but needed no reply, for all her instincts were crying out for the comfort of his touch, for the chance to lay her face against his chest, to feel his arms holding her close as his nearness blotted out the horrors of the day.

As the knowledge coursed through her she turned her head away, ashamed – knowing it must have been there in her eyes for him to see.

‘Better?' His voice was deep, even; she tried in vain to gauge from it whether or not he had seen and recognised the quickening of her senses.

‘Yes. I'm all right now.' She searched in the pocket of the borrowed overall for a handkerchief and failed to find one.

‘Here!' He handed her one of his own and she took it. Then, as she wiped her face, the smell of it raised the treacherous ache of longing again. Tobacco and lighter fuel superimposed on the scent of fresh laundering; comforting smells, reminding her of her childhood when her father's handkerchief had cleaned grazed knees and wiped away tears.

She made as if to return it to him, but he pushed it back into her hands.

‘Keep it. It's a better size for crying in to than those silly little things you normally use.'

‘Thank you.' Her fingers knotted into the fine cotton. ‘I'm sorry. I'm being really stupid.'

‘No, you're not; you've had a thorough baptism of fire. You had already had a very long day for your first effort at nursing, without having Grimly's death to cope with as well.'

He didn't say ‘that idiot Grimly' as people had tended to say in the man's lifetime, but she could feel him think it and she said, ‘He was like a lost little boy, you know, trying too hard all the time. His father had served with distinction in the First World War and he was doing his best to live up to him all the time. He was so afraid, you know, that when the time came he would go to pieces. That was why he put on that showy front.'

‘Do you want the rest of this brandy?' Gerald Brittain asked and when she shook her head he drained the glass himself. ‘Yes, people like that are often just a lot of talk – bravado to cover up the fact that there is nothing underneath.'

‘But we don't know that there was nothing underneath,' she argued. ‘He never had the chance to prove himself-that's the tragedy of it.'

He set down the empty brandy glass and stood up, holding out. his hand to her. ‘What you need now is a good night's rest. Come on, I'll see you back to your cabin.'

Obediently she stood up. In the companion way he walked behind her, his hand on her shoulder, and in the half light her cheeks burned with the newly awakened awareness of him.

It was ridiculous, she thought. Only this morning she had thought him obnoxious; now, suddenly, he was stirring such a ferment of emotions in her that she couldn't keep pace with them.

It must be the brandy. There was no other explanation.

At her cabin door she stopped, looking round at him. ‘ I'll be all right now.'

She opened the door. The cabin was in darkness and the sounds of even breathing told her the Wrens were already asleep. Ordinarily she would have been glad not to run the gauntlet of their comments, but tonight she felt something almost akin to comradeship with them. Today she had been to the other side of the world and back. Nothing could ever be the same again.

She closed the door and undressed with stumbling fingers, letting her clothes remain on the floor where they fell.

Then she climbed into the hard bunk. Tired as she was, she had expected to sleep easily, but she did not. Instead she lay there while the events of the day turned over and over in her mind in relentless circles; the fear, the smells, the cries all returned to her, the poignancy of what had happened to John Grimly and the sickening horror of his death.

No wonder she had felt such an attraction towards Gerald Brittain, she thought. After the maiming and death, he had been whole and strong, balm to her shattered emotions.

At last total weariness overtook Elise, blotting out the churning thoughts as she slept.

In his cabin, Gerald Brittain threw aside the papers he had been poring over and stood up, stretching his long muscular frame.

If anyone had the idea that working for British Intelligence was a romantic job, they were vastly mistaken, he thought. And he had been taken in himself – flattered, even, that he had been thought suitable, and excited by the challenge.

The approach had come just when he had needed it most, made by an insignificant looking man of middle age, middle height and middle colouring – but whose presence would nonetheless have caused a great many eyebrows to be raised among Brit's fellow Officers at the RAF Convalescent Home had his full rank and title been known.

‘We need someone to do a special job for us, Brittain, and we think you're the man.'

‘Oh yes?' Brit's voice had conveyed all the depression he was feeling. Two days earlier a service doctor had come to see him, armed with a collection of X-ray plates, and told him it was unlikely he would ever fly again. Although he had already suspected as much, the final verdict had still hit him with the force of a knockout blow; in the self-pitying hours which followed his realisation that it was true, he had allowed himself to sink to the point of actually wishing he had' bought it' along with his Spitfire.

‘A special job – pushing a pen in an office somewhere, I suppose?' he said laconically.

The apparently insignificant officer gave him a long, searching look.

‘I was given to understand that the torn tendons in your right hand would preclude that.'

‘Definitely,' said Brit, declining to point out that he was left-handed and thankful that for the moment at least he was safe from his ultimate nightmare – to be trapped behind a desk and a pile of paperwork. The very thought was enough to bring him out in a cold, claustrophobic swear and always had been. This aversion had been one of the reasons for turning his back on Cormorant – the offices in which he would have been expected to work might be the height of luxury, with their soft nappa leather furniture and the cabinets that contained rows of bottles of the best vintage wines and spirits, but to him they had seemed like prison cells. He had said as much and thought his father would probably never forgive him.

‘You were born and raised in Hong Kong, I understand?' the officer continued.

‘Yes.'

‘And you speak Chinese?'

‘I learned Cantonese as a boy.'

‘What about Japanese?'

‘I know the odd word.'

‘The odd word isn't enough for what we want. But it's a start.'

Brit looked at him with quickening interest. ‘A start for what? What is this job you have in mind?'

The officer-with-no-name stood up and crossed to the window. For seemingly endless moments he stood looking out over the rolling lawns of the convalescent home: the trees, still clinging to the last of their leaves, faded now from the glorious autumn reds and golds; and the sky, gun-metal grey for November, above them.

Then he turned and said unemotionally, ‘How would you feel about working behind enemy lines?'

How would you feel
?

At the time Brit had been too startled to feel anything. It was not something that had ever occurred to him – no, not even when the officer had asked him those strange but pertinent questions. Now he remembered other questions, other conversations, other eyes looking at him with the same searching depth as this man's. And knew what they wanted him to do.

They wanted him to go into China!

The sweat broke out in cold drops and the back of his neck prickled with it. How the hell could he hope to get away with it? It would be suicide. But what did that matter? The last two days he had been thinking he might just as well be dead. This was his chance to do something useful again and, if he died, to make his death worth-while.

He pulled himself up laboriously. ‘It's another six weeks before ray leg will be out of plaster.'

A small half smile twisted the mouth of the officer-with-no-name.

‘You'll need every minute of that to learn all we shall push your way.'

And that had been no exaggeration, thought Brit, staring with restless dislike at the untidy pile of papers spread across his bunk. Six weeks had only enabled him to skim the surface of the data he was expected to memorise and given him a mere smattering of Japanese. The powers in high places had arranged it so that he had a cabin of his own every step of the voyage, thus giving him the privacy to continue with his studies, and there would be more timewith specialised tutors when he arrived back in Hong Kong. So far, knowing that not only the success of the job he had to do but also his own life depended on it, he had made conscientious use of his time, but there were occasions when concentration was hard to come by, and today had been one of them.

The disturbance caused by picking up the survivors of the torpedoed ship had upset his routine, he supposed, for this morning – though he had settled himself with his books for the allotted time and refused to move – his mind had wandered repeatedly and he had the feeling that very little had actually sunk in. Or perhaps it was his subconscious kicking against the lists of Cantonese vocabulary – a throwback to his rebellious youth.

If I had worked harder on it then, it would be a good deal easier for me now, he thought ruefully.

But he hadn't worked on it; he had learned as little as he could get away with under pressure from his father, George, Brittain,
tai-pan
of Cormorant, who had insisted his two sons needed at least an understanding of Cantonese in order to control the business successfully.

Charles, Gerald's elder brother, had learned well and was everything his father had hoped he would be. Not so Gerald. His ambition had begun and ended with his desire to drive one of the two Rolls Royces that stood in the drive of their mansion at Shek-o and to pilot the company plane – much to the disgust of his father, who had lectured him endlessly.

‘Cormorant has been handed down from father to son since your great-great-great-grandfather came out here in the 1700s with the British East India Company and made something of himself. It's yours, in trust, for your children and theirs.'

Later when Brit had left home, first to fly commercially and then to join the RAF, the pressure had intensified.

‘Damn it, your place is here!'

But the tighter the noose, the more he had fought against it.

Ironic, he thought now, that I could end up doing more to help safeguard Cormorant than if I had stayed in Hong Kong like a good son and heir should. Even more ironic to think they might never know it!

But time was getting damned short. The day after tomorrow the
Stranraer
would be docking in Bombay; if his information was correct, after a week's wait another ship would take him on the next leg of his voyage around the coast to Calcutta. The prospect of the delay annoyed him. It would have been quicker to go overland, he would have thought. But the Ministry of War Transport was a law unto itself and argument would be pointless. And the important thing at the moment was not to draw attention to himself.

The mournful sound of a distant bugle interrupted his train of thought and he crossed the cabin to where the papers, spread out on his bunk, stared up at him uninvitingly. He cursed them silently but their hold over him was too strong. That one word he knew or did not know could mean the difference between being detected as a spy or being unsuspected; that cipher could hold the key to life or death.

With a sigh he bent over and dragged his mind back to the task in hand.

‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.'

The Chaplain's voice was thin and reedy on the open air; from the corner of the deck where she stood to watch the service of committal Elise strained her ears to catch the words.

‘In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour but of thee, O Lord …'

The ship had slowed and her flag flew at half-mast above the burial party. Against the guard rail a galley table rested; on it a bundle lay covered with a limp Union Jack.

John Grimly.

As Elise reminded herself once more that the body, weighted down by a 3-inch shell and sewn into a canvas bag, was indeed that of the young Captain, her throat seemed to swell and tighten until she could no longer swallow.

She had thought last night's tears would be the only ones she would shed for him. He was nothing to her, after all, just a young man whose path had crossed hers; yet more than anything she had been affected by the paralysing guilt that came from knowing she had made his last days wretched, when perhaps she could have made them happy. Those tears had been the tears of exhaustion, for herself and her failure as much as for the young man who had died so tragically.

Now, the knowledge of a life ended hit her afresh and the hollow echo of the Chaplain's words struck a core of sadness in her so deep and sharp that she wanted to cry out with it.

‘For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy …'

What great mercy? the weeping heart of her asked.

‘…to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep …'