Whether this was the elegant timing of fate once again or her twins’ simple genius with poor Andrew Motion’s life skills, Robin never knew.
*
In Friesland also it was hot that August; hotter in fact than in Hereford or Skye. The little resort of Harlingen sweltered under tropical skies. The Waddenzee wavered under a heat haze like boiling mercury and a couple of kilometres south the Ijsselmeer seethed and steamed. All along the inland edge of Harlingen’s North Sea beaches stood little beach huts extended into summer residences. Here one-room chalets boasted twin bunks with sliding doors and great swansdown pillows, bright-curtained windows, clean pine furniture, peace, privacy and free clogs. Here Harry Newbold and Angela van der Piet had come to rest, together, for a while. Harry remained beside Angela because to part from her would simply hurt too much. Like the rest of New England’s crew, she had been paid off after the loss, but well paid, by a grateful company taking much of the credit — and free publicity — for saving every major head of state alive; and Tom Hanks. She had been ready, willing and able to take a long holiday in Europe.
Why Pitman allowed Harry to accompany her home to Holland she never said; perhaps as insurance should the false papers or the hot money be called into question. But even when she had reached Holland safely Angela had not waved goodbye to Harry, so perhaps there was more to it than simple insurance.
They had been here for ten days so far and nothing had come of their easy intimacy. But time was running out and Harry was getting desperate. She lay now on one of the beds in the tightest of her high-cut bathing suits, one leg folded, thigh calculatedly akimbo, like the trunk of a fallen tree. Over the top of an English language newspaper she watched Angela as she finished her exercise routine, the green T-shirt and Calvin Klein shorts she favoured darkened intimately with perspiration. They would go for a swim later, when the fierce heat went off the golden sand. And take their bikes out in the cool of the evening, riding out to a little inn near Leeuwarden, further inland.
Harry’s eyes were blind to the newsprint. Even had she actually been interested in British news, the story of an Essex fisherman who had hoped to catch a bass in the mouth of the River Thames but who had actually pulled ashore the late Sir Justine Bulwer-Lytton, missing since his mysterious disappearance some weeks ago, would hardly have held her love-smitten attention, since she had no idea how intimately that strange event was bound up with her own recent experience.
Angela had brought the paper back from Leeuwarden with her yesterday when she had returned from a mysterious little foray alone, which had terrified Harry with the thought that she might not return at all. The fact that she had done so at once gave Harry renewed hope and had spurred her to consider more positive action. The revealing costume had been donned — and had apparently gone unnoticed. The gestures had become franker — as unmistakable as she dared make them, in fact. The looks more lingering and, she prayed, seductive. But she had balked at making physical advances for there had not been the slightest intimation of response from the woman she loved. And the risk of alienating her through precipitate action was more than Harry dared face.
And yet the sight of Angela exercising, the uncalculated, intimate glimpses their proximity afforded, robbed Harry of breath and sleep. She accompanied Angela to the restaurants and snack bars where Angela consumed wide varieties of local fare, fries and mayonnaise, but Harry herself had no appetite.
About the only thing that passed her lips apart from breath was her fingers as she chewed her nails. She was doing this now, holding the paper one-handed, while Angela, her feet wedged under the bed foot, her legs slightly parted, finished fifty sit-ups, fingers laced in the sweat-darkened curls of her nape, elbows to knees, T-shirt gaping at the neck as she curled.
Then, having completed the final series, she leaped to her feet and turned, still fizzing with energy. Lifting the hem of her vest distractingly high, she mopped her face with it, then she threw herself down in a chair by the pine table. She reached down into a kitbag which had gone with her to Leeuwarden yesterday and had come back with more than an English-language newspaper in it. It made a disturbingly solid thump as it landed on the plain pine boards. Angela delved into it while Harry laid the useless paper aside.
“Here,” announced Angela unexpectedly. “I got you something else.” She pulled out a book and lobbed it. Harry caught it easily and looked at it. The Poems: Sappho of Lesbos, said the cover.
Frowning, Harry looked up. Angela was deep in the kitbag again. Only the blonde spikes of her hair were visible above its woven black sides.
“Poetry?” said Harry quietly. “From you, Angela?”
“We got to meet halfway, Harriet,” said Angela, her voice deadpan. “Read me some.” Harry opened the book at random and obediently began:
He is more than a hero he is a god in my eyes the man who is allowed to sit beside you…
There was a strange sound which made her look up.
Angela was sitting watching her; her eyes were almost black, the pupils were so wide. She was breathing through flared nostrils and slightly parted lips. Her hands were busy with something wrapped in cloth on the table, but all of her attention, suddenly and breathtakingly, was on Harry.
“Go on, Harriet,” said Angela quietly.
Harry’s eyes went down to the page.
If I meet you suddenly, I can’t speak — my tongue is broken; a thin flame runs under my skin…
She stopped, simply unable to read any more. The words of the poem were coming true for her. Her tongue was broken. Her skin was on fire under Angela’s unwavering, all-engulfing gaze. She could feel the blood drumming in her ears and she was running with perspiration as though she had been exercising side by side with Angela. She began to shake, her head whirling, faint as death.
Angela’s hands stopped moving. The pale cloth was unwound and tossed aside. The last of yesterday’s purchases lay naked and wicked in the afternoon sun. Steely, skeletal; familiar. “Come over here,” she said, her voice low, seductive, irresistibly tempting. “Come over here and I’ll show you how to field strip a nine millimetre ASP…”
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I read more than sixty books in researching HELL GATE but it would hardly be of use or interest to list them all. The most important in the story should prove enough for even the most intrepid armchair adventurer or soldier, and to each and all of the men and women who wrote them or who stood at their centres I extend my deepest respect. Except, perhaps, for some of those about the IRA.
Because of Harry and Pitman, who were always the way they were almost without conscious design on my part and certainly well before their chosen style and orientation became so fashionable, books about women in the Forces were of the first importance. I most strongly recommend Sarah Ford’s fascinating ONE UP (HarperCollins, 1997) and Kate Muir’s ARMS AND THE WOMAN (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992); Jenni Atkinson’s A GIRL IN SQUARE RIG and Dea Birkett’s JELLA also detail the lot of women afloat. Of the books about the SAS, I can do no better than to recommend, alongside ONE UP, Andy McNabb’s BRAVO TWO ZERO (Corgi, 1993) and Chris Ryan’s THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY. All soldiering buffs will also be up to their armpits with books about the SAS: its formation, history and so forth. Every library and bookshop I have visited during the last few years has been packed with them. This is also the case with books about the Gulf War though I relied most strongly on the books named above (and Ms Muir’s), Stanwood, Allen & Peacock’s THE GULF WAR: A DAY BY DAY CHRONICLE (Heinemann, 1991) and, of course, General Sir Peter de la Billiere’s STORM COMMAND (HarperCollins, 1992). The names of Dall’s mercenary group were taken from Peter McAleese’s NO MEAN SOLDIER (London, 1993), which is also a fascinating
read. The ending of the book would simply not have been possible to write without the help of Kelvin Hughes who, as always, discussed my research requirement in patient detail and then supplied charts and Pilots of the East Coast, New York harbour and the East River. What New England passes in her last wild dash is there, cable for cable, bridge for bridge.
In fact, HELL GATE began with a pair of newspaper stories, one by Sean Ryan, The Sunday Times’s science correspondent, published on 5 March, 1995, under the self-explanatory title JET-SHIP POISED TO SHATTER SPEED BARRIER; the other by The Times foreign correspondent Daniel McGrory, published on 3 November, 1996, under the title CIA STUNG BY ITS STINGERS. The relevance of both of these to the overall shape of the plot should I hope, be obvious. I contacted neither of these journalists and my story is a fantasy entirely independent of their fine reporting. The same is true of the wealth of video-TV-and radio-generated material I used, from the excellent series about the Gulf War in its totality, to the individual programmes about Gulf War Syndrome and — more disturbingly still — about the effect of depleted uranium ammunition on the soldiers involved. It was the striking similarity in some of the symptoms described to those of Hansen’s disease or leprosy which gave me the final piece in my narrative jigsaw.
As is often the case with my work, all the research is far outweighed by the kind support and guidance given by a range of friends and experts whom I am pleased to acknowledge here. I must thank Geoff Corkish of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, Captain Dermot O’Toole and First Officer Dominic Bell for showing me around the bridge of the SEACAT I.O.M., and explaining to me how much of the equipment there is used now — and how the next generation of this equipment might be expected to function in the near future. I must thank John Murr for his advice about shipping matters and, through John’s good offices, Zarina Bhesania of Richards Butler for some direction as to the current standing of barratry in the statutes.
As always, I must extend a wealth of thanks to friends on the Isle of Man, not least the librarians in Port Erin, Castletown and Douglas, who help me with research and are unfailingly generous with their advice and their time. The list of friends on the Island who listen, discuss and offer their advice and experience is endless, but special place must go to Alec and Joan Rodden who gave me free use of their spare rooms and computer systems. A special thanks to David Taylor for a range of advice — from computing to sailing. But especially to Alec again for retrieving some unaccountably missing files from the depths of his machine memory. It would have been a much shorter book without you Alec.
I owe an enduring debt of thanks to the staff at the Sevenoaks Library who have left no stone unturned in helping with my research. Full time and part time, they have been more like friends than public servants. And good luck at university, Amy.
I owe a debt of thanks to Max Frost for finding out the last few details I simply could not get hold of about the current state of Southpoint, on Roosevelt Island, straight off the Internet. Research just doesn’t come any more current. Thanks, Max.
Although my writing is carefully calculated never to interfere with my “day job”, I must as ever thank colleagues at The Wildernesse School for their help and advice, from John Wright and Paul Clark with information about weather sats, the North Atlantic and New York, to Ron Herbert the headmaster and law tutor for his thoughts about barratry, piracy and suchlike in the early twenty-first century, and to Roger Hood (and his sister-in-law Rosemary Hood) for priceless, and extremely current, information about exactly what it is possible to do with a phone, a modem and a computer network.
I could not have written HELL GATE in its present form without the commentary of my most active critics, Juliet Evans and my wife Charmaine, who went through the early drafts rebalancing soldiering with storytelling, reckless adventure with adult relationship. And without Charmaine’s forbearance as she (yet again) took the boys off and amused them for ten hours a day during the long vacation — followed by one complete week in the autumn while I wrote, edited and printed from dawn to dusk uninterrupted. So much of Robin is in Cham — even as I vanish annually into fantasy as Richard vanishes into his adventures. The domestic effect is much the same, I have to say. And, needless to say, Guy and Mark are the backbone of William and Mary in all sorts of ways.
Finally, HELL GATE would not have been as authentic without the selfless and time-consuming help of Dale Clarke, who wishes simply to be known as my armaments officer — in spite of the fact that for some parts of the military sections he was almost co-author. Much of what is wrong with those sections is down to me. Most of what is right is down to Dale.
— Peter Tonkin, Sevenoaks and Port Erin, 1997.
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