Storm Island

by Ken Follett

  father the war hero, a legless fucking joke!"

  "Oh, David, David," she whispered. She knelt in front of his

  wheelchair.

  "David, don't think like that. He will respect you. He'll look up to

  you because you put your life together again, and because you can do

  the work of two men from your wheelchair, and because you carried your

  disability with courage and cheerfulness."

  "Don't be so damned condescending," he snapped.

  "You sound like a sanctimonious priest."

  She stood up.

  "Well, don't act as if it's my fault. Men can take precautions too,

  you know."

  "You can't take precautions against invisible lorries in the

  blackout!"

  That was a silly, feeble excuse, and they both knew it, so Lucy said

  nothing. The whole idea of Christmas seemed utterly trite now: the

  bits of coloured paper on the walls, and the tree in the corner, and

  the remains of a goose in the kitchen waiting to be thrown away none of

  it had anything to do with her life. She began to wonder what she was

  doing on this bleak island with a man who seemed not to love her,

  having a baby he didn't want. Why shouldn't she why not well, she

  could ... Then she realized she had nowhere else to go, nothing else

  to do with her life, nobody else to be other than Mrs. David Rose.

  Eventually David said: "Well, I'm going to bed." He wheeled himself to

  the hall and dragged himself out of the chair and up the stairs

  backwards. She heard him scrape across the floor, heard the bed creak

  as he hauled himself on to it, heard his clothes hit the corner of the

  room as he undressed, then heard the final groaning of the springs as

  he lay down and pulled the blankets up over his pyjamas.

  And still she would not cry.

  She looked at the brandy bottle and thought: If I drink all of this

  now, and have a bath, perhaps I won't be pregnant in the morning.

  She thought about it for a long time, until she came to the conclusion

  that life without David and die island and the baby would be even worse

  because it would be empty.

  So she did not cry, and she did not drink the brandy, and she did not

  leave the island; but instead she went upstairs and got into bed, and

  lay awake beside her sleeping husband, listening to the wind and trying

  not to think, until the gulls began to call, and a grey rainy dawn

  crept over the North Sea and filled the little bedroom with a cold,

  cheerless, silver light, and then at last she went to sleep.

  A kind of peace settled over her in the spring, as if all threats were

  postponed until after the baby was born. When the February snow had

  thawed she planted flowers and vegetables in the patch of ground

  between the kitchen door and the barn, not really believing they would

  grow. She cleaned the house thoroughly and told David that if he

  wanted it done again before August he would have to do it himself. She

  wrote to her mother and did a lot of knitting and ordered nappies by

  post. They suggested she go home to have the baby, but she knew that

  if she went she would never come back. She went for long walks over

  the moors, with a bird book under her arm, until her own weight became

  too much for her to carry very far. She kept the bottle of brandy in a

  cupboard David never used, and whenever she felt depressed she went to

  look at it and remind herself of what she had almost lost.

  Three weeks before the baby was due, she got the boat into Aberdeen.

  David and Tom waved from the jetty. The sea was so rough that both she

  and the skipper were terrified she might give birth before they reached

  the mainland. She went into hospital in Aberdeen, and four weeks later

  brought the baby home on the same boat.

  David knew none of it. He probably thought that women gave birth as

  easily as ewes. He was oblivious to the pain of contractions, and that

  awful, impossible stretching, and the soreness afterwards, and the

  bossy, know-all nurses who didn't want you to touch your baby because

  you weren't brisk and efficient and trained and sterile like they were;

  he just saw you go away pregnant and come back with a beautiful,

  white-wrapped, healthy baby boy and said: "We'll call him Jonathan."

  They added Alfred for David's father, and Malcolm for Lucy's, and

  Thomas for old Tom, but they called the boy Jo, because he was too tiny

  for Jonathan, let alone Jonathan Alfred Malcolm Thomas Rose. David

  learned to give him his bottle and burp him and change his nappy, and

  he even dandled him in his lap occasionally, but his interest was

  distant, uninvolved. He had a problem-solving approach, like the

  nurses; it was not for him as it was for Lucy. Tom was closer to the

  baby than David. Lucy would not let him smoke in the room where the

  baby was, and the old boy would put his great briar pipe with the lid

  in his pocket for hours and gurgle at little Jo, or watch him kick his

  feet, or help Lucy bath him. Lucy suggested mildly that he might be

  neglecting the sheep. Tom said they did not need him to watch them

  feed he would rather watch Jo feed. He carved a rattle out of

  driftwood and filled it with small round pebbles, and was overjoyed

  when Jo grabbed it and shook it, first time, without having to be shown

  how.

  And still David and Lucy did not make love.

  First there had been his injuries, and then she had been pregnant, and

  then she had been recovering from childbirth; but now the reasons had

  run out.

  One night she said: "I'm back to normal, now."

  "How do you mean?"

  "After the baby. My body is normal. I've healed."

  "Oh, I see. That's good." And he turned away.

  She made sure to go up to bed with him so that he could watch her

  undress, but he always turned his back.

  As they lay there, dozing off, she would move so that her hand, or her

  thigh, or her breast, brushed against him, a casual but unmistakable

  invitation. There was no response.

  She believed firmly that there was nothing wrong with her. She wasn't

  a nymphomaniac: she didn't simply want sex, she wanted sex with David.

  She was sure that, even if there had been another man under seventy on

  the island, she would not have been tempted. She wasn't a sex-starved

  tart, she was a love-starved wife.

  The crunch came on one of those nights when they lay on their backs,

  side by side, both wide awake, listening to the wind outside and the

  small sounds of Jo from the next room. It seemed to Lucy that it was

  time he either did it or came right out and said why not; and that he

  was going to avoid the issue until she forced it; and that she might as

  well force it now as live in miserable incomprehension any longer.

  So she brushed her arm across his thighs and opened her mouth to speak

  and almost cried out with shock to discover that he had an erection. So

  he could do it! And he wanted to, or why else And her hand closed

  triumphantly around the evidence of his desire, and she shifted closer

  to him, and sighed: "David-' He said: "Oh, for God's sake!" He gripped

  her wrist and thrust her hand away from him an
d turned on to his

  side.

  But this time she was not going to accept his rebuff in modest silence.

  She said: "David, why not?"

  "Jesus, Christ!" He threw the blankets off, swung himself to the

  floor, grabbed the eiderdown with one hand, and dragged himself to the

  door.

  Lucy sat up in bed and screamed at him: "Why not?"

  Jo began to cry.

  David pulled up the empty legs of his cut-off pyjama trousers, pointed

  to the pursed white skin of his stumps, and said: "That's why not!

  That's why not!"

  He slithered downstairs to sleep on the sofa, and Lucy went into the

  next bedroom to comfort Jo.

  It took a long time to lull him back to sleep, probably because she

  herself was so much in need of comfort. The baby tasted the tears on

  her cheeks, and she wondered if he had any inkling of their meaning:

  wouldn't tears be one of the first things a baby came to understand?

  She could not bring herself to sing to him, nor could she with any

  sincerity murmur that everything was all right; so she held him tight

  and rocked him, and when he had soothed her with his warmth and his

  clinging, he went to sleep in her arms.

  She put him back in the cot and stood looking at him for a while. There

  was no point in going back to bed. She could hear David's deep-sleep

  snoring from the living-room he had to take powerful pills, otherwise

  the old pain kept him awake. Lucy needed to get right away from him,

  where she could neither see nor hear him, where he couldn't find her

  for a few hours even if he wanted to. She put on trousers and a

  sweater, a heavy coat and boots, and crept downstairs and out into the

  night.

  There was a swirling mist, damp and bitterly cold, the kind the island

  specialized in. She put up the collar of her coat, thought about going

  back inside for a scarf, and decided not to. She squelched along the

  muddy path, welcoming the bite of the fog in her throat, the small

  discomfort of the weather taking her mind off the larger hurt inside

  her.

  She reached the cliff-top and walked gingerly down the steep, narrow

  ramp, placing her feet carefully on the slippery boards. At the bottom

  she jumped off on to the sand and walked to the edge of the sea.

  The wind and the water were carrying on their perpetual quarrel, the

  wind swooping down to tease the waves and the sea hissing and spitting

  as is crashed against the land, the two of them doomed to bicker

  forever because neither could be calm while the other was there, but

  neither had any place else to go.

  Lucy walked along the hard sand, letting the noise and the weather fill

  her head, until the beach ended in a sharp point where the water met

  the cliff, when she turned and walked back She paced the shore all

  night. Toward dawn a thought came to her, unbidden: It is his way of

  being strong.

  As it was, the thought was not much help, holding its meaning in a

  tightly clenched fist. But she worked on it for a while, and the fist

  opened to reveal what looked like a small pearl of wisdom nestling in

  its palm: for perhaps David's coldness to her was of one piece with his

  chopping down trees, and undressing himself, and driving the jeep, and

  throwing the Indian clubs, and coming to live on a cold cruel island in

  the North Sea ... What was it he had said? '... his father the war

  hero, a legless joke ..." He had something to prove, something that

  would sound trite if it were put into words; something he could have

  done as a fighter pilot, but now had to do with trees and fences and

  Indian clubs and a wheelchair. They wouldn't let him take the test,

  and he wanted to be able to say: "I could have passed it anyway, just

  look how I can suffer."

  It was cruelly, hopelessly, screamingly unjust: he had had the courage,

  and he had suffered the wounds, but he could take no pride in it. If a

  Messerschmidt had taken his legs the wheelchair would have been like a

  medal, a badge of courage. But now, all his life, he would have to

  say: "It was during the war but no, I never saw any action, this was a

  car crash, I did my training and I was going to fight, the very next

  day, I had seen my kite, she was a beauty, and I would have been brave,

  I know..."

  Yes, it was his way of being strong. And perhaps she could be strong,

  too. She might find ways of patching up the wreck of her life so that

  it would sail again. David had once been good and kind and loving, and

  she might now learn to wait patiently while he battled to become the

  complete man he used to be. She could find new hopes, new things to

  live for. Other women had found the strength to cope with bereavement,

  and bombed-out houses, and husbands in prisoner-of war camps.

  She picked up a pebble, drew back her arm, and threw it out to sea with

  all her might. She did not see or hear it land: it might have gone on

  forever, circling the earth like a satellite in a space story.

  She shouted: "I can be strong, too!"

  Then she turned around and started up the ramp to the cottage. It was

  almost time for Jo's first feed.

  SIX

  It looked like a mansion; and, up to a point, that was what it was: a

  large house, in its own grounds, in the leafy town of Wohldorf just

  outside North Hamburg. It might have been the home of a mine owner, or

  a successful importer, or an industrialist. It was in fact owned by

  the Abwehr.

  It owed its fate to the weather not here, but two hundred miles

  south-east in Berlin, where atmospheric conditions were unsuitable for

  wireless communicaton with England.

  It was a mansion only down to ground level. Below that were two huge

  concrete shelters and several million Reichs-marks worth of radio

  equipment. The electronics system had been put together by one Major

  Werner Trautmann, and he did a good job. Each hall had twenty neat

  little soundproofed listening posts, occupied by radio operators who

  could recognize a spy by the way he tapped out his message, as easily

  as you can recognize your mother's handwriting on an envelope.

  The receiving equipment was built with quality in mind, for the

  transmitters that were sending the messages had been designed for

  compactness rather than power. Most of them were the little suitcase

  sets called Klamotten which had been developed by Telefunken for

  Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.

  On this night the airwaves were relatively quiet, so everyone knew when

  Die Nadel came through. The message was taken by one of the older

  operators. He tapped out an acknowledgement, transcribed the signal

  quickly, tore the sheet off his notepad and went to the phone. He read

  the message over the direct line to Abwehr headquarters at Sophien

  Terrace in Hamburg, then he came back to his booth for a smoke.

  He offered a cigarette to the youngster in the next booth, and the two

  of them stood together for a few minutes, leaning against the wall and

  smoking.

  The youngster said: "Anything?"

  The older man shrugged. There's always something whe
n he calls. But

  not much, this time. The Luftwaffe missed St. Paul's Cathedral

  again."

  "No reply for him?"

  "We don't think he waits for replies. He's an independent bastard,

  that one. Always was. I trained him in wireless, you know: and once

  I'd finished he thought he knew it better than me."

  The youngster was awestruck.

  "You've met Die Nadel?"

  "Oh, yes," said the old-timer, flicking ash.

  "What's he like?"

  "As a drinking companion, he's about as much fun as a dead fish. I

  think he likes women, on the quiet, but as for sinking a few steins

  with the boys forget it. All the same, he's the best agent we've

  got."

  "Really?"

  "Definitely. Some say the best spy ever. There's a story that he

  spent five years working his way up in the NKVD in Russia, and ended up

  one of Stalin's most trusted aides ... I don't know whether it's true,

  but it's the kind of thing he'd do. A real pro. And the Fuhrer knows

  it."

  "Hitler knows him?"

  The older man nodded.

  "At one time he wanted to see all Die Nadel's signals. I don't know if

  he still does. Not that it would make any difference to Die Nadel.

  Nothing impresses that man. You know something? He looks at everybody

  the same way: as if he's figuring out how he'll kill you if you make a

  wrong move."