‘And you need to find out if the offer is genuine?’
‘More or less, yeah.’
‘Dominic still has relatives around Genoa, I think—’
‘He also has relatives in Philadelphia,’ Christy interrupted.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Polly, ‘I see your problem.’
‘His old man and his brother are criminal racketeers.’
‘I know what his father is,’ said Polly.
‘Do you still pay dues to Carlo Manone?’
‘No.’
‘When did you stop?’
‘When Dominic left Scotland.’
‘What happens to the money now?’
‘I’m not sure I want to answer that question,’ said Polly.
‘But you know, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You and the lawyer, Hughes, you run the organisation.’
‘Oh come now,’ said Polly. ‘It’s hardly an organisation and it certainly isn’t – what do you call it? – a racket. I look after my husband’s business interests on his behalf, all legal and above board. The company’s in my name so there’s no question of either your government or mine being able to confiscate our profits or freeze our assets just because Dominic’s an alien.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
‘I thought…’
‘I’m only a messenger,’ Christy said.
‘From whom?’
‘New US federal agency; Roosevelt sanctioned and approved.’
‘Does this agency have a name?’
‘Not yet.’
‘In other words you’re a spy.’
‘No, I’m a photographer,’ Christy said.
‘And I’m the Queen of the May,’ said Polly.
* * *
Babs had put the peach housecoat back in the closet once and for all. She was no longer inclined to tempt Christy Cameron into taking her to bed. Something about him made her wary, something within herself too. If it hadn’t been for her loyalty to Archie and her job she might even have handed Mr Cameron his marching orders and decamped to Blackstone for a week or two just to steer clear of whatever scheme Christy and Polly were hatching between them.
She went into the back bedroom to check on April and found her daughter deep in the Land of Nod, cheeks slightly flushed, thumb in her mouth, a trickle of saliva glistening on her lower lip. Babs returned to the hallway. She had been wrestling with her conscience all afternoon. What she contemplated doing wasn’t right but, by gum, it was tempting.
She stood before the door of Christy’s room.
She knew where he was tonight and that the chances of him returning before midnight were slim. Even so, she paused for all of sixty seconds before she turned the knob and pushed open the door.
She was in and out of the room every day, of course, making the bed, changing sheets, emptying ashtrays, hoovering and dusting. She had put him into Angus’s room and Angus’s spoor was all over the place. Her son had taken his favourite toys with him but books, games and jigsaw puzzles, toy soldiers, a dismembered old teddy bear and a rubber Pinocchio doll with the nose bitten off remained. A glass and a half-bottle of Talisker on the bedside table were the only signs of the room’s current occupant, for Christy lived out of two big, brown canvas duffel bags that he kept hidden on top of the wardrobe.
‘Mr Cameron?’ Babs whispered. ‘Christy, are you there?’
He wasn’t there, of course. He was round in Manor Park Avenue with Polly, plotting God knew what.
Babs switched on the light, pulled out a chair, climbed on to it and lifted down the duffel bags. They were heavier than she’d anticipated. The canvas had a gritty feel to it and one shoulder strap had been torn from its leather housing and neatly repaired with cord. All the travel labels had been washed off, leaving nothing but indecipherable scraps. She put one of the bags on the bed.
It wasn’t padlocked but a hank of cord was knotted round the carry-handle. She picked at the complicated knot, worked it loose, unthreaded the cord and under a ridge of canvas, found four metal fasteners.
She popped them one by one.
Then, drawing in a deep breath, she opened up the bag.
* * *
Polly said, ‘Look, whatever you want me to do for this mythical agency of yours, first you’re going to have to come clean. I was married to Dominic Manone for too many years still to be gullible. Even the US Government, profligate though it may be, doesn’t send freelance photographers chasing across the Atlantic just to chat with the wife of an Italian importer. What exactly are you, Mr Christy Cameron? State Department, military intelligence, or just a freebooter with an eye to the main chance?’
‘I told you,’ Christy said, ‘I’m a photo journalist.’
‘Why then are you working for a government agency?’
‘My brother dragged me into it.’
‘Ah! Ah-hah!’ said Polly. ‘So your brother’s to blame, is he?’
‘He is in military intelligence. US Naval Intelligence to be exact. I really can’t tell you who he’s working with because I don’t know. You think I play it close to the chest – try getting information out of Jamie.’
‘More,’ Polly gestured, curling her fingers. ‘Give me a little more.’
‘All right, I’ll tell what I do know,’ Christy said, ‘some of it anyway. Franklin D. has established a whole new alphabet of bureaucratic offices. Franklin D. is well aware that sooner or later the United States will have to enter the war or the whole of Europe will go up in flames. The fall of France was a real blow. France cracked morally, you know what I mean?’
Polly nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘When that happened Roosevelt sent an unofficial envoy – a journalist, as it happens – to London to compile a first-hand report on the German victory. This journalist creamed up information from lots of his journalist friends, guys and women who’d seen the stuff happen and who knew the inside score in eight, ten European countries.’
‘Were you included in this select group of information-gatherers?’
‘He talked to me too, yeah.’
‘If you and your newspaper friends have contacts in the occupied territories, I assume you’re still useful to this unofficial envoy?’
‘Not dumb, are you?’ Christy said.
‘Unlike my sister – no, I don’t bury my head in the sand.’
‘The United States maintains diplomatic relations with the Vichy Government,’ Christy went on, ‘so we have agents and double agents planted all over France. Right now, though, we’re more interested in Italy. The journalist who’s cosy with Roosevelt has been appointed co-ordinator of a bunch of writers, actors and photographers, just useless Jewish scribblers according to some Washington high brass, and for my sins I’m part of that team.’
‘You’re not Jewish.’
‘No, I told you I’m out of the same can as you are.’
‘What does all this Roosevelt stuff have to do with me?’
‘So far military intelligence selects the agents, though that situation will change quite soon, I guess. My brother more-or-less blackmailed me into taking the job and I couldn’t turn the son of a bitch down.’
‘What do you get out of it?’
‘I get to sail with a convoy and take all the photographs I want with minimum restriction. Brockway’s is my employer. Brockway’s is also my cover. I’m “serviced”, for want of a better word, by Brockway’s London office.’
‘You still haven’t explained how I fit into all this?’ Polly said.
‘For years Mussolini’s secret police have been beating up the opponents of Italian Fascism into terrorised silence. But the opponents haven’t gone away. They’re hiding out in Rome, Turin, Milan, Genoa, all over the north. What you have in Italy, like what you have in France, is really a class war raging right under the Nazi guns.’
‘Resistance,’ said Polly.
‘Lots of it,’ said Christy. ‘It isn’t a recognised movement
like the Fighting French and there’s no up-front leader like De Gaulle – but it’s there okay, stoked by smouldering fury at what the Duce’s done to the country. When the time comes to mount offensives on Italian-held territories—’
‘Like North Africa?’
‘Like North Africa – we’ll need inside help.’
‘An active Fifth Column.’
‘You got it,’ Christy said.
‘To overthrow the Duce.’
‘Eventually maybe. One step at a time, though. First we need to set up organised grass-roots resistance groups – and we need to pay them.’
‘Are you telling me my husband has offered to finance the anti-Fascist cause in Italy?’
‘He has.’
‘But you don’t trust him?’
‘Nope, apparently we don’t.’
‘Because his father and brother are criminals?’
‘Because,’ Christy said, ‘it’s all too good to be true.’
* * *
First out of the bag came two bath towels, then the camera cases and umpteen rolls of film. The cameras were nothing like the old box Brownie with which Jackie had recorded the growth and progress of the children. They were sleek objects in compact leather cases, a Rolleiflex and a Contax, plus the tiny two-and-a-quarter-inch miniature that Babs had seen on the tram. Beneath the cameras was a collection of lenses and light meters wrapped in chamois leather; beneath the lenses, three notebooks.
Babs placed the items on the bedspread in the order in which she took them from the bag. She was nervous now, scared almost.
She handled the notebooks gingerly.
The first was a log or journal, each page – and there were many pages – packed with coded records of delivered film. The record bristled with the names of foreign towns and cities – Madrid, Helsinki, Warsaw, Berlin. Babs didn’t like the sense of smallness that those names gave her or the thought that a man who had been to all those places was sleeping in her son’s bed.
Hastily, she closed the log and dropped it back in the bag.
The second book listed claims for expenses, most of which seemed to have been paid. The pages of the last notebook were almost blank but a word – ‘Marzipan’ – appeared on page one, together with a telephone number. Printed in the same dark blue ink in the same crabbed hand, her name appeared on the second page, ‘Barbara Hallop’, followed by the address of the Cyprus Street Recruitment and Welfare Centre, which suggested that her meeting with Christy had not been accidental after all.
She glanced at her watch: after eleven.
Carefully she repacked the bag and put it on the floor.
The smaller bag was less securely sealed than the first. It contained clothing: woollens, stockings, pyjamas, underwear, two shirts, one necktie, six or eight handkerchiefs, a shaving wallet and a fat packet of contraceptives. Six dozen contraceptives. Why was the man carrying seventy-two French letters in his luggage? Did he have women in every port and was he out in the streets of Glasgow looking for women when he wasn’t with her or – Babs blew out her cheeks and cleared her throat – did he intend to use the entire consignment before he left Scotland and if so who would be the lucky – or unlucky – lady on the receiving end?
Cheeks burning, she stuffed the packet back into the bag.
She was on the point of closing the bag when she noticed an envelope sticking out from between two cotton undershirts.
She slid it out, a plump brown 9 × 6 manila envelope all scuffed and stained and, fortunately, unsealed. She spilled the contents on to the bedspread. Photographs, not glossy professional photographs but family snaps similar to those Jackie used to take with the Brownie. Ma and Pa and the kids; Coney Island, 1928. Girls, three of them, in summer dresses, with a young boy in short trousers sitting cross-legged on a pavement at their feet. Another girl with a shawl over her head, raindrops beaded on the fringe of the shawl, a tear, or a raindrop, clinging to her cheek.
Two kids, boy and girl, posed informally with a tall guy in navy uniform.
Two kids whom she recognised.
Stuart and Ishbel: Polly’s children.
Babs held the picture to the light, scanning it for clues as to where and when it had been taken. Nothing in the background but a white picket fence and a wall of shrubs. A bright day, the children squinting into the light. Older than she remembered them, more casually dressed: Americanised. She wondered about the naval officer, who might, she thought, be Christy’s brother. She riffled through the rest of the photographs, found a shot of men and women laughing in the doorway of a tall building; three men in baggy suits leaning on the rail of a ferryboat; another girl, white-blonde and leggy in a torn dress, standing at a field gate with a dog lying at her feet; then one of six or eight people at a table in a nightclub; then a solitary shot of Christy in the reefer jacket and familiar sweater seated on a bollard against a background of misty skyscrapers. There were no more pictures of Polly’s children, though.
Tucked into a corner of the envelope was a letter pencilled on a page torn from a notebook in a language Babs could not decipher. It wasn’t French or Italian but it might, she thought, be German.
It was signed by someone called ‘Ewa’.
Christy Cameron was not what Babs had imagined him to be. What she had mistaken for charm was in fact character, far too much character for her to cope with. The snapshots and the letter, to say nothing of six dozen French letters, gave him substance, a shape that she could not define. She wondered what he was doing here; not his purpose, which might be explained in due course, but his proximity. How could she possibly be attracted to a man who had so much more substance than she had?
She put all the stuff back into the bag, returned the bags to the top of the wardrobe then went into the living room and poured herself a drink.
Seated in Jackie’s armchair before the embers of the fire, her plump, competent fingers trembled slightly as she brought the glass to her lips. At that moment she was afraid of her Yankee lodger and the wealth of suffering and experience that he had brought into her life, a wealth of suffering and experience that she had no wish to share.
At midnight she went to bed.
* * *
It was after midnight before Kenny got home. One of the ‘businessmen’ under lock and key in Greenock Prison had shown signs of cracking under interrogation and he had stayed on to press his advantage.
Mr McVicar was waiting for him at the close mouth to tell him that Rosie had collapsed at work and had been taken to Redlands Hospital. Panic and annoyance took possession of Kenny’s reason. How could he possibly juggle a sick wife and the demands of the job? If Fiona had been home there wouldn’t have been a problem, but Fiona was far away. He would have to rely on his mother-in-law. He ran out into the street and flagged down a taxi.
He reached Redlands at one o’clock in the morning.
Two soon-to-be fathers, one of them a soldier, were pacing up and down the corridor, smoking furiously. There was a commotion outside the delivery room where some sort of crisis demanded the full attention of midwives and doctors. He heard a woman scream, shrill as a copper’s whistle, as he climbed the staircase to Rosie’s ward.
The ward sister was manifestly reluctant to let him enter but, in view of his occupation, granted him five minutes at his wife’s bedside.
Rosie was asleep.
He spoke to her very softly.
He touched her hand. He brushed hair from her damp brow. He straightened the sheet. He spoke to her again, less softly.
Rosie did not waken.
He felt little or nothing when the sister gave him the news about the baby. He asked a couple of questions, was given answers of a sort. He looked at Rosie, who had colour in her cheeks and seemed to be breathing evenly, who even snorted a little when he kissed her brow.
‘When may I take her home?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Early tomorrow? First thing in the morning?’
‘You can’t stay here overnight.’<
br />
‘I know. Say six o’clock tomorrow morning?’
‘Half-past, not before.’
‘She is well enough to go home, I take it?’
‘Of course,’ the sister said. ‘I assume there will be a female person on hand to care for her if she should require nursing for a day or two?’
‘I’ll make sure of it,’ said Kenny.
He went by cab to Knightwood, told the cabbie to wait.
Bernard answered the door.
Kenny did not go into the house.
An arrangement was quickly reached; Lizzie would come to Cowcaddens tomorrow morning and look after Rosie while he went to work.
He rode the cab back to St Andrew’s Street, scrounged a meal in the all-night canteen and went to his office to try to snatch some sleep. His eyes were slitted with exhaustion and his limbs lead-heavy, but his brain just wouldn’t stop whirring. At length he put on his overcoat and climbed the narrow staircase to the roof.
It was a fine night, without much moon. He could see stars, though, and the faint effervescent glow that the city gave off even under blackout. They would be working in armaments factories, steel mills, shipyards, in all the manufactories, small and large, that supplied materials for the war effort. He was no longer sure what his contribution to the war effort added up to, especially when he thought of the two stubborn, whey-faced men in the cell at Greenock prison, self-important provincial tycoons who had traded with the enemy.
‘Mr MacGregor, sir. Is that you?’
‘It is.’
‘Didn’t think you were on tonight, sir.’
‘I’m not. I’m just taking a breath of air. How is it? Quiet?’
‘Quiet as the grave, sir, quiet as the grave.’
Kenny leaned on the stone parapet, looking down at the river, a cigarette cupped in the palm of his hand. He had lost a son yesterday, or a daughter, a child he hadn’t known existed. If he had known, if he’d lived with the knowledge for a week or two he might have felt more than he did. He was upset by the fact that he could feel no grief for the child who had never been.
At ten past six he left St Andrew’s Street in a taxicab to pick up Rosie, who, he reckoned – rightly, as it happened – would blame him for the miscarriage just as she blamed him for everything else.
Wives at War Page 8
