by Tim Jeal
Because Mike’s attack was the last, it had lacked surprise. As he went in, he came under heavy fire. But the fact that there had been only a short burst of shooting after he fired his torpedoes had been considered a good sign, since it seemed to indicate that he had got away fast, leaving the German gunners with nothing to shoot at.
Mike had been called up by radio but had not answered. This had been no surprise to Tony. Aerials were often shot away in action and sets damaged. There’d been light fog over the sea when they’d reached the Dutch coast, and, since then, it had grown progressively worse. So, all they could do was stop their engines several miles away and listen. If Mike was in trouble, his engines should have remained audible, or at least his guns. But they could hear nothing, except the convoy chugging away to the north on its old course. Later, Tony and the others had gone back to the scene of the action but hadn’t been able to make out anything in the thickening mist.
They had hoped Mike would be back at the quay when they returned there shortly before dawn, but his berth was empty. Engine failure seemed the likeliest explanation, or so they’d figured. But Mike wasn’t back by noon, or even by six. Had he hit a mine on his way home and sunk? It was possible. Two MGB flotillas made a joint sweep with a similar number of MTBs, but nothing was spotted. Nor was it, ever. Tony suggested to Andrea that perhaps Mike’s boat had been hit by one unlucky shell and blown apart. Indeed, the explosion they had heard might not have come from the destroyer at all.
Andrea had asked Tony where Mike’s last attack had taken place. A few miles out to sea from the Dutch port of Haarlem, had been his reply. So what was the name of the closest place on the English coast? He’d thought for a while. Aldeburgh, Leiston, Thorpeness. Somewhere in that part of Suffolk.
Two days later, since Peter had the car and Andrea had not wanted to ask if she could borrow it, she made the journey the hard way. She changed at Ipswich for Saxmundham. An obese and sweating soldier sat opposite her in the slow local train, reading Blighty and Men Only all the way, tin helmet and rifle beside him. She took a country bus to Leiston, and trudged the final mile on foot with her few wilting roses. All along the pebbly beach, concrete tank defences had been set up and barbed wire strung out, making her fear she would come upon a warning sign for mines. But she didn’t, and, finally, found a way through the wire. The beach sloped down steeply to water that was brownish grey and streaked with froth.
A dull roar came from out to sea, merging with the closer rattle of stones and the thump of waves. It was a warm August afternoon but the breeze was cool. She sat down for a while and listened to the sea mumbling to itself – on and on, forever and ever, amen. She thought it the most desolate sound in the world. Poor handsome Mike. Her head bowed, she tossed her roses into the waves.
CHAPTER 25
Although the holidays were nearly over, Leo didn’t seem as bothered as usual by the prospect of leaving home. Andrea knew that this was mainly because she and Peter had decided that, when this next term ended, his boarding days would be over. After the Christmas holidays, he would be staying on in Oxford and going to a new school, St Edward’s, a short cycle ride from home.
Apart from complaining about a dull week spent with Peter’s parents near Bath, Leo had been happy enough in Oxford, looking up old friends, and reading No Orchids for Miss Blandish, though Andrea had done her best to dissuade him, since it was reputed to contain descriptions of a rape and half a dozen murders.
‘It’s just cops and robbers,’ he’d grumbled.
So Andrea had given in, thankful her relations with him were improving. This, she knew, was largely because she had hinted that his father would soon be coming home. But she had tried hard in other ways – for instance, coming to the Parks to witness the maiden flight of his model Beaufighter. Tennis had also become a bond between them, since they played two or three times a week; and, though Leo could not have forgotten her partnering Mike in Elspeth’s tournament, he never spoke of it.
Returning to Park Town from the courts, after what would be the last game of the holidays, Andrea congratulated Leo on improving his service. Glancing at her son walking beside her, Andrea was more than ever aware of recent physical changes: the fuzz of hair above his upper lip, the more muscular legs, broader shoulders. During the holidays, Leo’s voice had started to alter, fluctuating from alto to something indeterminately lower. Yet none of these alterations seemed threatening to her, as they would have done last year. Since that happy era, Leo had been lost to her, so completely it had seemed, that the partial return, taking place right now, was more than she could have hoped for even a month ago. Certainly the reconciliation was helping her get through the pain of losing Mike.
What helped most of all was her knowledge that Peter, her extraordinary husband, had told Mike he could go on seeing her, in effect giving his permission. In a bizarre fashion, Mike had become Peter’s gift to her. Mike’s death wasn’t less tragic because of that, but she knew it would have been harder for her to bear if he had died six months earlier.
As mother and son walked into the dappled shadows cast by the trees in Park Town’s central oval, Andrea sensed that the time had come to tell Leo that his father would soon be returning home. What forbearance they would have to show one another! Peter would have to admit that his working hours had been absurd, and his rearrangement of all their lives to suit his own needs, unspeakably selfish – just as she would have to confess that, by allowing herself to start an affair with a physically active younger man, she had been cruel, not only to Peter with his handicap, but to Leo, given his love for his father. She should never have been stupidly careless – revealing her guilt to Justin in a way that had caused Leo so much pain.
Peter, she had been glad to see, had lost weight in recent weeks – either because of the strains of his job or because of her affair – but, whatever the cause, he looked less jowly, and would not, she imagined, be so rotundly cumbersome in bed.
As she opened the hall door gripping the box of tennis balls and her racquet under one arm, Andrea was already imagining Leo’s happiness when she told him the good news about his father. The afternoon post lay scattered at her feet. She bent down to pick up these letters, her bare knees brushing the bristles of the mat. One envelope was different, the jagged German script standing out: Kriegsgefangenenpost. The British Censor’s crown with the word PASSED under it had been stamped near the bottom. Andrea’s name and address were to the right of the envelope, the sender’s to the left:
Absender:
Vor- und Zuname:
Lieut. Comm. Michael J. Harrington RNVR
The single flight of stairs up to the maisonette seemed to sway under her, as words leapt out from the envelope. Gebuhrenfrei! A German joke – delivered free! And what would Mike say? And what would she want him to say?
‘Hurry up, mum,’ complained Leo, treading on her heels. ‘Any letters for me?’
‘Sorry, sweetheart.’
In the bathroom, she sat on the old-fashioned wooden seat and opened the envelope along gummed strip that the censor had used to reseal it. Her heart was hammering.
Kriegsgefangenenlager Datum: 24.08.41
Marlag VIIB
My darling,
If you haven’t already heard that I’m a living, breathing POW, and not a feast for the fishes, I hope you’re sitting down! But it’s the nicest kind of shock, I trust. Dearest, I’ve been so ridiculously lucky I really ought to start believing in something grander than common or garden chance to explain my resurrection. Only two of us were rescued after we blew up, though eight were still just about alive after the explosion. All I suffered was a cracked rib and a broken thumb.
Strange, isn’t it, how I had premonitions the whole time in the West Country. Yet, recently, I’d begun to think I could go on forever. That’s why I didn’t get around to telling you lots of things, including how damned glad I am I never stuck to my earlier decision to stop seeing you. Those snatched meetings were wrong for us. But a c
omplete break would have been even worse. Unthinkable, in fact. We’re neither of us made for sharing, my love. It’s all or nothing for the likes of you and me. In life one doesn’t get what one wants most and the second best thing.
We had a bad time in the water before the E-boat found us. Such brave efforts to save the wounded men. But they all failed. Waiting for my turn to meet the man with the scythe, I felt everything you might expect: rage, fear, despair, but something unexpected, too – a longing for things to be better in the world, out of simple fairness. In a funny kind of way, I felt proud that this was how it would end, after what we’d been through already. I’d just about accepted that I wouldn’t live to see the sun rise, when the E-boat showed up.
Six weeks on and I’m still euphoric in this drab place. We are taken to exercise in a clearing, deep in dark Teutonic woods straight out of the Brothers Grimm. A few leaves are already turning, and early this morning there was a mist among the trees that felt autumnal and made my heart ache for you. Because I risked everything (though I hardly chose to) my life has become incredibly valuable. I can’t go back to the kind of marriage where the superficialities of social existence pass for life itself. Not even the attempt to be a decent father can justify going on paying the price I had to. I have to be with you now, my darling.
We have no curtains in our huts here; and in the evening, when our low voltage lights are on, I stare at the dark window panes. A pale image of myself peers back from the blue void outside. He sees me in captivity, and I see him in the future, in the dark. For what will I return to when I leave this place? What if in a few years you’ve grown happy without me?
Perhaps it would be better, kinder, to tell me now that I must not hope. Please write and tell me in the plainest words if that is the case. I must know, my love. You have lived my death; and now that I am alive again, am I still dead to you, or do I live and breathe?
Correspondence is restricted. I’m allowed to send three letters per month and a few more postcards. So will you please write to Justin with my news? Tell him I think of him, and will write next month. I love you, darling. And dream of you.
Mike
Several loud knocks on the bathroom door made Andrea jump.
‘Hey, mum, it’s dad. On the telephone.’
‘Hang on a moment.’
Andrea rose and stood undecided. She imagined the letter in pieces, swirling in the lavatory pan, as she pulled the chain. Instead, she thrust it into her tennis blouse.
In the sitting room, Leo stood holding the receiver with his palm clamped over it.
‘Tell dad when he can come back. Go on mum. Please!’
So Andrea told Peter that Friday would be good for her, and heard him catch his breath. In fact, he was silent for so long before agreeing to come home that she guessed he was crying with happiness. And he deserved to be happy, having been so generous to her. As for Mike – he might be shot escaping, or he might remain in the German forest for as many years as the war lasted. But by then Leo would be older, and would care less. So what would it matter if she made everyone happy now, even if later she had to disillusion one or more of them? The earliest months of his captivity would be the worst ones for Mike, and when he most needed her help.
Andrea thought of her first night with her lover, his flung-back hair, his deep-set eyes, his slenderness. How had she allowed her one great love to grow manageable? Maybe it would have happened anyway, even if Leo had never gone to sea. Romance always ended up as something else – becoming tragic, or mundane, or just stopping, and then being nothing at all. So she’d done better than that anyway.
‘What did dad say?’ cried Leo, the moment she had replaced the receiver on its cradle.
‘Not a lot. You know dad.’
‘He must have been happy.’
‘He was, darling. Very happy.’
Later, playing a Chopin Nocturne, while Leo sprawled on the sofa, she imagined her reply to Mike. ‘My lover – Nothing has ever made me happier than receiving your beautiful and moving letter …’ And would it just be generous of her? Not really. By writing, she could still be that wonderful woman she had been in the spring, though leading another life entirely, day by day.
She stopped playing, and acknowledged Leo’s brief but almost enthusiastic applause.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Tim Jeal, 2000
Preface to the 2013 Edition © Tim Jeal, 2013
The right of Tim Jeal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30400–4
