Convoy (8 page)

For someone who didn’t ‘pry’, Yorke thought to himself, the physiotherapist was well informed about the letters. All the other patients were due to have exercises, so presumably they too would get their mail afterwards, like giving a horse a sugar lump after a difficult jump.

‘And your name’s in the newspaper,’ she said. ‘In the list of people who’ve been given medals.’

‘Oh, they’ve Gazetted it at last.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, ‘but don’t you want to see the paper and find out what you’ve got?’

‘I know already.’

She was clearly disappointed. ‘I’d have thought they’d keep it secret until they put it in the paper; a sort of surprise.’

There was no point in explaining that for security reasons the names of people getting awards were often not Gazetted until months after the awards were made: German intelligence officers could not then work out from the officers and men receiving awards the activities of individual ships. Sometimes, when it was known that a particular ship had been involved in a battle, the names were listed together; but when the Admiralty wanted to keep secret a particular loss, the names were scattered.

‘What did you get it for – the DSO?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Being a good boy. I made everyone eat up his porridge. The Admiralty are very keen on porridge. Gives your stomach a warm lining on a cold day.’

‘My boyfriend is serving in the Tropics.’

‘The porridge packet says that in the Tropics it’s for external use only.’

‘I’ll write and tell him. Might help keep his privates cool.’

Yorke laughed. ‘Yes, a sovereign remedy for avoiding hot privates.’

‘Don’t be vulgar, Mr Yorke,’ she said severely. ‘My boy-friend’s a sergeant; he worries about his men. They’re privates. It’s infantry, you see.’

The exercises changed and his arm ached; the whole forearm felt as if it had been pummelled with a mallet. ‘The bandages are chafing.’

‘They’re bound to, but the skin’s too soft to exercise without them; your hand would blister.’

If only Clare was the physiotherapist. No, that was not fair on either woman: Clare would not be tough enough, and this woman certainly knew her job. More important, she knew how to make her patients do the exercises without bullying them.

‘There!’ she said, putting the various exercise devices back on the trolley, ‘That’s it for this morning. I’ll be back this afternoon. And here are your letters. And the paper with your name in it. They seem to know all about you. Quite a story, eh? Didn’t know you came from these parts.’

He knew which letter he would open last, because he wanted to savour it, but which first? He tore open the Admiralty letter. Pale blueish-grey paper; the usual formal introductory sentence. Then the orders: as soon as he was discharged from the hospital as being fit for active service he was to report to the Admiralty, and in the meantime indicate when that was likely to be. There was a room number and a four-letter initial, ASIU. What department was that? It must be new; the usual ones were familiar enough – DNI for the Director (or Department) of Naval Intelligence, DOD for Operations Division, and so on. This must be some new and crackpot department which allowed the Second Sea Lord (who dealt with appointments) to find quiet jobs for deserving wrecks like Lieutenant Edward Yorke, DSO, RN – providing he had two arms that functioned. If his left arm seized up then he would be invalided with a pension and one of the large silver lapel badges called ‘The King’s Badge for Loyal Service’ (presumably intended to stop old ladies giving you white feathers) and turned out to graze in civilian clothes with the assurance that the King and his various helpers could now beat Hitler without Lieutenant Yorke’s one-armed assistance.

There was a great future for a one-armed man of twenty-five who had been trained only as a naval officer, especially one who had specialized in navigation, so that a dagger sign followed his name in the Navy List. The world was waiting with open arms for unemployed dagger navigators; they were needed to help old ladies drive their cars through the centre of London, making the best use of the petrol ration.

The letter from his mother was, as usual, a calm note which ignored the existence of Hitler, the Luftwaffe, rationing or bombing, and which was a measure of her personality since she was living in the town house in Palace Street, only a few hundred yards from Victoria Station. She described how she had been able to find some ‘artificial boarding’ to cover up a few broken windows – no mention that the glass was shattered by the blast of bombs – and the loose tiles had been replaced. She was more concerned lest she had said the wrong thing to newspaper reporters who had called to find out details about him. ‘The fact was,’ she wrote, ‘that they seemed to know a great deal more of the interesting part of your life than I did; I was able to tell them only that over the years the men in the family had tended to go to sea. There was an amusing moment when we found out that one of the reporters, who was a bit tipsy, thought I said “tended to go to seed”, but a colleague of his, a nice young man who had lost a leg in the Western Desert (trod on a landmine, I think he said), seemed to watch out for that sort of thing.’

Then, with her usual forthrightness, she commented on his reference to Clare. ‘I was interested to read about your beautiful young widow – you seem to prefer small women. But beware of widows in general. The advantage is that they have few illusions left about men; they have learned all the lessons and if they fall in love with you it is likely to be both genuine and without any illusions. The disadvantage is that if they loved their first husbands, then the new husband is competing with a ghost and will always lose. He might in fact be a much more satisfactory husband, but he will never be certain because he’ll never believe his wife’s assurances. If you love her,’ his mother wrote, ‘then trust her and dismiss from your mind that there was ever a predecessor. You wouldn’t be jealous of an earlier lover – in this modern age most young women have had one – and a brief marriage differs from a brief affair only in the legal aspect.’

Yorke folded the letter and put it on his locker with the manilla envelope from the Admiralty. Clare, whether as Miss Exton or Mrs Brown, was welcome at Palace Street. He wished his father had still been alive to meet her; but on the other hand the last few months of the war would have broken his heart: with Winston Churchill he had tried in the House of Commons to warn the nation against Hitler and persuade it to rearm; but like Churchill he had been howled down. Peace had been the fashion, the Labour Party was against rearmament and the Conservatives against taxation, and the majority of the people had been prepared to pay any price as long as it cost nothing. Well, the bill was now being presented – not just their sons’ lives but, in the bombed cities, their own as well.

The third letter…the writing small, educated, by a woman with a strong personality who had studied Greek. She had written it the second night after telling him about her husband.

‘I am sitting here at the desk in the middle of the ward looking at you sleeping. The lamp is so shielded that you are just a shadowy figure. The four other patients are snoring but you aren’t. You don’t snore. I don’t know if I do. I wonder if you are dreaming. Dreaming of your loved one is, I believe, a myth; I’m told (by a doctor specializing in psychology) that however much two people are in love, they usually dream of other people, and if the dreams are erotic, then they are almost never of the ones they love. Are you having an erotic dream at this moment? Who is the lucky girl? Who has flown into your sleeping thoughts and roused you in a way I cannot because I am Nurse Exton, on night duty in Ward BI? I hate her; I am jealous; I want to walk over and shake you until you wake up, so that she has to go away, because I know she exists only while you sleep and no matter what you might try to do to keep her, she will vanish the moment you wake.’

He continued reading the letter slowly, picturing her at the desk – which was now empty except for the lamp with the green shade which looked like one of the first electric lights ever made – and thinking of her watching him as he slept.

‘You were jealous of the memories you thought I had of my previous (unhappy) existence, but I wonder if you realise how many
happy
new memories I have already even though Lieutenant Yorke and Miss Exton have known each other such a short time? Just think of yesterday – the look of shock, amazement and then relief on your face when I told you how it had been: I knew then that although you might have a girl in every port, I am the important one. And then finding the German leaflets. How right you are, about the Germans not bothering to drop them if they were really winning. Anyway, I have put one of them among my few treasures, to look at again when I am an old lady.

‘Then, already surprised how well you knew the countryside here, I suddenly realized the coincidence of your name and the name of the big house we can see in the distance, so I cycled over there. Yes, the old gardener finally broke down under fierce interrogation by Nurse Exton, even though he felt loyalty to the family meant he should say nothing about anything to anyone.

‘So that was your home until the war began. How your mother must have hated giving it up “for the duration”. And you grew up there. I still can’t picture you as a small boy. Did you collect birds’ eggs and have a catapult? Did you get measles and have to stay in bed and eat jelly and blancmange? And, my darling Ned, all those paintings that are boarded up in various rooms (the gardener let me see the house) – are they portraits of your forebears or dreary landscapes, where the varnish has darkened so much that high noon over the Weald of Kent now looks like midnight in Limbo? Don’t tell me, and I liked the mystery as I walked through what I suppose was the dining room and saw those rectangles of bare wood, the size of picture frames. I realize they must protect paintings on the actual wall, or set into the plaster. Perhaps some long-dead Yorke commissioned Rubens to cover the walls with chubby pink and naked cherubs.

‘How I wish I could have shared those early years there with you. And yet had I done so they would not seem so intriguing now. The fun is
speculating
about the boy Ned;
knowing
might be disappointing! It is better to imagine rather than to see a small boy with measles sitting up in bed counting his birds’ eggs and repairing his catapult and then feeling sick because he’s eaten too much blancmange.’

Walking round the south side of Trafalgar Square with the clouds streaming in low from the west, a scud warning of rain, he felt almost a stranger in London as he headed for Admiralty Arch. Six weeks at Willesborough, with almost daily walks along the lanes skirting the rolling fields at the foot of the Downs, no acute pain to keep him awake at night, and Clare within a few yards every day, had pushed the war into the far distance; a memory no stronger than a film seen last year. Ironic, come to think of it, because but for the war Clare would never have been at Willesborough and he would never have met her; nor, for that matter, would his left forearm and hand look like a pink walnut. This damned cold and damp weather brought a sharp-yet-dull pain to the muscles and was as good as a barometer; no wonder old folk can forecast the weather by sciatic twinges.

The last time he had walked across the top of Whitehall and under Admiralty Arch into the Mall – the other way, rather, because they were all going to Charing Cross Station to catch the Dover train – had been with Clifton and Jeffries, and both of them had been killed within a few weeks. Clifton was lost in a corvette; Jeffries had been commanding his own flotilla of MTBs out of Felixstowe but was late back from one night patrol when several German fighters caught him after dawn somewhere off Smith’s Knoll. Although his riddled boat managed to get back without her petrol tanks exploding, she was, they said, like a seagoing hearse.

Salute, salute, salute…rarely ten paces without a salute. The Poles seemed most frequent and were a smart crowd; even the privates had taken their battledress jackets to decent tailors for a good fit. All the American soldiers looked like officers and even the lowliest private, obviously freshly arrived in Britain, the hayseed still in his crew-cut hair, seemed to have two or three medal ribbons, although from what he had heard they received medals where the British would have been lucky to get an arm badge – marksman, and so on; even a medal for being in Britain, which they considered a war zone. Judging from the sandbagged doorways, signs pointing towards air-raid shelters, boarded-up windows and bombed buildings, perhaps they were right.

Even the pigeons had a military gait, perhaps more Nazi than Allied; strutting, almost goose-stepping, and always beady-eyed, like Guards drill sergeants or Navy gunnery instructors. All that each one lacked was a respirator slung over the shoulder; a standard Service-issue one but with stiff cardboard or plywood inside, front and back, to make the bag square, in the best Guards style. Guards? Put a telescope under a wing and each pigeon was a strutting midshipman or flag lieutenant on the quarterdeck as the admiral loomed in sight. They were blasé about bangs, too; a taxi backfiring a few yards from one group of a dozen put up only a single bird which fluttered a yard or so and then, Yorke was sure, looked ashamed as it strutted back.

Under Admiralty Arch, with the ammonia whiff of the pigeons who lived up there, and then he could see Buckingham Palace sitting at the far end of the Mall, four-square and reassuring, the double row of trees stark now, stripped of leaves for the winter. The Palace was in fact the symbol of yet another family who weren’t moving out because of the Ted bombers. And there, just inside the Arch and beyond the bronze statue of Captain Cook, was the ‘Gingerbread’, officially the Citadel, the huge brown concrete box, nearly new and housing, many feet below ground, the operational heart of the Royal Navy. Down there officers juggled with markers and charts and sent fleets to sea or tracked Ted U-boats as they converged on some convoy unlucky enough to have been spotted by Focke-Wulf Condors, or seen by a single U-boat which raised the alarm…