Gibraltar Road (5 page)

When he didn’t say anything she knew—and, of course, she understood. Her hand stole under the table to squeeze his. For an instant their thighs touched; emotion showed momentarily in Shaw’s face. His quick thoughts had been running on bitterly behind the gay chatter from the other tables, the inconsequential rubbish, the laughter aroused by shared jokes, the lights, the hovering attentions of the waiters, the olive hand which deferentially plied the half-forgotten carafe.

Shaw took up his glass, lifted it, frowning as the girl watched him; squinted through the red glow as the lights shone behind the crystal, saw the pinky-red pool of its reflection thrown on to the cloth. Like blood, that glass . . . He thought of a man dying in a dark alleyway, of the sudden flick of steel behind a dirty bar in a Tunis back street, a body somersaulting over rocks outside Mers-el-Kebir, in North Africa, somersaulting into a ripple of silver moonlight on the Mediterranean. All these things and so many more he had seen and done; and all were there yet in his mind, a dark backcloth to his imaginative thoughts. But maybe Spain would be a piece of cake compared with the past. Couldn’t be worse. He ran his fingers slowly along the edge of a table-knife . . . the blade was thick, blunt. That surprised him. Ridiculous. In a way it had been a shock to find that knife so blunt to the touch—all knives weren’t blunt like that. But Spain, now . . . the full red glow on the tablecloth, the blood in the glass, the blood which was only wine—it could be symbolic merely of the blood on the sand—bullfights, bottles of wine, a maddened crowd sweating in the close-packed stone seats of the ring, the vicious dark-red spurt as the picadors thrust home with their lances, shielded legs dangling from the scraggy horses’ sides, straw-bloated against the gashing horns of the sacrificial victim. . . .

He gave a hard laugh, put down the glass. His fingers shook a little. Dear God, he thought, it’s really time I quit, the way my mind’s working.

The girl looked up quizzically, and he smiled across at her. He said, “I was just reminding myself that I’m a bit of a clot and oughtn’t to think too much.” He touched her hand, a look of rueful amusement coming into his eyes now. “Joe Soap—that’s me.”

“A nice Joe Soap.”

He remained silent. She watched his eyes; they were nice ones, she’d always thought. “Penny?” she asked softly.

“Oh . . . never mind. Not worth even that.” He passed it off with a quick pursing of his lips. But the thoughts wouldn’t go, not even with the girl there opposite him looking troubled. He thought: Yes, I’m Joe Soap and I’m Esmonde Shaw and the day after to-morrow I’ll still be Esmonde Shaw, but on the retired list and Admiralty Inspector of Armament Supply. And Heaven knows who else I’ll have to be, whatever the Old Man says, when I get into Spain and on Karina’s track. Karina, he thought, Karina! Will she have changed much in the intervening years? She was quite a few years younger than he was—she’d begun her career early.

There were many gaps in the story of Karina, and not even the F.O. or M.I.5 or the outfit had managed to fill them in satisfactorily. Shaw had a memory, a very vivid and enchanting one, of thick auburn hair, slightly slanting greenish eyes, and a supple figure which did all sorts of things to a man. Skin oddly like Debonnair’s—that lovely golden colouring, but without the tawniness of the girl herself. A small, oval face, full of life and danger-signals. That auburn hair longish, as well as thick. And there, with Karina’s body, the enchantment ended; for, of course, she was a bitch, and a clever bitch who’d pulled fast ones on both him and the Old Man, and Shaw himself realized quite well that, though he’d gone more than half-way towards falling for her in those days, the attraction was purely, passionately physical. And nothing more. He’d been a bit more impressionable then, maybe—younger, anyhow—and he hadn't met Debonnair. He had an idea, and it made him feel ashamed, that Karina really had been in love with him in her own fashion.

Suddenly he had a recurrence of that nasty feeling that he was going to muff this job, muff it right from the word go. The nagging pain in the pit of his stomach grew into a ball of fire, gave him an extra jab of hell as though in sympathy with his thoughts. . . .

“Darling,
do
come back to Martinez. I don’t know where you’ve been, but really . . Shaw looked up, the greenish slanting eyes of his imagination faded into big hazel ones smiling at him in concern. Debonnair said softly, eyes bright beneath the long lashes, “Tell me all about the ship you’re going out in. I know how you’ll love being back at sea again. And for Heaven’s sake stop worrying, Esmonde! Life isn’t as bad as all that.”

He lifted his shoulders, pursed up his mouth, shoved some table silver about in front of him. “There’s nothing much to tell you about the old
Cambridge
.” But, making an initial effort, he began to yam about the sea in general.

And when he began to talk about the sea like that, easily as he did after a time, the years fell away and it seemed to Debonnair, watching him fondly and not really listening to a word he was saying—only following the light in his eyes and wanting to smooth away the lines in a dear face—that he was like a boy again, a boy about to join his first ship. Or like a man serving a life sentence and forgetting the present in a talk with an old friend who brings back the past to him, the galling bitterness easing away temporarily. It almost made her say something rash. Or something darn wise . . . her heart told her that she didn’t know which she would have called it.

He knew she’d tumbled to it, of course, much later that night in the flatlet’s tiny sitting-room softly lit by the glow of the gas-fire, when they were very close to each other, and he knew it was useless to keep up the formal pretence any longer. Shaw’s arm was round her, his brown hand, strong and large but with long, sensitive fingers, caressed her hair. She leant against him, feeling the hardness of his body pressed into hers, her head pillowed on his chest beneath his chin, her face pale but rose-tinted in the fire glow. She said, half dreamily answering a plea of his, a plea that he’d made scores of times before, “It’s no use, darling; you see, I know what it’s like.” She frowned a little and glanced upward at him, lifting her head. “I’ve known so many people who—do your job, my pet. I’ve known their wives too. I’ve seen what it does to them.”

“Is it so much worse for a wife?” asked Shaw gently. “So much worse than—now?”

She nodded, her hair fanning against his nostrils, fresh and lightly scented. She looked at him curiously. She knew he’d had plenty of experience of women, but sometimes, she thought, you’d hardly know it. “But, darling, of course it is. Husbands and wives are much more to each other. . .

She bit her lip, hard. “There’d be children.”

“I’d hope so.”

“I know, Esmonde. But I wouldn’t like to have children whose father was always away, mysteriously, and who—who—”

“Might never come back. Might just—disappear—be shot as a spy. Very awkward to explain to them.”

“That was rather unkind, darling.”

He felt the stiffening of her body, the slight withdrawal. Gently he disengaged himself, stood up, fumbled for a cigarette. Debonnair sat silent, looking into the fire.

“You’re quite right, of course,” Shaw said, as the sudden match flickered over his face, strength outlined in shadow and light. He blew out smoke. “You see—I’d want children, lots and lots of them. And a home . . . just a little place in the country, maybe, somewhere right away from the kind of life I’ve had, somewhere we can dig in and stay, get to know people—ordinary normal
nice
people who sleep sound in their beds at night and don’t have to jump through the roof when the phone rings. People who can read about murders and intrigue and spy rings and
agents provocateurs
in the paper at breakfast and say, ‘Poor chaps, and it’s tough luck, but thank God I’m not one of them’—and then turn to the sports page, finish their kippers, shove on their bowlers, and catch the 8.15 to the office and ask the other fellows in the carriage how their tomatoes are coming along—”

Debonnair’s giggle broke into his oratory—which he was ready to admit had become a trifle impassioned. He stopped. Debonnair, the giggle stifling into a throaty little chuckle, said, “And just think how you’d
loathe
all that!”

He said vigorously, “But I wouldn’t, don’t you see? I mean it. God! How I’ve dreamed of it. Debbie, I’d love it.” Shaw wasn’t much of a one for continued high living; his pay and his expense account allowed him, if he wanted to and if he used discretion, to indulge in all London had to offer when he wasn’t on a job; the romance, the glitter of the West End was his, had been his for more years than he cared to remember, when he wanted to use them; and he didn’t stint what he spent on Debonnair whenever she would let him, so it was all hers too, for the asking. But they both knew that it wasn’t real, knew how spurious it all was, that it didn’t lead anywhere. Neither of them wanted that as a life. Yet a routine existence was the one point, other than the basic one of getting married while he was still with the outfit, on which they didn’t see eye to eye ... it might be aiming low in a way, Shaw thought, but it had a reality, a solidity. He had a mental image of a cottage, and as he saw that picture now—the old, half-timbered walls, the stone, the shady garden, possibly the thatch—he said again, “I’d love it.”

She said, “Yes, Esmonde, I know you think you would. And you would, too—for a month or so, perhaps. After that you’d start looking at me and thinking to yourself, Why, the old hag! If it wasn’t for
her
I’d be off again somewhere to-morrow. She’s the millstone—she’s the old woman in the corner by the fire who’s got me on to the 8.15 racket where it’s Mr This and Mr That and what did you see on the telly last night? And then the office, with a nice little desk and a chair and dozens of other people all half dead from the waist up. And I’d be responsible—me, and the dormitory of little cots upstairs! You ought to realize what it’d be like . . . that’s how you’d feel, Esmonde—wouldn’t you?” She was facing him now, breasts heaving a little, eyes almost angry. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I would not.”

“Yes, you would! Anyway, I’d always be feeling that about myself, and come to that I don’t think
I’m
cut out to be an 8.15 wife myself. I
do
want you to get out, but in a way I—I’m frightened.” She looked at him accusingly. “Esmonde, if you really feel that way—why
don’t
you get out, now?”

Shaw flushed. He said, “Darling, I’ve tried to. I’ve told the Old Man—not once, but often. Again to-day.”

“And he said no, so you’re still in it. Esmonde, you’re hopeless. You know damn’ well they wouldn’t keep you at it if you were firm. But that’s not the reason.” The girl came close to Shaw, took his hands in hers. “That’s not the reason,” she repeated, “and I’ll tell you what the reason is: you don’t
really
want to get out, not deep down, because you’re a Man! A damn’ stupid, pig-headed Man, and without being in the least conceited about it you do know you’re the best man they’ve got, and you feel you’ve got to do your duty for England and the Service and—and all the other things Men think are important. You’re just old-fashioned, and ought to have been pensioned off years and years ago.” Her voice broke a little as she went on, “Well, it’s not much comfort to you or me, but a lot of those people who sleep tight every night and go safely to the office and yammer about their delphiniums and cabbages ought to be bloody well glad there are men like you and—and—and—I know I’m difficult and bad for you and I seem to keep contradicting myself, but I love you, oh, God, I do—but I’m not going to marry you—not yet . . . oh,
Esmonde!
"

Shaw had crushed her tight in his arms, arms which emotion had made into steel-wire hawsers, his mouth seeking hers and fastening upon it urgently with force enough to squeeze the last breath from her body. . . .

Two mornings later Shaw drove in a taxi through the main gates of Portsmouth Dockyard off the train from Waterloo. The taxi halted briefly while the Admiralty constable checked Shaw’s right of entry, then drove on past the boatyard and turned left for the South Railway jetty, where the masts and upperworks of the
Cambridge
were visible, a thin white trail of steam twisting upward. And as the taxi disappeared a loafer who had been leaning against the high brick wall of the dockyard as Shaw arrived lit a cigarette and strolled casually away, across the road and along the Hard past Gieves, the naval tailors, and Saccone and Speed, where the Fleet bought its wardroom bar stocks, and the Keppel’s Head Hotel . . . the Navy’s landmarks of departure and return. The loafer wandered aimlessly along to the bridge over the mud-flats leading to the Harbour station, and then he strolled casually back toward a coffee-stall near the bus-stop. He had a cup of coffee, lit another cigarette. He waited. Then, a little later, as the cruiser slipped from the berth and made out to sea past the old grey walls of Fort Blockhouse, he walked off towards a telephone-box.

A cold wind knifed through Shaw’s body as he stood on deck off Ushant, comfortably dressed in an old leather-patched brown tweed jacket, eyes stinging with the salt, enjoying it, and breathing deeply as the cruiser headed south into the Bay of Biscay and the gathering storm. He appreciated the heave of a deck beneath his feet, the gale ruffling the greying brown hair into a curling mop sticky from the salt in the atmosphere, while white clouds streaked out across a clear blue sky above the tumbling, swooping water.

All last night Shaw had lain queasily, stretched out in his bunk as the
Cambridge
met the beginnings of the bad weather. Having no duties to perform, nothing to make him get on his feet, was a bad thing really. It had been nine hours of sheer misery, a misery of listening to the groans and creaks of the ship as she cut through the seas and took green water over her fo’c’sle-head, of listening to the wind’s shriek and the mounting rollers battering at the scuttle-glass beyond the deadlight’s steel, of watching his dressing-gown float out into the compartment from the hook behind the door, fall and then rise again until it stood almost at right angles, hovering there until the next slow drop back to remain unnaturally pressed against the woodwork. Bodily the bunk bore him upward, heaving hard into the under-side of his body and then dropping him with a swooping shudder which made the stomach pain worse. Nine hours, and then Shaw got up. He got up unsteadily, his face a pale green, hair rumpled and sweaty, and a foul taste in his mouth, his body cold with hunger and the fatigue which results from the constantly changing muscular efforts necessary to keep one’s body safely in a leaping bunk.