Gifts of War (18 page)

“It wouldn’t be fair on you.” She shook her head so that her hair was flicked off her face. “It would mean that I was just using you because some other course of action had failed.”

“Maybe you see it that way, but I don’t mind.”

“I
do
mind.”

I could hear the train in the distance. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that—”

The train whistled.

“I’m saying that if I agree to your proposal… to your suggestion, I must do so not because I have failed at something, or been rejected by a board, but because I
want
to be with you.”

The train was almost at the platform. I never took my eyes off Sam’s face, but I could hear the squeal of the wheels, the hiss of escaping steam. The other passengers on the platform picked up their cases and bags.

“Go on.”

She made a face, as if I were as young as Will. “You are a good man, Hal. Very good. And you are good for me. I said last night that I don’t love you, and that’s true. For now it’s true anyway. But you’re … I like being with you, I can talk to you, I like touching you, feeling you’re there. Will’s calmer, too, when you’re around. You couldn’t know that.”

We were suddenly engulfed in steam. Everyone and everything else disappeared for a moment. I was reminded of what Sam had said about the mist on the canal, the night Will was conceived.

The steam cleared.

“I can’t marry you, Hal. That wouldn’t be right. Maybe… if I grow to love you … as I hope I can … then we’ll see. But we’ll have to pretend to be married. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my sisters but I’ve had enough of the way people look at me in the village, and the way they look at Will, calling him… names … as if
he’s
done anything wrong. At least in London we’ll be more anonymous, people won’t have to know… we can get on with living our lives.”

She bit her lip. “If you can accept that, if you don’t think I am using you, and if your offer still stands, I accept. But I’m not going to wait for that board to dismiss me. If your offer still stands, let’s act on it straightaway. We can make a start for London right away; today, I mean.”

She reached out and her hand touched mine. “I’ll tell the school I’m resigning. The board can go … they can …” She grinned again. “I really don’t care
what
they do.”

NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, WHEN I FOUND IT
, was gloomy beyond belief. I mean the street itself. It led from Trafalgar Square to the Thames but was lined with vast stone-faced office buildings. And I mean the ministry too, or that part of the ministry that was housed there. At first, I thought I had made a mistake, swapping the tranquil, provincial landscape of Stratford for a metropolitan warren that made the Ag seem like the latest word in modern architecture. My sister had misled me.

Things didn’t improve much when, eventually, and with some difficulty, I located Pritchard. It must have taken forty minutes and three different escorts (all in uniform, with medals, all missing an arm or a hand) before I was shown into his office, at the back of the building on the third floor, across a small, stone-flagged courtyard. His was a windowless room containing two desks, though the other appeared unmanned for the present. At any rate there were no papers on it, no pencils, no cup for tea or coffee, no ashtray, no photographs of husband or wife, children or dogs. It was as barren as no-man’s-land.

“There
you are,” he growled, scrambling to his feet. “No saluting here, by the way,” he added as I raised my arm. “We don’t go in for it in intelligence. Here, I have some papers for you to sign, confirming your appointment and your promotion. And the Official Secrets Act.”

He laid them on his desk and I signed without reading them.

“Have a seat there,” he said. “I’ll brief you and then take you through to where you’ll be working. Find a hotel all right?”

I nodded. “In Bayswater.”

“Good,” he said, lighting his pipe. He wasn’t interested in where I lived. That suited me. Sam was looking for a flat.

I, of course, had been pleased—more than pleased, delirious, overwhelmed—that she had agreed to head south with me, right there and then, at Middle Hill station. She and I had had a good first weekend in London, even though it had meant lugging Will around the sights—Buckingham Palace, Parliament, the British Museum. But we’d found a cheap and cheerful restaurant near the hotel, where they made a fuss over Will and where a large Saint Bernard kept an eye on the proceedings. Will liked dogs.

“Okay,” said Pritchard, once his pipe was safely alight. “For the first few weeks, at any rate, you’re going to be doing some fairly routine stuff. Reading newspapers mainly—German newspapers that our agents have picked up, either inside Germany itself, and have smuggled out, or in Switzerland or Norway, and have shipped back here.” He wiped his pipe with his handkerchief. “The papers are out of date, of course—maybe as much as three weeks out of date. But we’re not looking for obvious secrets; the Germans have censorship just as we do, so it’s unlikely anything obvious would slip through. No, I want you to read the papers in an oblique way, so to speak, to see whether the overall thrust of articles tells you anything about, say, German morale, general population movements, weaknesses or worries the population might have that we could use in propaganda. As days and weeks go by, you might notice changes in news coverage, and that might tell us something. It’s thin, I know, but it’s a useful way of starting, so we can double-check that you have the cast of mind we are looking for. And you’ll learn, of course, from others who’ve been at this for months already.”

He must have been able to see from my face that I was again beginning to think that I had made a mistake in leaving Stratford, for he
reached across his desk and picked up a folder, made of thin brown card and across which was stenciled the word
SECRET
. He opened it.

“See this?” he said, lowering his voice and laying his hand on the sheets inside. “This is a report—very short, just two pages—about three newspaper references, in the Hamburg press, to a new class of destroyer. The newspapers are not allowed to give any details, but in the interests of boosting morale the papers
were
allowed to explain that Hamburg workers had beaten the work schedule for the first two of this new class of ship.” He held up some more clippings. “Launch reports, a few weeks later. Nothing special, except the names of the ships. The
Albrecht
and the
Ewald—
mean anything to you?”

They did, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Weren’t they… weren’t they eighteenth-century figures, sir? Theologians? Scientists? Sorry.”

“No, no. You’re halfway there. Good. Wilhelm Albrecht and Heinrich Ewald were, according to this report”—he laid his hand back on the papers—“famous professors at Göttingen University in the nineteenth century, and they were part of a particular group—”

“The Göttingen Seven,” I breathed. “I remember now.”

“Correct,” said Pritchard. “Well done. Seven professors who objected to something the local prince had done and formed a protest movement.”

He sucked on his pipe.

“So, this paper, this secret paper, argues that this new class of destroyer will very likely comprise seven ships in all.” He closed the file. “It’s not much, and it may not be true, but it gives our people something on the ground to work with. It helps them with what to look for, suggests what questions they need to ask. Do you see?”

I nodded. I supposed that you were more likely to find seven needles in a haystack than one.

“Now we work in teams of four—each team with a leader, a major. I divide up the work between the teams, and the leaders subdivide it further. The teams tend to have specialities, and we have about ten of them. Some specialize in German history, some in politics, some in economics, others in industrial relations. The science team is a bit short at the moment—I’d like you to go there.”

It wasn’t a request, so I said, “Yes sir, fine by me.”

“Good. Now follow me, and I’ll introduce you.”

He led the way out of his office, along a narrow corridor lined with windows on one side, through two sets of double doors, down a flight of stairs that wrapped around a rickety lift, through two more sets of double doors, and into a room that resembled nothing so much as the school gymnasium where I had addressed the children back in Middle Hill. It was big enough to contain a badminton court with space left over, with high walls and huge round dish lights hanging on thick black cables. Bulky tables were laid out across the room, each one square and of such a size as to accommodate four people comfortably, one on each side. There was muted talk as we entered through the double doors, chatter that died as we descended the short flight of stairs. A pile of newspapers was stacked in the middle of each table.

Pritchard led the way through the layout of tables, toward one where I could see there was an empty chair.

“Sheila,” he said to a woman seated facing the rest of the room. “This is Henry Montgomery. I told you about him. Injured at the Front, convalesced in Evesham, has done a few weeks at Stratford. Short, I know, but his family was in publishing—”

“Yes, I remember what you told me,” said Sheila. She got up and came toward me. “Leave him with me. I’ll hold his hand.”

“Good.” Pritchard turned to me. “Sheila was a professor of German at Liverpool University. She’s not as ferocious as she looks.”

“Oh yes I am,” Sheila barked. “Don’t mislead the poor lamb.” She was smiling, but there was an edge to what she said. I was willing to bet she had been tough on her students.

“Come and see me on Friday morning,” said Pritchard to me. “Let me know how your first week has gone. I just have to talk to someone in one of the other teams. Sheila will do the honors with everyone else.”

He smiled at me, then at Sheila, and walked across to one of the other tables.

Sheila and I shook hands.

“Sheila Small is my full name,” she said. “This is Colin Jardine and over there is James Leith.”

We shook hands. Jardine was tall and lanky, Leith as wiry as a terrier and bald as a bullet.

“Colin worked for a shipping company in Hamburg,” confided Sheila. “James was a railway man. He knows all about compressors, the physics of boilers, hard stuff like that.”

“You?” said Jardine. Both Leith and he were Scots and he spoke with a soft lilt.

I brought them up to speed on my time in Germany and at the Front.

They didn’t fuss but I could tell they were appreciative. Though I was young, I had the right kind of experience.

Sheila pointed to the vacant chair. “Plonk yourself there, Henry.”

I nodded. “They call me Hal at home.”

“Hal it is.” She reached toward the center of the table, took a newspaper from the pile, and laid it in front of me. “Here’s how it works. Colonel Pritchard probably explained to you that we read newspapers, German, Swiss, Hungarian, Rumanian, Polish, and Czech newspapers, on the lookout for anything we might turn into intelligence—yes?”

I nodded.

“Right. We’ll soon see how good you are in that department. But there are two other things to bear in mind.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. “One, you have to read quickly. A lot of intelligence dates, so we try to read all papers within a month of publication—even if it takes them two weeks to get here. Clear?”

I nodded again.

“That means that we don’t read the papers in the order in which they arrive, but in the order in which they are published, always trying to keep as up to date as possible.” She put her eyeglasses back on. “Two, reading newspapers is the lowest of the low in intelligence terms. You’ll soon get bored stiff by the whole thing. The good news is that a carrot is dangled in front of everyone in this room. Those who prove adept at reading between the lines in the newspapers are promoted—and given their chance at reading enemy interrogation reports, even captured enemy intelligence documents. If you’re really good you are even sent abroad, back to the Front, to inspect fresh intelligence as and when it comes in.” She looked about the room. “Not everyone gets sent to the Front, of course. Some are too old, too fat, like their creature comforts too much. It can be dangerous.” She smiled a grim smile. “So someone your age may not find promotion so hard.”

She went back to her seat. “Anyway, you’re here on a month’s probation in the first instance. Any problems, don’t wait to ask. The hours are eight-thirty till six, lunch is twelve-thirty till one-fifteen, coffee and tea are brought round. No smoking in this room, men must wear ties, everyone must wear trousers, so we can all keep our minds on the job. If anyone makes a major breakthrough—as judged by Colonel Pritchard’s superiors—each table gets a bottle of whisky. At the moment we average one breakthrough a month, though it has been falling off lately. This department goes round the corner to the Wellington for a drink after work on Wednesdays. You will be expected to attend.”

I picked up the paper in front of me, a copy of the
Frankfurter All-gemeine Zeitung
, or
FAZ
, as I learned to call it, and the rest of the day passed rather more quickly than the days that followed.