The Sons of Adam (72 page)

‘Welcome to Britain, sir. This your first time over?’

Tom didn’t even answer that. The car whisked him to a railway station and left him there with his bags. It was all so familiar. The Victorian railway architecture. The big station clock. The tiny rituals of politeness, meticulously observed. The smell of hot tea coming from the station waiting room.

It was all so familiar – but also different. For a while Tom couldn’t understand it, but then he could. It was to do with class. It wasn’t as though everything had changed, far from it. But the country he’d returned to was no longer the one he’d left. With the entire country at war, who was the gentleman and who the working man? With the entire country governed by ration-book and sacrifice, who was the rich man and who was the poor?

For a while, Tom waited on the station platform overwhelmed equally by the new and the old. He waited a while, then couldn’t stand it.

He left his bags and ran from the station. Opposite him, there stood the inevitable Station Hotel. He ran inside.

‘I have a call to make to the United States. It’s extremely urgent.’

He dropped papers on the desk, indicating his seniority. The girl on the desk glanced at them and took Tom to a horrible little booth, overheated, red plush, airless. There was a phone there and a tiny pad of paper. He called the operator and asked for a connection. For forty-four minutes, he waited. And waited. Time slid by and his train wouldn’t wait. When there was just three minutes to go, he gave up. He had stood up to go, when the phone rang. He snatched at it.

‘I have your line for you now,’ said the operator.

Then a ringing tone.

Far away in Norgaard House a maid picked up the phone. Tom asked her to get Rebecca, to run, to fetch her as quick as possible. He could hear the girl’s footsteps running across the wooden floor as she ran for her mistress. Tom looked at his watch. Two minutes. One and a half. Then more steps, and: ‘Tom?’

‘Becca, my God, I can’t stand it here –’

‘But you can only just have arrived. Why don’t –’

‘Can you join me? As soon as possible? My office can arrange transport.’

‘Not very easily. I’m busy here. Perhaps when things at the Foundation quieten down in July.’

‘Christ, I’d better not still be here in July. Can’t you come over right away?’

There was a pause. The lines were unreliable, but this break wasn’t to do with the lines. ‘Is it being in England? Is it meeting Alan Montague?’

‘I just need to see you.’

There was another pause, longer this time. ‘No, dearest Tomek, you need to do this by yourself … Call me from London.’

‘Please, Becca, I –’

‘Call me from London, Tomek. Good luck.’

It was 4 June 1944.

The following day, 5 June, Tom Calloway-Creeley would meet his one-time twin, Alan Montague, for the first time in nearly thirty years. And the day after that, in the very first hours of 6 June, an invasion fleet would begin the landings in Normandy, which would determine the fate of the war.

Tom sat in an empty first-class compartment and watched the countryside slide past. Time and distance were narrowing now. In a matter of hours, he and Alan would meet again. Tom had no idea what he would say, no idea what he would feel.

Dusk, 5 June 1944.

The big car rolled onwards. The trees moaned in the wind and the car’s feeble lights turned little shadows into great ones. Alan was driving and Lottie sat beside him in the passenger seat. The American Petroleum Administration had its British office in a small village a few miles outside Windsor. They were driving there now: driving to meet Tom.

‘How do you feel?’ asked Lottie.

Alan shook his head. ‘Great God! I have no idea at all.’

Lottie smiled. ‘Well, do you feel more inclined to kill him or more inclined to embrace him?’

Alan shook his head again. ‘No idea. Though I don’t suppose I’ll embrace him … not unless …’

Lottie’s tone sharpened an inch or two. ‘Not unless he apologises first? And do you just think it’s possible he’s saying the same?’

‘I don’t in all honesty care.’

Lottie didn’t answer, just pursed her lips and looked crossly out of the window. She knew everything, of course. She knew about her husband’s lunatic war against Tom. She had argued against it, then given up. Like Rebecca in Texas, she had urged the two men to meet, but without success.

Alan drove on in silence. A burst tyre earlier in the drive had caused them to lose several hours, and the twilight drive had been slow and arduous. Alan was tense and drove too fast. A convoy of army trucks rumbled by, heading south. It was one of the few visible signs of the momentous events that would be taking place in Normandy at dawn tomorrow.

‘There are a lot of trucks on the road,’ said Lottie.

‘There’s a big operation being launched tomorrow,’ said Alan, who had carefully avoided the topic before.

‘The invasion?’

Alan nodded.

‘Of France, I suppose?’

Alan nodded again. Lottie’s question hadn’t been foolish. The Allied plan had been shrouded in the very highest secrecy from the start. Only a few people in Britain knew. Alan had been one of them. Lottie had not.

She took a deep breath. ‘Will it … ? I suppose it will … ?’

Alan snatched a glance sideways before looking back at the road. ‘Be successful? Yes, probably. Might it go wrong? Yes, possibly. Either way, we’re about to find out.’

He didn’t mention
PLUTO
, but, of course, the thought was never far from his mind.

The conversation fell silent. Lottie decided to get some rest and curled up in the back under a travelling blanket.

Just before the outbreak of war, Alan had bought himself a wine-red Bentley. The car was a pleasure to drive and its huge motor purred evenly under the bonnet. The miles dropped away. But he found it hard to concentrate. A couple of times, he’d taken a bend badly. A couple of times, he’d snatched at the wheel and recovered in time. Each time he’d done so, he glanced in the mirror to see if he’d woken Lottie. Each time, he found her wide blue eyes open and turned on him. He murmured an apology for carelessness and let her sink back into sleep.

They drew closer to Windsor. He checked the directions and began to head down a steep slope into the little valley below.

Then it happened.

‘Watch out!’ Lottie screamed from the back.

There was a huge shape, reddish-grey in the headlights. Alan slammed on a brake and swerved. The shape was a deer that bounded away, startled, into the undergrowth.

‘Careful,’ said Lottie, ‘careful!’

Alan, in his anxiety, was annoyed with her for making a meal of what was trivial. He stepped on the accelerator, guiding the big car back into the centre of the road. There was a strange sound, like a sort of metallic sigh. Just for a moment, then nothing.

Then something else appeared in the lamplight. A tyre, bounding black and silver down the steepening hill. It was their tyre. It bolted downhill, bounced high a couple of times, then vanished.

‘Darling!’

Lottie’s voice was high-pitched and desperately strained.

Alan tried touching the brakes, but as soon as he did so the big car threatened to dive out of control. He decided to take the hill as well as he could and lose speed naturally on the flat.

‘Hold tight!’ he said.

He flashed the car’s headlights full on, so the road was brilliantly lit. The hill was dangerously steep. With clenched mouth, Alan watched as the gleaming tarmac rode up at him. He took one corner. Then another. The big car was leaping forwards faster and faster. He tried touching the brake again.

A mistake.

Control of the car was snatched out of his hands. There was a moment of terrifying freedom. In the sudden blare of headlights, a huge tree appeared, shining white. The tree and the car leaped towards each other.

There was a colossal smash.

Oddly enough to those who had known him earlier in his life, Tom had gained a reputation for coolness and calm among his Washington colleagues. Not tonight.

Every gust of wind that came through the trees sounded like the arrival of a car. Against all blackout regulations, Tom had had big lights put on in the drive. Five times Tom had checked that the telephone lines were working. He paced and paced. He was a frenzy of nerves.

By ten o’clock, it was solidly dark. Tom sent his aides and the British house staff back to their lodgings, off to bed. He was the only person left in the house: a former rectory that had been converted into offices. He would have given anything in the world to be away from England, away from Alan.

He went down into the kitchen, looking for something warm to drink. There was no coffee, only tea. The kitchen was supplied with an old-fashioned range, black kettles, and a tap that ran explosively or not at all. The whole place seemed exactly like the Whitcombe House of forty years earlier. Even the draughty whistle in the chimney struck the same notes. Tom half expected to turn and find Mrs White, the old cook, making pastries in a corner. He shook coal into the range, filled the kettle, found tea leaves. The big stove began to warm. The kettle slowly rose above room temperature.

Tom waited impatiently for the kettle, burned his finger on the range, longed for home. He wondered what Rebecca was doing right this moment. He wondered how Mitch was doing on the rigs. The kettle began to sing.

Tom reached to lift it from the stove, but, as he reached, all of a sudden, there was a bang at the door, the jiggle of a latch, a blast of cool air. A woman ran in, as though blown by the wind.

‘Please … my husband … please help, there’s been the most terrible accident … He’s on the road back there … I saw your lights … Thank God you’re up.’

Lottie had no idea whose house she had entered.

She had been asleep in the back of the car and had no idea where the crash had happened. But one thing was clear: by sheer good fortune, she had come to beg help from a man superbly equipped to give it. Despite Lottie’s shocked and shaken state, the strong American quickly and accurately found out from her what had happened. Instantly, he was on the phone, giving orders, sending for doctors, cutting equipment, fire wardens, an ambulance.

‘Thank you,’ said Lottie. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

He ignored her. Instead, he was bundling her into the Austin parked outside, forcing her to remember accurately where the accident had taken place. The Austin was old and small; but the American drove it like a racing machine. The drive had only lasted a minute or so, when the road turned. The Austin’s headlamps illuminated the tree, the Bentley, and the skid-marks of disaster.

It was immediately apparent that the driver inside must surely be dead. The engine had shunted backwards into the front compartment of the car. All around, there was broken glass and twisted metal. Lottie, who was seeing the crash lit up for the first time, let out a gasp.

‘Oh!’ she cried. It was a wail more than a word.

As she spoke, there was a flicker of fire from inside the car engine. ‘The engine!’ cried Lottie. ‘It’s on fire! Get him out!’

The American hesitated.

Anybody would have done. The man inside was probably dead. The car was probably about to turn into an inferno. Lottie, desperate to help her husband, used the only card left to play.