Eye of the Needle(27)
IN THE KITCHEN one evening Lucy said to David, “I’d like Mother to stay another two weeks, if she will.” Mother was upstairs putting Jo to bed, telling him a story.
“Isn’t a fortnight long enough for you to dissect my personality?” David said.
“Don’t be silly, David.”
He wheeled himself over to her chair. “Are you telling me you don’t talk about me?”
“Of course we talk about you—you’re my husband.”
“What do you say to her?”
“Why are you so worried?” Lucy said, not without malice. “What are you so ashamed of?”
“Damn you, I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. No one wants his personal life talked about by a pair of gossiping women—”
“We don’t gossip about you.”
“What do you say?”
“Aren’t you touchy!”
“Answer my question.”
“I say I want to leave you, and she tries to talk me out of it.”
He spun around and wheeled away. “Tell her not to bother for my sake.”
She called, “Do you mean that?”
He stopped. “I don’t need anybody, do you understand? I can manage alone.”
“And what about me?” she said quietly. “Perhaps I need somebody.”
“What for?”
“To love me.”
Mother came in, and sensed the atmosphere. “He’s fast asleep,” she said. “Dropped off before Cinderella got to the ball. I think I’ll pack a few things, not to leave it all until tomorrow.” She went out again.
“Do you think it will ever change, David?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Will we ever be…the way we were, before the wedding?”
“My legs won’t grow back, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, God, don’t you know that doesn’t bother me? I just want to be loved.”
David shrugged. “That’s your problem.” He went out before she started to cry.
MOTHER DID NOT STAY the second fortnight. Lucy walked with her down the jetty the next day. It was raining hard, and they both wore mackintoshes. They stood in silence waiting for the boat, watching the rain pit the sea with tiny craters. Mother held Jo in her arms.
“Things will change, in time, you know,” she said. “Four years is nothing in a marriage.”
Lucy said, “I don’t know, but there’s not much I can do. There’s Jo, and the war, and David’s condition—how can I leave?”
The boat arrived, and Lucy exchanged her mother for three boxes of groceries and five letters. The water was choppy. Mother sat in the boat’s tiny cabin. They waved her around the headland. Lucy felt very lonely.
Jo began to cry. “I don’t want Gran to go away!”
“Nor do I,” said Lucy.
10
GODLIMAN AND BLOGGS WALKED SIDE BY SIDE ALONG the pavement of a bomb-damaged London shopping street. They were a mismatched pair: the stooped, birdlike professor, with pebble-lensed spectacles and a pipe, not looking where he was going, taking short, scurrying steps; and the flat-footed youngster, blond and purposeful, in his detective’s raincoat and melodramatic hat; a cartoon looking for a caption.
Godliman was saying, “I think Die Nadel is well-connected.”
“Why?”
“The only way he could be so insubordinate with impunity. It’s this ‘Regards to Willi’ line. It must refer to Canaris.”
“You think he was pals with Canaris.”
“He’s pals with somebody—perhaps someone more powerful than Canaris was.”
“I have the feeling this is leading somewhere.”
“People who are well-connected generally make those connections at school, or university or staff college. Look at that.”
They were outside a shop that had a huge empty space where once there had been a plate-glass window. A rough sign, hand-painted and nailed to the window-frame, said, “Even more open than usual.”
Bloggs laughed, “I saw one outside a bombed police station: ‘Be good, we are still open.’”
“It’s become a minor art form.”
They walked on. Bloggs said, “So, what if Die Nadel did go to school with someone high in the Wehrmacht?”
“People always have their pictures taken at school. Middleton down in the basement at Kensington—that house where MI6 used to be before the war—he’s got a collection of thousands of photographs of German officers: school photos, binges in the Mess, passing-out parades, shaking hands with Adolf, newspaper pictures—everything.”
“I see,” Bloggs said. “So if you’re right, and Die Nadel had been through Germany’s equivalent of Eton and Sandhurst, we’ve probably got a picture of him.”
“Almost certainly. Spies are notoriously camera-shy, but they don’t become spies in school. It will be a youthful Die Nadel that we find in Middleton’s files.”
They skirted a huge crater outside a barber’s. The shop was intact, but the traditional red-and-white-striped pole lay in shards on the pavement. The sign in the window said, “We’ve had a close shave—come and get one yourself.”