Eye of the Needle(68)
He took a sip of the soup, and suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He ate it all quickly, then the bread. When he’d finished Lucy laughed. She looked lovely when she laughed; her mouth opened wide, showing lots of even white teeth, and her eyes crinkled merrily at the corners.
“More?” she offered.
“Thank you very much.”
“I can see it doing you good. The color is coming back to your cheeks.”
Faber realized he felt physically better. He forced himself to eat his second helping more slowly, out of courtesy, but he still relished it.
David said, “How did you happen to be out in this storm?” It was the first time he had spoken.
“Don’t badger him, David…”
“It’s all right,” Faber said quickly. “I was foolish, that’s all. This is the first fishing holiday I’ve been able to have since before the war, and I just refused to let the weather spoil it. Are you a fisherman?”
David shook his head. “Sheep farmer.”
“Do you have many employees?”
“Just one, old Tom.”
“I suppose there are other sheep farms on the island.”
“No. We live at this end, Tom lives at the other end, and in between there’s nothing but sheep.”
Faber nodded. Good—very good. A woman, a cripple, a child and an old man…and he was already feeling much stronger.
“How do you contact the mainland?” Faber said.
“There’s a boat once a fortnight. It’s due this Monday but it won’t come if the storm keeps up. There’s a radio transmitter in Tom’s cottage, but we can only use that in emergencies. If I thought people might be searching for you, or if you needed urgent medical help, I should use it. But as things are I don’t feel it’s necessary. There’s little point; nobody can come to fetch you off the island until the storm clears and when that happens the boat will come anyway.”
“Of course.” Faber’s tone concealed his delight. The problem of how to contact the U-boat on Monday had been nagging at the back of his mind. He had seen an ordinary wireless set in the Roses’ living room, and he would, if necessary, have been able to rig up a transmitter from that. But the fact that this Tom had a proper radio made everything so much simpler…“What does Tom need a transmitter for?”
“He’s a member of the Royal Observer Corps. Aberdeen was bombed July of 1940. There was no air raid warning. There were fifty casualties. That was when they recruited Tom. It’s a good thing his hearing is better than his eyesight.”
“I suppose the bombers come from Norway.”
“I suppose so.”
Lucy stood up. “Let’s go into the other room.”
The two men followed her. Faber felt no weakness, no dizziness. He held the living room door for David, who wheeled himself close to the fire. Lucy offered Faber brandy. He declined. She poured one for her husband and herself.
Faber sat back and allowed himself to study them. Lucy was really quite striking: she had an oval face, wide-set eyes of an unusual, cat-like amber color and an abundance of rich, dark-red hair. Under the mannish fisherman’s sweater and baggy trousers there was the suggestion of her very good, fullish figure. Dressed up in silk stockings and, say, a cocktail sort of dress, she might be very glamorous. David was also handsome—almost pretty, except for the shadow of a very dark beard. His hair was nearly black and his skin looked Mediterranean. He would have been tall if he had had legs in proportion to his arms. Faber suspected that those arms might be powerful, muscled from years of pushing the wheels of the chair.
An attractive couple—but there was something badly wrong between them. Faber was no expert on marriage, but his training in interrogation techniques had taught him to read the silent language of the body—to know, from small gestures, when someone was frightened, confident, hiding something, or lying. Lucy and David rarely looked at one another, and never touched. They spoke to him more than to each other. They circled one another, like turkeys trying to keep in front of them a few square feet of vacant territory. The tension between them was enormous. They were like Churchill and Stalin, obliged temporarily to fight side by side, fiercely suppressing a deeper enmity. Faber wondered what the trauma was that lay at the back of their distance. This cozy little house must be an emotional pressure cooker, despite its rugs and its bright paintwork, its floral armchairs and blazing fires and framed watercolors. To live alone, with only an old man and a child for company, with this thing between them…it reminded him of a play he had seen in London, by an American called Tennessee something—
Abruptly, David swallowed his drink and said, “I must turn in. My back’s playing up.”
Faber got to his feet. “I’m sorry—I’ve been keeping you up.”
David waved him down. “Not at all. You’ve been asleep all day—you won’t want to go back to bed right away. Besides, Lucy would like to chat, I’m sure. It’s just that I mistreat my back—backs were designed to share the load with the legs, you know.”
Lucy said, “You’d better take two pills tonight then.” She took a bottle from the top shelf of the bookcase, shook out two tablets and gave them to her husband.
He swallowed them dry. “I’ll say good night.” He wheeled himself out.