Eye of the Needle(73)
The late hour had got to all of them. Bloggs’s sudden access of energy jerked them out of a creeping lethargy. One leaned forward, rubbing his hands; another tied his shoelaces; a third put his jacket on. They wanted to go to work. There were no comments, no questions.
23
FABER WAS AWAKE. HIS BODY PROBABLY NEEDED sleep despite the fact that he had spent the day in bed; but his mind was hyperactive, turning over possibilities, sketching scenarios…thinking about women, and about home.
Now that he was so close to getting out, his memories of home became near painfully sweet. He thought of things like sausages fat enough to eat in slices, and motor cars on the right-hand side of the road, and really tall trees, and most of all his own language—words with guts and precision, hard consonants and pure vowels and the verb at the end of the sentence where it ought to be, finality and meaning in the same climactic terminal.
Thoughts of climaxes brought Gertrud to mind again: her face underneath his, makeup washed away by his kisses, eyes closing tight in pleasure then opening again to look with delight into his, mouth stretched wide in a permanent gasp, saying “Ja, Liebling, ja…”
It was silly. He had led the life of a monk for seven years, but she had no reason to do the same. She would have had a dozen men since Faber. She might even be dead, bombed by the RAF or murdered by the maniacs because her nose was half an inch too long or run over by a motor car in the blackout. Anyway, she would hardly remember him. He would probably never see her again. But she was important. She stood for something…for him to think about.
He did not normally permit himself the indulgence of sentiment. There was in his nature, in any case, a very cold streak, and he cultivated it. It protected him. Now, though, he was so close to success, and he felt free. Not to relax his vigilance, but at least to fantasize a little.
The storm was his safeguard so long as it continued. He would simply contact the U-boat with Tom’s radio on Monday, and its captain would send a dinghy into the bay as soon as the weather cleared. If the storm ended before Monday, there was a slight complication: the supply boat. David and Lucy would naturally expect him to take the boat back to the mainland.
Lucy came into his thoughts in vivid, full-color images he could not quite control. He saw her striking amber eyes watching him as he made a bandage for her thumb; her outline walking up the stairs in front of him, even clad as she was in shapeless man’s clothing; her heavy rounded breasts as she stood naked in the bathroom; and, as the images developed into fantasy, she leaned over the bandage and kissed his mouth, turned back on the stairs and took him in her arms, stepped out of the bathroom and placed his hands on her breasts.
He turned restlessly in the small bed, cursing the imagination that sent him dreams the like of which he hadn’t suffered since his schooldays. At that time, before he’d experienced the reality of sex, he had constructed elaborate sexual scenarios featuring the older women with whom he came into daily contact: the starchy Matron; Professor Nagel’s dark, thin, intellectual wife; the shopkeeper in the village who wore red lipstick and talked to her husband with contempt. Sometimes he put all three of them into one orgiastic fantasy. When, at age fifteen, he’d seduced, classically, a housemaid’s daughter in the twilight of a West Prussian forest, he let go of the imaginary orgies because they were so much better than the disappointing real thing. As young Heinrich he had been greatly puzzled by this; where was the blinding ecstasy, the sensation of soaring through the air like a bird, the mystical fusion of two bodies into one? The fantasies became painful, reminding him of his failure to make them real. Later, of course, the reality improved, and he formed the view that ecstasy came not from a man’s pleasure in a woman, but from each one’s pleasure in each other. He had voiced that opinion to his elder brother, who seemed to think it banal, a truism rather than a discovery; and before long he saw it that way too.
He became a good lover, eventually. He found sex interesting, as well as physically pleasant. He was never a great seducer…the thrill of conquest was not what he wanted. But he was expert at giving and receiving sexual gratification, without the expert’s illusion that technique was all. For some women he was a highly desirable man, and the fact that he didn’t know this only served to make him even more attractive.
He tried to remember how many women he had had: Anna, Gretchen, Ingrid, the American girl, those two whores in Stuttgart…he could not recall them all, but there could not have been more than about twenty. And Gertrud, of course.
None of them, he thought, had been quite as beautiful as Lucy. He gave an exasperated sigh; he had let this woman affect him just because he was close to home and had been so careful for so long. He was annoyed with himself. It was undisciplined; he must not relax until the assignment was over, and this was not over, not quite. Not yet.
There was the problem of avoiding going back on the supply boat. Several solutions came to mind: perhaps the most promising was to incapacitate the island’s inhabitants, meet the boat himself and send the boatman away with a cock-and-bull story. He could say he was visiting the Roses, had come out on another boat; that he was a relative, or a bird-watcher…anything. It was too small a problem to engage his full attention at the moment. Later, when and if the weather improved, he would select something.
He really had no serious problems. A lonely island, miles off the coast, with four inhabitants—it was an ideal hideout. From now on, leaving Britain was going to be as easy as breaking out of a baby’s playpen. When he thought of the situations he had already come through, the people he had killed—the five Home Guard men, the Yorkshire lad on the train, the Abwehr messenger—he considered himself now to be sitting pretty.