Black August (31 page)

‘Would you go in again?' he asked. ‘I mean, if it is necessary to make a reconnaissance?'

‘Not me,' said Mr. Andrews fervently. ‘Not for a thousand pounds I won't; and I couldn't if I would for that matter. I'd hoped to get the gas for the car, but there wasn't any so it died on me back on Sutton Common, and I had to walk the last five miles home.'

Gregory smiled. ‘There must be hundreds of thousands of cars abandoned by the roadside by now. What a chance for the car bandits, eh?'

‘Ah! if they had the gas,' laughed Mr. Andrews, ‘but a thousand atmospheres would be worth more than a Rolls today. Come on now, sir, here's breakfast, and eat hearty. You never can tell when you'll see another square meal.'

The men had already sorted themselves out and stood round the two long tables, which had last accommodated a crowd of noisy trippers, and Gregory needed no urging. With Veronica
and Ann on either side of him he took his place at the top and they sat down to the dishes of fine fresh fish.

‘Boiled, they are, miss,' Mr. Andrews apologised, leaning over Veronica's shoulder, ‘but none the worse for that and I must keep what little fat we've got for other cooking.'

They're delicious,' she declared heartily. ‘What fools people are to make such a fuss about blue trout; if herrings cost as much they would be three times as expensive because they've got ten times the flavour.'

‘Well now!' declared Silas, ‘I do think Lady Veronica's arithmetic is just marvellous. I couldn't have worked that out in a month of Sundays.' His blue eyes twinkled merrily at her out of his round expressive face, and they all joined in the laughter.

When the meal was over Gregory led three rousing cheers for the host of the Anchor, and after many expressions of goodwill, marched his assorted company back to the Martello Tower.

The men were sent down to the beach for a bathe under Sergeant Thompson and Petty Officer Sims, while Gregory called a conference of the officers. Ann, Veronica, and Rudd were asked to attend
ex officio
and the party settled themselves upon tufts of coarse grass in the sunshine, some fifty yards to leeward of the tower.

‘Now,' said Gregory, ‘we must discuss our future plans. As you know it was my intention to take you all safely out of England, but my luck didn't hold, so here we are back again in this unfortunate country where everyone is about to starve to death or go mad. The question is, do we stay where an inscrutable providence had seen fit to park us, or do we advance upon a port in the hope of securing another ship?'

‘We haven't been lucky with ships,' murmured Kenyon, ‘and we
are
lucky to be here at all.'

‘Unless you can procure a private yacht of at least a thousand tons with a skipper and crew who adore you, my dear, this child sits on the beach until it is all over,' said Veronica firmly.

Gregory smiled. ‘You assume that it will be over then, in—say a week or a fortnight's time?'

‘I haven't the faintest idea, but nothing will get me on a warship again until the King holds his next review at Spithead.'

‘You prefer to face the very real possibility that civilisation is breaking up and England going back to the dark ages?'

‘Yes, O man of valour! I'm prepared to walk naked about the beach if need be, but I'm not going on a warship.'

This ship business,' said Silas suddenly. ‘Why did you choose a naval boat? Surely a trader would have been easier to get away with in the first place, and a whole heap easier to control once you were on board.'

‘In order to be able to say “Stand and deliver” at the Azores, or to other shipping when our supplies of food and fuel ran low.'

‘Well, it certainly was a great idea, and with fifty good men behind you it might well have come off, but we've nothing like the same chance now. There's plenty of fish in the sea, let's stop here and eat them.'

‘What's your view, Ann?' Gregory smiled, noting that a touch of colour was creeping back into her lovely face.

‘No more ships for me, thank you,' she said promptly; ‘and anyhow I'm quite near my home now.'

‘I don't see how that will help you, or us. However, what do you say, Rudd?'

‘I'm for doin' jus' what you think best, Mr. Gregory, sir. I don't doubt but we'll manage all right.'

‘Yes, but I'd like to have your opinion all the same.'

‘Well, if that's your wish, sir, this is 'ow it seems to me. Mr. ‘Arker there, if 'e'll excuse the expression, said a mouthful. Wiv invalids an' ladies—pardon me, Miss—'ow are we goin' ter get another ship? But if we stays put in this 'ere tower we could ‘old it against the ‘ole blinking Army if we wants to, an' speakin' for meself I've ‘ad worse vittals than those we ‘ad fer breakfust many a time, so wots the matter with a bit of a 'oliday by the sea?'

Gregory nodded. ‘Well, you all seem pretty unanimous against any further attempt to leave the country, although frankly if I thought there was any reasonable chance of capturing a sea-worthy ship, I'd take it, whether you came with me or not. I can see some sort of decent future for myself if only I could get to a hot country where the climate's good and the food abundant, but I can't see any here. In a week or so the people from the towns will have permeated the whole countryside and then it will be dog eat dog. Once our ammunition is exhausted we shall stand no better chance of surviving than the rest, and if we do,
it will be to drag out a miserable existence through a bleak East Coast winter on a diet of herring. However, there is no prospect of a ship at the moment, and as Rudd says, we can hold the fort if we're attacked by any starving rabble, so we had best dig in here for the time being. Now I'm going to have a talk to Sergeant Thompson about the men.'

‘One moment, General,' Silas raised his pointed eyebrows. ‘Are you banking on our friends in the village feeding us all the time?'

‘They don't imagine that they are going to at the moment, but, of course, they will.'

‘Does that mean that King Sallust is going to do his buccaneer act again?'

‘No, I hope that won't be necessary. There are many ways in which we can be useful to the locals and earn our keep. The gift of our protection alone is worth a lot at a time like this.'

Silas looked up in admiration. ‘Give them your protection in exchange for fish, eh—you're a marvel. Al Capone would have gone all green with jealousy if he had ever heard about you.'

Gregory grinned back. ‘Well, at least I'm adaptable. If I can't be King of the Hebrides, I certainly mean to be King of Shingle Street, and that before the day is out.'

‘Sure,' drawled the American, ‘and what do we do now?'

‘Sit in the sunshine while I see Thompson, and discuss the future with the Mayor and Corporation.' With a little laugh Gregory moved away.

‘Kenyon,' said Ann quietly, ‘I want to talk to you.'

He looked up catching his breath a little as he met her eyes. ‘Righto, let's walk down to the shore.'

Side by side they strolled across the little valleys of shingle, the pebbles jumping and sliding under their feet until they reached the last ridge above the gleaming line left by the turning tide.

As they sat down Kenyon felt a nervous apprehension, the tension was almost visible betwen them now, then slowly, awkwardly, Ann broke the silence.

‘This has been an incredible experience, my dear, and I shall never forget you, as long as I live.'

Something seemed to sink in the pit of Kenyon's stomach as though he was falling in a rapid lift. ‘What on earth do you mean, Ann?' he managed to say.

‘Only that, although I was stupidly angry with you at the time, I do realise that you saved my life by dragging me out of London, and I wanted to thank you before I go.'

‘Go!' he echoed with dismal foreboding, ‘go where?'

‘To Uncle Timothy at Orford. It's only five miles away, you know, and I must see what has happened there. I'm naturally anxious about him.'

‘But you won't stay there, will you?'

‘Yes, if everything is all right.'

‘You'd be safer, much safer here with us.'

‘Why, it's such a quiet little place I don't suppose for a minute that it's been affected any more than Shingle Street, and it's my home. The people there have known me all my life and would never dream of doing me any harm, besides…'

‘Besides what?'

‘Well, I don't want to see you again—for a long time.'

‘But why, Ann, why? What have I done? I know I behaved like a fool in London, but everything seemed to happen so quickly. My head was bung full of the election when I met you, and before I saw you again we were right on the verge of the crash. I hadn't a thought of marrying anybody, and was only living from day to day, just wondering what was going to happen to us all. I loved you before that night in Grosvenor Square, you know that, but I hadn't properly woken up to it, and because I hesitated a second you're holding that against me. Surely you're not going to turn me down because of that?'

Ann sat silent, staring at the countless spangles of dancing sun-shine which flickered on the sea. In her heart she knew she loved him, and she was fighting a bitter battle with herself. If she had been certain that Gregory was right and everything was going sky-high she would not have hesitated, the trimmings of civilisation were not essential to her happiness, and she would have remained cheerfully, joyfully adapting herself to a new and primitive existence, where she would cook and fend for Kenyon while he snared game or gathered shell-fish from the beach; and both would laugh together over silly stupid things till dawn dimmed the camp fire, then sleep, his curly head pillowed upon her breast, far into another day. Ann, perhaps, was more bitterly disappointed even than Gregory that their fortunes had not carried them to Southern Seas. There it would all have been so simple—but here the old problems remained.

Kenyon had taken her hands in his and was kissing the small grubby palms while he went on pleading fervently for her to stay, but she could only mutter: ‘Don't, my dear, don't,' and stubbornly shake her head as she visualised the actual possibilities.

If Gregory was wrong, and, after a period of violence, order was restored again, where would she be if she had married Kenyon in the meantime, as he was pressing her to do now? That streak of pride in her which took the form of inverted snobbery, revolted at the thought of the position she would occupy. His wife, but not quite of his world. If only all the women were like Veronica, but they weren't and she was tortured by a vision of their subtle slights, aimed at her but lodging in Kenyon's heart and therefore causing her a hundred times the pain and mortification.

He could laugh over it now and call her ‘a precious little fool with absurd notions about people she did not know,' but would he laugh after a year or so if they went back to Grosvenor Square? If she married him and then lost him she thought it would kill her, and her resolve not to let him see her true weakness for him made her harsher in her refusals than she knew herself. Yet despite the pain in his face she was determined not to give way and chance spoiling his life by a surrender to this passion scarcely yet a week old.

She even refused to allow him to accompany her to Orford saying that she had already spoken to Gregory who had promised her Rudd and two men as an escort for that afternoon.

For an hour he reasoned, and finally, driven by the ill success of his arguments, bullied; but her firmness shook him, and as he talked on, reverting again to tender expostulations at her hardness, he began to be conscious of a horrible feeling of futility, that whatever he might say or do she would not alter. His awareness of it sapped the logic from his contentions and the passion from his pleading, so that after a time he found himself stupidly repeating the same phrases over and over again, and at last, by sinking into a miserable silence, he acknowledged defeat.

‘My dear, I'm sorry,' she said, ‘terribly sorry, but it is far better that I should go away, and that five-mile trudge with a parting at the end of it would be a miserable business, you must see that.'

‘All right,' he agreed a little suddenly, then with a quick
movement he drew her to him. ‘Kiss me, Ann, kiss me; we shan't have a chance later on.'

She pressed his face back gently, terrified that if he kissed her she would fail at the last and let herself go. ‘I—I'd rather not, Kenyon. Oh, well, if you want me to.'

He hesitated for a second, and then as she assented crushed her in his arms, but her lips had none of the soft warmth that had made his senses rock in Gloucester Road, they were firm, cold and unresponsive. With a little sigh he put her from him, and she turned her face away to hide her quick relief that he had not tried her resistance higher.

A few hours later he watched her small, almost childish figure as she stepped rapidly along between the tall soldiers. All four grew smaller and fainter until they were gradually merged into the green and grey of the foreshore towards the north.

He turned away to find Veronica beside him. ‘I wish she hadn't left us,' she said suddenly. ‘Do you remember, there was death in her cards that night I told them at Grosvenor Square?'

True to his boast, Gregory concluded a highly satisfactory understanding with Mr. Solly Andrews that evening, by which he became virtually the dictator of Shingle Street, and at the same time responsible for the lives and well-being of the whole community. Then he set himself with tireless energy to provision and fortify the place against a siege, which he felt certain they would be called upon to sustain from the starving multitudes of town workers who would sweep the country, picking each village clean.

During the days that followed, every man, woman and child who was not employed in augmenting their supplies, laboured at the fortifications which he threw up; and once they understood the grim menace of the furtive strangers whom Gregory's sentries were already turning back from the outskirts of their area, they worked cheerfully enough; joking and laughing as though they were assisting in the erection of some strange fair for a super Bank Holiday.