Convoy (19 page)

This, involving clearing his desk to spread out the chart, brought Jemmy and the Croupier. ‘Spring cleaning?’ inquired Jemmy, ‘or wrapping up Christmas presents?’

‘Don’t tease the lad,’ the Croupier said, ‘he’s run out of ideas.’

Ned glowered at him. ‘How did you guess?’

‘You have that sort of trapped look, as though a girl just phoned to say her period is four days overdue…and you know you were only doing her a favour. We all get it, lad, it’s part of working in ASIU – and having girlfriends.’

‘It’ll pass,’ Jemmy added. ‘Usually they find they made a mistake in their diary. Girls I mean. I’m not so sure about U-boats. Come and have some lunch.’

Yorke shook his head. ‘I want to get on with this.’

‘Don’t overwork that tiny brain,’ Jemmy said. ‘It’ll overheat.’

‘No,’ Yorke said, ‘I want to get this diagram drawn out while the idea is fresh in my mind.’

Clare found an empty carriage and climbed in, hoisting her suitcase up on to the rack after taking out a book to read. She tucked her ticket in the top pocket of her grey tweed suit, ready for the ticket inspector who would soon amble along with his clippers and probably want to pause for a chat. ‘Charing Cross, madam? Pr’olly be a few minutes late…’ and on it would go from there because today she would welcome it.

Standing on the ‘up’ platform of any station should cheer a person surely because the mere fact it was ‘up’ and not ‘down’ meant the trains coming to it were bound for a more important destination than the ones going the other way. She had previously heard the ancient porter over on the ‘down’ platform calling the destinations for the train due from London, his Kentish accent broad as he started off with ‘Smeeth, Westenhanger, Sandling Junction…’ and finished up with a triumphant ‘…Walmer, Deal and Sang-wich!’

But he had most fun with the little two-carriage waiting on the other side of that platform for passengers. It went to Canterbury, calling at Wye, Chilham and Chartham (whose first two letters were pronounced as they were in Chatham and Chiswick), but the porter was already having his regular joke, crying out to the few people on the platform that the little train was for ‘Why kill ’em and cart ’em to Can-ter-bury…’ Clare had a feeling that the old porter and the joke dated back to the opening of the branch line.

Stations on the line…nameless, cold and draughty, the waiting rooms of some lit with weak electric light bulbs, others depending on hurricane lamps. She glanced up as the engine gave enormous huffs and puffs and the train started moving, doors slamming as porters swung those left open by thoughtless passengers. The posts which once were topped by boards proclaiming Ashford were missing; like the signposts on the roads they would have helped German parachutists if (or was it when) England was invaded. The train began chattering as it passed over the points and gathered speed so that in a minute or two it would be clear of the terraces of houses and out into the gently rolling countryside of the Weald, passing within a few yards of farmhouses and so familiar that hens pecking in the grass did not look up and a sheepdog scratched itself, unconcerned at the roaring giant: both knew the giant never moved off the rails; it passed like the sun and the moon and with the same regularity.

Suddenly Clare felt alone; not just lonely but terrifyingly alone. Two months ago, before chance brought a patient called Edward Yorke to St Stephen’s Hospital, she had been alone. As Nurse Exton, a war widow, she had neither husband nor parents. There were a few distant relatives whom she knew but rarely saw, but she had never felt alone or lonely. Her marriage, she realized, had been such a shock that she had quite deliberately made herself self-contained. She had stayed away from people, keeping them at a distance whoever they were: polite but aloof and risking being thought a cold woman. She had surprised herself one day when she realized she was quite unconcerned about what people thought: other nurses were nice enough but more concerned with finding supplies of lipstick and silk stockings and ways of getting back into the nurses’ quarters after the door was officially locked at midnight. The men patients tried to flirt and because most of them had been wounded in action she was pleasant, but she always made sure it remained a nurse-and-patient relationship: she would do shopping for them during her time off, post letters, even meet elderly parents at the station and bring them to the hospital for special visits, but it had stopped there – until Ned Yorke had arrived, and the time came when she had seen his eyes watching her, had seen the distress in his face when she had pretended to be angry over the teasing about the crooked stocking seam. Then the stick of bombs had started falling and she was certain one would hit the ward and kill them all, and she had in a second suddenly known that she wanted to die with him and had flung herself across his body in the bed.

Since then – well, ‘the courtship had run its normal course’, but suddenly, on this train, in this compartment decorated with sepia prints showing the peacetime delights of resorts served by the Southern Railway and the warning that pulling the communication cord (‘Improperly’, a piece of jargon that always made her want to giggle) would cost five pounds, she felt both alone and lonely.

Why now, of all absurd times? In London – not five hundred yards from Charing Cross station, in fact – Ned was working in the Citadel; half a mile beyond him in Palace Street was Mrs Yorke who had, in a dozen delightfully subtle ways, showed that Clare Exton was a welcome addition to the family… Yet Ned and his mother might be the reason for this feeling. Before she had met either of them she had been self-contained; she had nothing to lose and therefore nothing to fear. She had given no hostages. The German bombers came nightly, the Battle of the Atlantic went on as a vague, grey and frightening rumour, the war was being fought in the Western Desert and caught all the headlines, but apart from a hatred of war because of the misery it brought, she had nothing more to lose.

She went through the polite motions when someone sympathized at her losing her pilot husband (people tended to think he must have been a Battle of Britain hero), and she knew that by now she would have been suicidal had he lived and insisted on her playing at the farce of being his wife. No, she had nothing of value to lose then; her family jewellery was stored in a bank; the inherited family portraits and some other paintings were being kept by a distant cousin whose house was in the depths of the country. With nothing of value to lose she had nothing to worry about. Her house in Norfolk was rented on a long lease to people who looked after it, and anyway it meant very little to her now. Or, rather, it had meant very little to her then. Now she began to think of Ned ambling through the familiar rooms in an old jersey and a pair of grey flannel bags, boots muddy and grinning with pride over some gardening triumph.

Suddenly, since she had met Ned, she had possessions; she had things to lose, or from which she could be parted. Separated from Ned, she felt lonely. If – she forced herself to think about it – anything happened to him, she would be
alone
in a way she could never previously have experienced. Losing something, in other words, meant first having something to lose. This was the price one paid for falling in love in wartime: the danger could heighten the bliss of being together but it could also mean a parting for ever. She had not got just something to lose but everything, so that the words ‘bombers’ and ‘torpedoes’, for instance, took on new and terrible meanings.

The train hurried through Charing as she forced herself to think on, hoping the ticket collector would come and chat for a few minutes, long enough to leave her willing to start reading her book. Supposing something happened to Ned – and it could: his escape this last time must have been a miracle, and she now knew him well enough to understand that his refusal to talk about it told her more than any words could about the loss of the
Aztec
.

Be thankful for what is rather than fret about what might be, she told herself; he’s been appointed to the Admiralty. Presumably such appointments are for at least six months, so they (she, anyway; Ned probably took the ‘I could not love thee dear, so much…’ view, and unfortunately she both understood and accepted it) had that much time. Those leaflets dropped by the German bombers had said categorically, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic has been lost by the British…’ Ned had read one and laughed, but she realized now that he had laughed to reassure her because she had found the bundle of leaflets in a field, not because the words were absurd and therefore funny. The Battle of the Atlantic, she saw,
was
being lost; the sinking of Ned’s destroyer was but a symptom, like the cheese and sugar ration being cut. And the bombing: people were used to it now (just as well, perhaps) but it went on night after night, gradually battering down London. People said all the big factories were out in the suburbs of London and other cities, and the Germans always bombed the centres and thus missed the factories, but it was hard to believe the Germans could be that silly.

Ned killed, London burning, the Germans invading – in a panicky moment of fantasy she knew she would then take a scalpel and open a vein… And this was Tonbridge: the engine shuddering as the metal brakes pressed against the great wheels. And the face of an old woman appeared at the window, grey hair topped by what was obviously her best hat. Clare lip-read the request to open the door and then realized the woman was holding a battered old case in one hand and a large bundle wrapped up in a counterpane in the other.

‘Room for me, dearie?’

Clare helped her in and swung her baggage up on to the rack. The old woman sank down with a thankful sigh after reassuring herself that she had her back to the engine. ‘Frightens me to see where we’re going,’ she commented. ‘With my back to the engine I don’t think about it.’

As the train started pulling out of the station the woman glanced up at her case and package and said conversationally, ‘It’s me daughter, that’s why I’m going to London. Lost ’er ’ubby a month ago, ’e was in the artillery in the Eighth Army. She don’t know what ’appened yet; just the telegram from the War Office. But ’er next is due in two weeks – it’s ’er third; you’d never think I was a grandma, would you? Anyway, I’m going up to be with ’er when ’er time comes. Going to ’ave to bundle up a bit, though; a bomb took ’arf the roof orf last week. The council ’ave put a tarpauling over it, but it means the spare room is no good – window gone and the ceiling down, and mortal cold with just a tarpauling above. And that shrapning, or shrapnel, or whatever they call it from the anti-aeroplane guns, well, it’d go through the tarpauling like an ’ot knife through butter. Leastways, that’s what Betty says, and this is the second time. Lost the whole house last time – council had to dig ’em out. They got this new place – and now the roof’s gone.’

The woman sighed. ‘Betty’s own bleedin’ fault,’ she said crossly. ‘She won’t ’vacuate, see? The council would send her down to the country because of the kids and her expectin’, but Betty won’t go. I’ve told ’er a hundred times to come down to me. I got a spare bedroom, but she knows ’aving those kids yellin’ and cryin’ round the place makes me nervous. Very ’ighly strung, I am; never think it to look at me, would you? But she’s too free and easy wiv ’em. I’d give ’em a back ’ander when they play up, but Betty uses the modern method. Very modern she is; just lets ’em yell and scream. I don’t ‘old with it; a good slap didn’t ’arm our Betty.

‘Breast feed ’em and slap their bottoms; that’s the secret, take it from a grandma. My old man thinks the same. ’E’s staying down ’ere on account of there’s no room up at Betty’s, and we got the two cats, and he wants to get the allotment dug over while I’m away. He gets ’is boots so muddy the ’ouse’ll be a pigsty when I get back, but I can’t complain; never lifted an ’and to me, not in twenty-seven years of marriage. Well, once, but that was my fault; I was a bit flirtatious when I was a girl–’ her hand went up to make sure her hat was straight, ‘not that my ’ubby left me much energy in those days.’

Clare smiled at the woman because there seemed nothing to say; in a matter of three or four minutes the woman had, quite matter of factly, told such a tragic yet heroic story without a word of complaint and obviously without exaggerating, that the only word that came to mind was ‘undefeated’, and there were millions more like her.

Ned Yorke closed the last docket, put it back on the pile, and then stared down at all the entries he had made in the big form drawn on the back of the chart. Recorded there, in his own handwriting, was everything of any consequence known about the eleven Allied convoys which had been attacked by U-boat insiders. If no clue emerged from the figures and words he had written in so carefully, then he could see no way of ever beating the insiders, except by putting corvettes and frigates among the centre columns, and with the danger of depth charges exploding beneath Allied merchant ships there was no chance of doing that, even had the escorts been available.

The story told by the bare statistics on the form was frightening: eleven convoys with an average of thirty-three ships – a total of 363. Of those, eighty-eight had been torpedoed by insider U-boats – enough ships to make up two and a half average-sized convoys had been sunk, killing 2,376 men (and some women too, passengers coming to England to join the Forces). The lost ships totalled 554,000 tons deadweight.

He looked under the column headed ‘Cargo carried’ and saw there was not the slightest pattern. Tanks, guns, ammunition, fighters, bombers, fuel oil, high-octane petrol, grain, hides, palm nuts, cotton bales, ingots of copper, steel and aluminium, great reels of newsprint… Cargoes which were vital – but only vital cargoes were ever loaded.

All the zigzag diagram numbers which had been used by the convoys from the day before the first attack until the day after the attack ended were listed. Again, no pattern. Yet where an attack had lasted, say, six nights, the U-boat managed to stay with the convoy despite zigzagging. Even though the underwater speed of a U-boat was only a few knots, the Teds had not been shaken off. No U-boat could make six knots submerged for twenty-four hours, but no U-boat captain, snatching a quick look round with his periscope, could possibly know which particular zigzag diagram the convoy was going to use. The ships themselves had only a brief warning – a flag hoist from the commodore giving the number, followed by another hoist giving the time the first turn would be made…