Every Secret Thing (11 page)

But the Major spoke to Georgie, first. ‘Miss Clarke, meet Andrew Deacon. Andrew, this is Miss Amelia Clarke. She’ll be escorting you down to New York.’

Through the polite exchange of nods, Georgie tried to adjust to the notion that the ‘package’ she’d be taking back was human, while the Major continued, offhand, ‘We might be wise to keep you here another day, and send you back tomorrow. Give Miss Clarke a little time. She didn’t come prepared.’

She turned her head, and asked, ‘Prepared for what?’

The Major smiled. ‘For being Andrew’s wife.’

They didn’t actually have time alone together until they had boarded the train on the following evening. And it wasn’t until they were seated in the dining car for dinner that they had their first real conversation.

The dining car was very nearly empty. There were only three couples, including themselves, and the others were seated at tables some distance away. They could speak in lowered voices without being overheard.

‘This has all been a bit of a shock for you, I expect,’ Deacon said.

She had taken to calling him Deacon because it made everything seem much more businesslike, much less uncomfortable. Not that he’d been anything except a perfect gentleman, but still, the fact remained that she was travelling in intimate close quarters with a stranger.

‘It’s been a shock for me, as well,’ he said, in his evenly pitched British voice, with a faint smile that told her that he, too, felt awkward. ‘I didn’t plan on marrying this year.’

The marriage wasn’t real, of course. Somewhere, she knew, there would be papers stating otherwise, to bolster the charade. And there would also be the photographs the two of them had posed for in the camp commandant’s office earlier today, Deacon in his grey suit and she in a dress borrowed for the occasion from a local shop.

She could have tried refusing, she supposed. She could have told them that, although there was a chance, a good chance, that her boyfriend might be dead, this whole scenario felt wrong, to her. Disloyal.

Or she could have tried to argue that she didn’t have the skills for this. She wasn’t trained to masquerade as someone else; she wouldn’t be convincing.
Why me?
she’d wondered once again, and as before, had found no one to give her any answer. She only knew that this was
not
what she’d signed on for, when she’d gone to work for BSC.

Nonetheless, she’d gone along with it. Hers not to reason why, she reminded herself. Besides, she didn’t know what mission they were sending Deacon on – she’d been told simply that he was going overseas – but it was possible that what this man was being sent to do would be important to the war, and that her role, however small, might make a difference.

She found it difficult, looking at him across the
white-clothed
table in the dining car, to judge what kind of job he might be going to. He was not the sort of man who made a definite impression on her at first meeting, but rather he revealed his personality in stages, like an image that was blurry to begin with but came into focus more and more the longer that one looked at it.

He was, she thought, a quiet man; a little shy with people, but not lacking in self-confidence. His smiles were swift but genuine – they always touched his eyes. And she thought that she’d detected, underneath the calm reserve, a rather wicked sense of humour that would make him fun to be around.

He noticed people; watched them, not suspiciously, but – so it seemed to her, at least – because he found them interesting. And it said a lot about him that he’d spoken to the waiter in the same way that he spoke to everybody else, with natural politeness and respect. He might be English, with an educated accent, but he wasn’t, to her great relief, a snob.

She hadn’t been told much about him. He lived in New York, she knew that. He had friends there, whom she would be meeting. He was an art dealer. That seemed as good a place to start as any, Georgie thought, and so she asked what sort of art he bought and sold.

His upward glance was friendly. ‘Paintings, mostly. Some sculpture. I have a particular interest in Spanish art.’

While they ate, between the comings and the goings of the waiter, Deacon talked about the shop he’d had in Rio de Janeiro, describing some of his more colourful customers in such detail she felt she would know them on sight if they ever passed by her. He didn’t say much about the dengue fever that had driven him out of Brazil, but she had the impression he must have been very ill indeed to have left a place he obviously loved so much. His second shop, in New York City, didn’t seem to hold the same appeal. ‘It’s still my business, but I hired a chap to manage it last spring,’ he said, ‘when I went up to Canada, and he’s done such a brilliant job that I intend to let him go on doing it.’

So he had been up at the Training Camp for several months, she thought. She didn’t ask him what he had been doing there, because she knew he couldn’t tell her
that
. She did know, though, from her time on the thirty-sixth floor, that South America was of special interest to BSC, so she reasoned his stay at The Farm might have somehow been linked to his time in Brazil.

The waiter came past and a family of four took the table beside them. They didn’t discuss much of anything after that; only concentrated on the meal, which was excellent.

It was snowing when they left the dining car. The heavy flakes turned instantly to water on the windows of the lurching narrow corridors as Deacon, with a hand at Georgie’s elbow, led the way towards the first-class sleeping coach. Georgie hadn’t given much thought to the implications of their having a private compartment before, but it occurred to her that, while they’d been at dinner, the compartment would have been made up for night-time, and the berths pulled down to sleep on, and the thought of that arrangement made her even more uncomfortable than she had been before.

There was no real alternative, she knew. Her job was to convince others that she was Deacon’s wife, and she’d never do that if she went to pieces every time they had to share a room.

Another couple pressed past in the corridor as Deacon stopped outside the door of their compartment. Stepping close to shield her, he reached down to put the key into her hand, and in a voice that wanted to be overheard, he said, ‘I’m not quite ready to turn in yet, darling. Think I’ll go and have a brandy. Do you mind?’

She said she didn’t, and the other couple passed by, out of hearing.

‘Right, then,’ Deacon said, and smiled. ‘Goodnight, Amelia.’

Her real name, unfamiliar, sounded pleasant in his accent. It was, after all, the name by which she had been introduced to him, but Georgie had a feeling that he wouldn’t use her nickname even if she tried correcting him. She didn’t mind. It helped to keep things formal, like her using just his surname.

So she said, ‘Goodnight,’ and watched him walk away along the corridor, then turning, fit the key into the lock of the compartment and went in to bed.

She woke to the feeling that something was not as it should be.

Deacon’s berth was empty. She hadn’t heard him come in, but she knew from the state of his blankets he’d been there at some point. The hands of the clock at her bedside read quarter to seven. They should be getting near New York now, she thought, wrapping herself in her robe as she got up to look out the window.

It was then, when her feet touched the floor, that she knew what was different. The train had stopped moving.

Outside, the snow had settled in high drifts around the tracks. The wind sheared thin curls from the tops of the drifts and whirled them up and round and past the windows with a hollow-sounding whistle. Georgie hugged her arms against the creeping early morning cold and hurried to dress before Deacon came back.

She needn’t have worried. It was another half an hour before he turned up. And he knocked.

‘Good morning,’ he said, as she opened the compartment door. He came in with a tray, and cups. ‘I’ve managed to scrounge us some tea.’

There was nothing else. The restaurant car, he told her, had been taken off at Buffalo, so there wouldn’t be a breakfast till they’d reached New York, and that, the way things were going, might not be for several hours yet.

She didn’t know how he had managed the tea, but she was grateful he had. Simply holding the cup in her hands made her warm. There was nowhere to sit but the edge of her berth, so she sat there, while Deacon remained by the door.

‘I could try to find someone to make up the compartment,’ he suggested.

‘Don’t be silly. Have a seat,’ she told him, shifting to make room. ‘We
are
supposed to be married, after all.’

Her father always said a good night’s sleep made any situation better, and in fact this morning Georgie felt more positive about her new assignment, more committed to get on with it and do the best job possible. She looked up as he sat beside her. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Why do you need a wife?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, you’ve lived in New York. You have friends there. Why do you need me?’

He hesitated, and she said, ‘If you can’t tell me, that’s all right. It’s only that I wondered what my
purpose
was.’

Another moment passed while he considered. ‘If I tell you it’s important that my friends believe I’m married, would that be enough?’

It would have to be, she knew. She told him, ‘Yes. But if we want to be convincing there are things I should know about you, and your family, and things you should know about me. In case somebody asks.’

He conceded the point. ‘All right. Where would you like to begin?’

‘With your family.’

She didn’t take notes. Georgie had a good memory, and Deacon, again, had that gift of description that let her see everyone clearly: His father, the schoolmaster, getting on now, but still stern in his habits; his mother, a gentle soul, pottering round in her garden; his sister, who had married young and aged too quickly, carrying too much upon her shoulders. ‘It can’t be easy for her, raising the boy on her own. Not that Jamie’s a difficult lad,’ he said. ‘Always a nice little boy, from what I remember, and I gather from her letters that he’s grown into a nice young man. Nearly twelve, he’d be. I likely wouldn’t know him. And I don’t expect he’d much want to know me.’ He gave a tight, small smile. ‘Understandable, really. His father behaved like a hero, while I’ve lived a comfortable life over here. I’m not even in uniform.’

He said that last lightly enough, but Georgie thought she heard a harder undertone, and, curious herself, she asked, ‘Why aren’t you?’

‘What?’

‘In uniform.’

‘The easy answer is I didn’t have to be, and anyway, I value my own skin too much to want to go and get shot at.’

Georgie studied him. ‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

She didn’t know why not. ‘Because I don’t, that’s all.’

‘Well then,’ he said, with another small smile, ‘you’ve a higher opinion of me than most of my family. But what about
your
family, now? What are they like?’

He’d turned the tables on purpose, she thought, but she willingly filled in her share of the blanks. ‘Well, my father’s a newspaperman. That’s how Mother and he met – she worked as a typist, before they got married.’ Her parents were well matched, in spite of their differences. ‘Dad likes to travel, keep busy, while Mother would rather stay home. But they do have a few things in common. They both like to read, and go fly-fishing…’

‘Fly-fishing?’ Both his eyebrows rose at that.

‘It’s a family obsession. I’m not very good at it,’ Georgie confessed. ‘I don’t have enough patience. My brothers are better.’

‘You have more than one brother?’

‘Yes,’ she said, first, and then, ‘No. Well, I did…my brother Mike died this past summer, in Sicily.’

‘Oh. I am sorry.’

She looked away. Drank her tea. ‘Yes, well. That happens in wartime, doesn’t it? He was always the leader, Mike. Always the one that we followed. It’s a little like losing the star that you steer by, you know, losing him. My parents feel it, too, I know. They haven’t been the same. And Ronnie – that’s my other brother – he’ll be taking it the hardest of any of us. They were inseparable, growing up, Ronnie and Kenneth and Mike. People called them the Three Musketeers.’

‘Who is Kenneth?’

She hadn’t intended to talk about Ken. It wasn’t a part of her life Deacon needed to know about, really, to keep up their married façade. So she said, ‘Just a boy from the neighbourhood. One of my brothers’ best friends.’ And then, turning the tables herself, she said, ‘Speaking of which, you should probably tell me a bit about
your
friends – the ones I might meet in New York.’

The tea was gone. He pulled a cigarette case from his pocket. ‘Do you smoke?’

It was comfortable being with Deacon like this, in the train, with the snow piled high round the car and the buffeting wind at the window glass making her feel as though they were cut off from the rest of the world for a time. She took a cigarette and settled back.

They sat and talked and smoked until the train began to move again, an hour later. To Georgie’s great relief, another restaurant car was sent to join their train at Albany, so she was able to have breakfast after all. She didn’t function well without a proper breakfast.

Deacon, she noticed, ate lightly. He liked honey on his toast instead of jam. He drank his coffee black and sweet. With tea, he’d added milk. These things, and others, she made note of in her memory. It was a lot, she thought, like studying for school examinations – feeling always that she should know more; that she was unprepared.

The feeling lingered as the train began to slow, on its final approach into Grand Central Station. She looked out the window. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, low, to herself, ‘here goes nothing.’

He had an apartment on 73
^rd
Street – the Upper West Side, near the Park.

For such a fashionable address it was a strangely plain apartment, quiet in greys and greens, with a small but modern kitchen, gleaming chrome. It looked too clean to have been shut up all the time he’d been away. There was no dust, and the bathroom smelt strongly of soap and shampoo.