Eye of the Needle (6 page)

“Huh—when?”

“So how do you know for sure?”

“Oh, David, don’t be so boring. I know for sure because my periods have stopped and my nipples hurt and I throw up in the mornings and my waist is four inches bigger than it used to be. If you ever
looked
at me
you
would know for sure.”

“All right.”

“What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be thrilled!”

“Oh, sure. Perhaps we’ll have a son, and then I can take him for walks and play football with him, and he’ll grow up wanting to be like his father the war hero, a legless fucking joke!”

“Oh, David, David,” she whispered. She knelt in front of his wheelchair. “David, don’t think like that. He will respect you. He’ll look up to you because you put your life together again, and because you can do the work of two men from your wheelchair, and because you carried your disability with courage and cheerfulness and—”

“Don’t be so damned condescending,” he snapped. “You sound like a sanctimonious priest.”

She stood up. “Well, don’t act as if it’s my fault. Men can take precautions too, you know.”

“Not against invisible trucks in the blackout!”

It was a silly exchange and they both knew it, so Lucy said nothing. The whole idea of Christmas seemed utterly trite now: the bits of colored paper on the walls, and the tree in the corner, and the remains of a goose in the kitchen waiting to be thrown away—none of it had anything to do with her life. She began to wonder what she was doing on this bleak island with a man who seemed not to love her, having a baby he didn’t want. Why shouldn’t she—why not—well, she could…. Then she realized she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do with her life, nobody else to
be
other than Mrs. David Rose.

Eventually David said, “Well, I’m going to bed.” He wheeled himself to the hall and dragged himself out of the chair and up the stairs backwards. She heard him scrape across the floor, heard the bed creak as he hauled himself on to it, heard his clothes hit the corner of the room as he undressed, then heard the final groaning of the springs as he lay down and pulled the blankets up over him.

And still she would not cry.

She looked at the brandy bottle and thought, If I drink all of this now, and have a bath, perhaps I won’t be pregnant in the morning.

She thought about it for a long time, until she came to the conclusion that life without David and the island and the baby would be even worse because it would be empty.

So she did not cry, and she did not drink the brandy, and she did not leave the island; but instead she went upstairs and got into bed, and lay awake beside her sleeping husband, listening to the wind and trying not to think, until the gulls began to call, and a grey rainy dawn crept over the North Sea and filled the little bedroom with a cold pale light, and at last she went to sleep.

A kind of peace settled over her in the spring, as if all threats were postponed until after the baby was born. When the February snow had thawed she planted flowers and vegetables in the patch of ground between the kitchen door and the barn, not really believing they would grow. She cleaned the house thoroughly and told David that if he wanted it done again before August he would have to do it himself. She wrote to her mother and did a lot of knitting and ordered diapers by mail. They suggested she go home to have the baby, but she knew, was afraid, that if she went she would never come back. She went for long walks over the moors, with a bird book under her arm, until her weight became too much for her to carry very far. She kept the bottle of brandy in a cupboard David never used, and whenever she felt depressed she went to look at it and remind herself of what she had almost lost.

Three weeks before the baby was due, she got the boat into Aberdeen. David and Tom waved from the jetty. The sea was so rough that both she and the skipper were terrified she might give birth before they reached the mainland. She went into the hospital in Aberdeen, and four weeks later brought the baby home on the same boat.

David knew none of it. He probably thought that women gave birth as easily as ewes, she decided. He was oblivious to the pain of contractions, and that awful, impossible stretching, and the soreness afterward, and the bossy, know-it-all nurses who didn’t want you to touch your baby because you weren’t brisk and efficient and trained and sterile like they were; he just saw you go away pregnant and come back with a beautiful, white-wrapped, healthy baby boy and said, “We’ll call him Jonathan.”

They added Alfred for David’s father, and Malcolm for Lucy’s, and Thomas for old Tom, but they called the boy Jo, because he was too tiny for Jonathan, let alone Jonathan Alfred Malcolm Thomas Rose. David learned to give him his bottle and burp him and change his diaper, and he even dangled him in his lap occasionally, but his interest seemed distant, uninvolved; he had a problem-solving approach, like the nurses; it was not for him as it was for Lucy. Tom was closer to the baby than David. Lucy would not let him smoke in the room where the baby was, and the old boy would put his great briar pipe with the lid in his pocket for hours and gurgle at little Jo, or watch him kick his feet, or help Lucy bathe him. Lucy suggested mildly that he might be neglecting the sheep. Tom said they did not need him to watch them feed—he would rather watch Jo feed. He carved a rattle out of driftwood and filled it with small round pebbles, and was overjoyed when Jo grabbed it and shook it, first time, without having to be shown how.

David and Lucy still did not make love.

First there had been his injuries, and then she had been pregnant, and then she had been recovering from childbirth; but now the reasons had run out.

One night she said, “I’m back to normal now.”

“How do you mean?”

“After the baby. My body is normal. I’ve healed.”

“Oh, I see. That’s good.”

She made sure to go to bed with him so that he could watch her undress, but he always turned his back.

As they lay there, dozing off, she would move so that her hand, or her thigh, or her breast, brushed against him, a casual but unmistakable invitation. There was no response.

She believed firmly that there was nothing wrong with her. She wasn’t a nymphomaniac—she didn’t simply want sex, she wanted sex with David. She was sure that, even if there had been another man under seventy on the island, she would not have been tempted. She wasn’t a sex-starved tart, she was a love-starved wife.

The crunch came on one of those nights when they lay on their backs, side by side, both wide awake, listening to the wind outside and the small sounds of Jo from the next room. It seemed to Lucy that it was time he either did it or came right out and said why not; and that he was going to avoid the issue until she forced it; and that she might as well force it now.

So she brushed her arm across his thighs and opened her mouth to speak—and almost cried out with shock to discover that he had an erection. So he could do it! And he wanted to, or why else—and her hand closed triumphantly around the evidence of his desire, and she shifted closer to him, and sighed, “David—”

He said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” and gripped her wrist and pushed her hand away from him and turned onto his side.

But this time she was not going to accept his rebuff in modest silence. “David, why not?”

“Jesus Christ!” He threw the blankets off, swung himself to the floor, grabbed the eiderdown with one hand, and dragged himself to the door.

Lucy sat up in bed and screamed at him, “Why not?”

Jo began to cry.

David pulled up the empty legs of his cut-off pajama trousers, pointed to the pursed white skin of his stumps, and said, “That’s why not! That’s why not!”

He slithered downstairs to sleep on the sofa, and Lucy went into the next bedroom to comfort Jo.

It took a long time to lull him back to sleep, probably because she herself was so much in need of comfort. The baby tasted the tears on her cheeks, and she wondered if he had any inkling of their meaning—wouldn’t tears be one of the first things a baby came to understand? She could not bring herself to sing to him, or murmur that everything was all right; so she held him tight and rocked him, and when
he
had soothed
her
with his warmth and his clinging, he went to sleep in her arms.

She put him back in the cot and stood looking at him for a while. There was no point in going back to bed. She could hear David’s deep-sleep snoring from the living room—he had to take powerful pills, otherwise the old pain kept him awake. Lucy needed to get away from him, where she could neither see nor hear him, where he couldn’t find her for a few hours even if he wanted to. She put on trousers and a sweater, a heavy coat and boots, and crept downstairs and out.

There was a swirling mist, damp and bitterly cold, the kind the island specialized in. She put up the collar of her coat, thought about going back inside for a scarf, and decided not to. She squelched along the muddy path, welcoming the bite of the fog in her throat, the small discomfort of the weather taking her mind off the larger hurt inside her.

She reached the cliff top and walked gingerly down the steep, narrow ramp, placing her feet carefully on the slippery boards. At the bottom she jumped off on the sand and walked to the edge of the sea.

The wind and the water were carrying on their perpetual quarrel, the wind swooping down to tease the waves and the sea hissing and spitting as it crashed against the land, the two of them doomed to bicker forever.

Lucy walked along the hard sand, letting the noise and the weather fill her head, until the beach ended in a sharp point where the water met the cliff, when she turned and walked back. She paced the shore all night. Toward dawn a thought came to her, unbidden: It is his way of being strong.

As it was, the thought was not much help, holding its meaning in a tightly clenched fist. But she worked on it for a while, and the fist opened to reveal what looked like a small pearl of wisdom nestling in its palm—perhaps David’s coldness to her was of one piece with his chopping down trees, and undressing himself, and driving the jeep, and throwing the Indian clubs, and coming to live on a cold cruel island in the North Sea…

What was it he had said? “…his father the war hero, a legless joke…” He had something to prove, something that would sound trite if it were put into words; something he could have done as a fighter pilot, but now had to do with trees and fences and Indian clubs and a wheelchair. They wouldn’t let him take the test, and he wanted to be able to say: “I could have passed it anyway, just
look
how I can suffer.”

It was cruelly, screamingly unjust: he had had the courage, and he had suffered the wounds, but he could take no pride in it. If a Messerschmidt had taken his legs the wheelchair would have been like a medal, a badge of courage. But now, all his life, he would have to say: “It was during the war—but no, I never saw any action, this was a car crash. I did my training and I was going to fight, the very next day, I had seen my kite, she was a beauty, and…”

Yes, it was his way of being strong. And perhaps she could be strong, too. She might find ways of patching up the wreck of her life. David had once been good and kind and loving, and she might now learn to wait patiently while he battled to become the complete man he used to be. She could find new hopes, new things to live for. Other women had found the strength to cope with bereavement, and bombed-out houses, and husbands in prisoner-of-war camps.

She picked up a pebble, drew back her arm, and threw it out to sea with all her might. She did not see or hear it land; it might have gone on forever, circling the earth like a satellite in a space story.

She shouted, “I can be strong, too, damn it.” And then she turned around and started up the ramp to the cottage. It was almost time for Jo’s first feed.

6

I
T LOOKED LIKE A MANSION, AND, UP TO A POINT,
that was what it was—a large house, in its own grounds, in the leafy town of Wohldorf just outside North Hamburg. It might have been the home of a mine owner, or a successful importer, or an industrialist. However, it was in fact owned by the Abwehr.

It owed its fate to the weather—not here, but two hundred miles southeast in Berlin, where atmospheric conditions were unsuitable for wireless communication with England.

It was a mansion only down to ground level. Below that were two huge concrete shelters and several million reichsmarks’ worth of radio equipment. The electronics system had been put together by a Major Werner Trautmann, and he did a good job. Each hall had twenty neat little soundproof listening posts, occupied by radio operators who could recognize a spy by the way he tapped out his message, as easily as you can recognize your mother’s handwriting on an envelope.

The receiving equipment was built with quality in mind, for the transmitters sending the messages had been designed for compactness rather than power. Most of them were the small suitcase-sets called Klamotten, which had been developed by Telefunken for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.

On this night the airways were relatively quiet, so every one knew when Die Nadel came through. The message was taken by one of the older operators. He tapped out an acknowledgment, transcribed the signal, quickly tore the sheet off his note pad and went to the phone. He read the message over the direct line to Abwehr headquarters at Sophien Terrace in Hamburg, then came back to his booth for a smoke.

He offered a cigarette to the youngster in the next booth, and the two of them stood together for a few minutes, leaning against the wall and smoking.

The youngster said, “Anything?”

The older man shrugged. “There’s always
something
when he calls. But not much this time. The Luftwaffe missed St. Paul’s Cathedral again.”

“No reply for him?”

“We don’t think he waits for replies. He’s an independent bastard, always was. I trained him in wireless, you know, and once I’d finished he thought he knew it better than me.”

“You’ve
met
Die Nadel? What’s he like?”

“About as much fun as a dead fish. All the same he’s the best agent we’ve got. Some say the best ever. There’s a story that he spent five years working his way up in the NKVD in Russia, and ended up one of Stalin’s most trusted aides…. I don’t know whether it’s true, but it’s the kind of thing he’d do. A real pro. And the Fuehrer knows it.”

“Hitler knows him?”

The older man nodded. “At one time he wanted to see all Die Nadel’s signals. I don’t know if he still does. Not that it would make any difference to Die Nadel. Nothing impresses that man. You know something? He looks at everybody the same way—as if he’s figuring out how he’ll kill you if you make a wrong move.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to train him.”

“He learned quickly, I’ll give him that. Worked at it twenty-four hours a day, then when he’d mastered it, he wouldn’t give me a good-morning. It takes him all his time to remember to salute Canaris. He always signs off ‘Regards to Willi.’ That’s how much he cares about rank.”

They finished their cigarettes, dropped them on the floor, and trod them out. Then the older man picked up the stubs and pocketed them, because smoking was not really permitted in the dugout. The radios were still quiet.

“Yes, he won’t use his code name,” the older man went on. “Von Braun gave it to him, and he’s never liked it. He’s never liked Von Braun either. Do you remember the time—no, it was before you joined us—Braun told Nadel to go to the airfield in Farnborough, Kent. The message came back: ‘There is no airfield in Farnborough, Kent. There is one at Farnborough, Hampshire. Fortunately the Luftwaffe’s geography is better than yours, you cunt.’ Just like that.”

“I suppose it’s understandable. When we make mistakes we put their lives on the line.”

The older man frowned. He was the one who delivered such judgments, and he did not like his audience to weigh in with opinions of its own. “Perhaps,” he said grudgingly.

“But why doesn’t he like his code name?”

“He says it has a meaning, and a code word with a meaning can give a man away. Von Braun wouldn’t listen.”

“A meaning? The Needle? What does it mean?”

But at that moment the old-timer’s radio chirped, and he returned quickly to his station, so the explanation never came.