Gifts of War (49 page)
Authors: Mackenzie Ford
“Hal has a point, Colonel,” said the brigadier quietly. “He
did
expose Genevieve Afton, she
was
executed, and he
has
himself killed another traitor since then, on the instructions of the prime minister. His loyalty is not in doubt. At the highest levels.”
The colonel didn’t say anything for a while. “Yes, he told his wife he was going to Switzerland, when he shouldn’t have done. Another black mark.” A pause. “Brigadier, you are ultimately responsible for this audit of the war. It would be … disastrous if the main author of that audit turned out to be… well, a traitor. Are you quite happy with this man?”
“Yes,” said Malahyde quietly. “I am. I have no doubts.”
Another silence. Then: “Very well, sir. Since you vouch for him, I will take no further action. A report of the matter will, however, remain on his file—is that clear?”
I nodded.
“Please,” he said, getting up, “the Official Secrets Act means what it says. Wives and girlfriends are off-limits. It would be embarrassing— worse than embarrassing, much worse—if you were caught again.”
I nodded and he left.
The brigadier walked with me back to my office. “I once told my wife something I shouldn’t have.”
I looked at him. “And?”
“She comes from a very old, diplomatic family—ambassadors, private secretaries, that sort of thing. Used to running the country. She said that if I did it again, she’d divorce me.” His eyes twinkled. “It was very tempting.”
After its summer break, Miss Allardyce’s school got going again in September. In the second week, the headmistress held a cocktail party to meet all the parents. Because the school didn’t accept children until they were three, Will hadn’t been able to attend until the spring, so we had been ineligible for the party the year before.
The school, when we reached it, was in reality little more than a four-story house with large gardens front and back. The front garden looked directly onto the road: Queensgate.
Parents and children were scattered all over the house. Sherry and beer were offered, plus lemonade and, of course, water. Sam had a sherry; I stuck to beer. In the course of meeting several sets of fellow parents, I lost sight of both Will and Sam and was surprised when a small, wiry, and very energetic gray-haired woman buttonholed me. I guessed she was Miss Allardyce herself.
She was wearing a woolen three-piece with a set of expensive-looking pearls at her neck. Were we paying too much in fees, I wondered.
“You must be Mr. Ross,” she virtually shouted at me, fixing me with the sort of stare a teacher reserves for a miscreant child.
I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about and was about to deny it when I saw movement off to my left as Sam’s head jerked round in
my direction. She had heard Miss Allardyce and knew what she meant before I did. Sam came toward us.
“Er … yes,” I muttered eventually. “That’s right.” It had been so long since we had used Sam’s maiden name that I had all but forgotten it.
Sam joined us.
“He’s a bright boy, your Will,” Miss Allardyce said. “I can see the family resemblance,” she added, looking at me. “He’s a natural leader, you know. The army would suit him very well as a career.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little early?” I said as forcefully as I could without sounding rude. “He’s only three and a bit.”
“Yes, but you can always encourage the little ones. They never forget what they learn early on.” And she was gone; there were other parents to meet.
Sam looked at me. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should have warned you. When I brought him here, to register, I never thought… I thought it might burden you if I used your name.”
“You’d better make up your mind soon,” I replied sourly. “His name is going to mean a lot to him before long. You’d better decide what it is.” And I walked off.
But not far. There was a commotion in the front garden. The children were crowding by the fence, with some of the parents standing not far off. It soon became clear what they were looking at. Some grenadiers were marching in the road, the scarlet stripes down their gray trousers very vivid in the sunshine. As they drew abreast of the school, and with a stylish flourish, the sergeant major at the front of the men suddenly barked out, “Eyes right!”
As one, the soldiers turned their heads to acknowledge the schoolchildren.
Some of the boys, impressed by this, uncertainly saluted back to the men. Will was one of them.
“Eyes front!” The grenadiers marched on and out of sight.
I turned. Sam was standing behind Will. She looked at me, mouthed that she was going home, and pulled down Will’s arm, the one that was saluting, so that she could lead him away.
Dearest Hal
,
News of an “incident.” An incident that would make a good report in my new “career” as a journalist (I still haven’t told Alan)
.
We were working well behind the lines the other day, in a lull in the fighting, taking the opportunity to clean our kit and do other maintenance jobs, when a Frenchman appeared. He was in his thirties and told us he was a doctor from the nearby village of A. How he had evaded our security system I don’t know, but he had. He was in a state. He said that his wife had just given birth a short while before and that she had hemorrhaged and lost a lot of blood—could we help? He had obviously heard something about blood transfusion and our unit, but at that moment the military police turned up, together with the local commanding officer. They arrested the doctor—or at least they tried to. As they moved toward him, to take hold of him, he pulled out a gun—a pistol. Standoff. In no time at all, there we were in a small tableau: the doctor pointing his gun at Alan, and the military police, three of them, pointing their guns at the Frenchman
.
The commanding officer said we couldn’t let him have any blood—it was reserved for military use. The doctor replied that we were in France and that we were all fighting to preserve France and the French way of life, that we were guests in his country, and allies. However, I am making it sound all rather more polite than it actually was—the exchange was very heated. Alan let it go on for a while, until the argument had more or less run its course, then said that he sided with the doctor, that there was a lull in the fighting and that two or three pints of blood would not affect the war effort one way or the other
.
He then took some bottles of blood and stepped in front of the doctor, so he was acting as a human shield. He said that he was going to leave, with the doctor, and walk to A. if need be, to help with the transfusion. He was a doctor, he said, and if he could save this woman’s life he would
.
It was very dramatic. Alan and the Frenchman walked past the three guns and on toward the village. No one did anything to stop them. I ran after them and the three of us hurried unchallenged into A
.
When we got there, the woman was dead. She had bled to death while we were arguing. The baby, a boy, amazingly, was alive but there was nothing we could do for the mother. We did what we could to console the doctor, who was also the father, of course. Then Alan and I returned the way we had come
.
When we were a few hundred yards from the village we heard two shots. You can guess the pitiful truth: the doctor had killed himself and the baby
.
So now we have made enemies of the local villagers
.
When people think that wars are black-and-white things, that there is good on one side only and bad on the other side, how wrong they are. War throws up these confused situations in profusion. I was proud of Alan, that he did what he did, but it took it out of him. He has been on at me, saying we should get married. The romantic in him says that a marriage in wartime, at the Front, would be something very poignant. I tell him no. I want to get married in our tiny church in Edgewater, with my parents there and my lovely brother, with lots of flowers, masses of hymns, and our mother’s sisters in their awful frocks. Weren’t you sweet on one of the vicar’s daughters at one stage? I remember you always used to go bright pink whenever she was near. Maybe you didn’t notice but the rest of us did!!
Speaking of Ma, I also think, secretly, that having a wedding in Edgewater will give her something to hold out for—I hope so anyway
.
She wrote me a rather tough letter the other day, asking if I felt any responsibility for the death of Alan’s wife. All I can say is that I was to blame at some level, but I never wanted Alan to tell his wife about us; he didn’t need to, not yet anyway. I will have to meet the children at some stage, I expect, and that won’t be easy. But an Edgewater wedding is what I think about most now. With the Germans on one side, and now the hostile villagers of A. on the other, I badly need to get back to the peace and friendliness of home
.
But… the war is almost over, or it looks like it. What a time it has been for all of us. I now see why our side is called the “Allies.” Will we still be friends when the peace comes?
This is far too serious for a letter
.
Who do you think I should choose as bridesmaids?
Huge love: xxxooo
Izzy
“You’ve got a letter.” Nadia, my assistant, was standing over me, a cup of coffee in one hand, an envelope in the other.
“You make it sound unusual.”
“This one is. It’s not internal; it’s from the great unwashed public.”
I saw what she meant. Being in a top-secret unit, we got all our post from other departments of government—the few departments that knew we existed—and it arrived via the internal, civil service, Whitehall-based postal service. The envelope Nadia was holding was white rather than brown, had what looked like a normal postmark and stamp, and had been slit open by the censor.
“If it got through the censor, it can’t be very important,” I said. I held out my hand and she passed it to me.
I slid my finger into the envelope and took out what was inside. I looked at the signature first: it was from Lottie. Why was she writing to me, and why was she writing to me
here?
I took the cup of coffee that Nadia had made me and settled down with the letter. Its thrust was, as she put it partway through, a “double olive branch.” The first item of news was that Faye was getting married. Being Faye, it was a whirlwind romance, with an actor she had met through, of all people, Lottie; the two sisters were friends again. Faye had seen Sam and me at Ruth’s engagement party, felt ill at ease in not talking to us, and wanted to resume “normal relations,” as Lottie put it. Therefore, we were invited to Faye’s wedding, to be held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields three weeks hence; afterward there would be a party on the stage of the theater where her actor fiancé was appearing. Faye wasn’t sure what reception she would receive if she approached Sam directly, so she had asked Lottie to intervene with me.
At the same time, Lottie said, she was offering an olive branch of her own. She was sorry, she wrote, for the things she had said outside our flat that day when Sam had not allowed her in. She was sorry, she said, because they weren’t true; she’d just been “hitting out” at Sam because Sam wouldn’t forgive her.
“Some of what I said was true,” she wrote. “Like the fact that, yes, I always did have a soft spot for you and, had we met under different circumstances, what fun we might have had. But I had no right to say what I said about Sam. Of course, I do know her better than you—at least, I have known her far longer. But she never discussed you and your life together with me, and I never asked, please believe that, Hal. I said what I said out of spite and I am sorry and ashamed and, for the second time, ask you to forgive me. I hope I will see you at the wedding.”
I sat, sipping my coffee and rereading Lottie’s letter. The business with Faye’s wedding posed no problems. Sam would either agree to go or she wouldn’t. The rest of the letter, however, was far from straightforward and posed as many problems as it attempted to solve. First
off, did I believe Lottie? Had she undergone a genuine change of heart, and was what she was saying now a truer version of events than what she had told me—in a heated exchange—outside Penrith Mansions? If so, why had she changed her tune, and why now? I had no idea. I did know that part of her letter was demonstrably untrue. Sam had discussed our life together with her sisters, because I had overheard them the night Will couldn’t sleep, after the party for Reg. Second, what was I going to say to Sam? If I said that I had received a letter from Lottie at the office, she would think that very odd and she would want to see it, and I didn’t want that. But if I didn’t show her the letter, how had I come by the information that Faye was to be married and that we were invited? I couldn’t duck that.
Lottie had landed me in it.
As the week went on, I couldn’t decide what to do. On Thursday, Sam said, “Will’s playing in a school football game on Saturday. He wants you to take him and to stay and watch. I have things to do. Do you mind?”
“Of course not,” I said.
But the very next day, when I came home in the evening, after she had poured me a whisky, Sam took me to one side, away from Will. “Saturday’s game is off.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Oh, Hal. I went to see the headmistress, Miss Allardyce herself. It’s the first time Will’s been selected and they type out the team sheets for these games and post them on the school notice board. Knowing that, I said to the headmistress that Will’s name wasn’t Ross but Montgomery. She asked me how that could be—and I told her. That we aren’t married, I mean.”
Sam looked at me. “She was shocked. Shocked and very upset. Spitting fire. She said I had cheated and she’s asked me to take Will out of the school.” Sam was close to tears. “I feel so wretched—it’s all my fault, and Will is going to be devastated.” She looked distraught.
I thought for a bit. “The game is the easy part. I’ll take him to a proper game—you know, at Woolwich Arsenal or Tottenham. He’ll be thrilled and that will take his mind off what was going to happen.”
