Restless - Boyd William - Страница 62
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Blytheswood was dozing, his head repeatedly nodding forward then abruptly jerking up as he regained consciousness. Eva leant forward and placed her hand on his shoulder.
'Don't turn round, Alfie,' she said, softly in his ear. 'You know who it is.'
Blytheswood was completely rigid and completely awake.
'Eve,' he said. 'Bloody hell. I can't believe it.' He moved to turn his head reflexively but she stopped him with her palm on his cheek.
'If you don't turn round, then you can honestly say you haven't seen me.'
He nodded. 'Right, yes, yes, that would be best.'
'What do you know about me?'
'They said you'd flown. Morris killed himself and you flew away.'
'That's right. Did they tell you why?'
'They said you and Morris were ghosts.'
'It's all lies, Alfie. If I was a ghost do you think I'd be sitting on this bus, talking to you?'
'No… No, I suppose not.'
'Morris was killed because he'd found something out. I was meant to be killed too. I'd be dead now if I hadn't flown.'
She could see him struggling with his desire to turn and look at her. She was fully aware of the risks involved in this contact but there were certain things she had to find out and Blytheswood was the only person she could ask.
'Have you heard from Angus or Sylvia?' she asked.
Blytheswood tried to swivel his head again but she stopped him with her fingertips.
'You don't know?'
'Know what?'
'That they're dead.'
She jolted visibly at this news, as if the bus had braked suddenly. She felt suddenly sick, saliva flowing into her mouth as if she were about to gag or vomit.
'My God,' she said, trying to take this in. 'How? What happened?'
'They were in a flying boat, a Sunderland, shot down between Lisbon and Poole Harbour. They were flying back from the States. Everyone on the plane was killed. Sixteen, eighteen people, I think.'
'When did this happen?'
'Early January. Some general was on board. Didn't you read about it?'
She remembered something, vaguely – but of course Angus Woolf and Sylvia Rhys-Meyer wouldn't have been mentioned among the casualties.
'Jerries were waiting for them. Bay of Biscay, somewhere.'
She was thinking: Morris, Angus, Sylvia. And there should have been me too. AAS Ltd was being rolled up. She had flown and disappeared; that left only Blytheswood.
'You should be all right, Alfie,' she said. 'You left early.'
'What do you mean?'
'We're being rolled up, aren't we? It's only because I flew that I'm still here. There's only you and me left.'
'There's still Mr Romer. No, no, I can't believe that, Eve. Us being rolled up? Just bad luck, surely.'
He was wishful-thinking. She knew he could read the signs as well as she could.
'Have you heard from Mr Romer?' she said.
'No, actually, as a matter of fact I haven't.'
'Be very careful, Alfie, if you hear that Mr Romer wants to meet you.' She said this without thinking and she immediately regretted it as she could see Blytheswood's head instantly shaking slightly as he ran through the implications of her remark. For all that he had been part of AAS Ltd for several years, Blytheswood was essentially an immensely skilled radio operator, an electrical engineer of some genius; these kind of complexities – dark nuances, sudden contradictions in the established order of things – disturbed him, made no sense, Eva could tell.
'I've got a lot of time for Mr Romer,' he said finally, with a bit of petulance in his voice, as if he were a loyal estate worker being asked to pass judgement on the lord of the manor.
Eva realised she couldn't leave it like this. 'Just…' she paused, thinking fast, 'just don't ever tell him we've had this conversation or you'll be as dead as the others,' she said, her voice harsh.
He took this in, his head slightly bowed now, his shoulders slumped, not wanting this information at all, and Eva saw her opportunity and was out of her seat and down the stairs before he had time to turn round to see her go. The bus was slowing for some traffic lights and she jumped off and ran into a newsagent's. Blytheswood, had he looked, would have seen the back of a woman in a beret, nothing more. She watched the bus pull away from the lights but he didn't get off. Let's hope he took me seriously, she thought, wondering all the same if she'd made a bad mistake. The worst, the very worst, that could happen was that Romer would know for sure that she was now back in England, but that was all, and in any event he was probably working with that possibility in mind – nothing had really changed – except that she knew now about Angus and Sylvia. And she thought about them both, and the times they had shared, and she remembered, with bitterness, the vow she had made to herself in Canada and how it hardened her resolve. She bought an evening paper to discover the latest news of the air raids and the casualty figures.
The convoy had left St John, New Brunswick, on 18 January 1942, as planned. It was a stormy crossing but, apart from the bad weather, uneventful. There were twenty passengers on their ex-Belgian cargo ship – the SS Brazzaville – carrying aero-engines and steel girders: five government secretaries from Ottawa transferring to the London embassy, half a dozen officers from the Royal Regiment of Canada and an assortment of diplomatic staff. The heaving ocean kept most of the passengers to their cabins. Eva shared hers with an inordinately tall girl from the Department of Mines, called Cecily Fontaine, who needed to vomit every half-hour, as it turned out. By day Eva spent her time in the cramped 'staterooms' trying to read, and for three nights managed to claim one of the two empty beds in the Brazzaville's sick bay before a stoker with a grumbling appendix drove her back to Cecily. From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky, the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smokestacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells – disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time – gamely making for the British Isles.
The first day out of St John they did their life-jacket evacuation drill and Eva hoped she'd never have to trust her person to those two canvas-covered cork-filled pillows she slipped over her head. The few seasickness survivors gathered in the mess under naked light bulbs to eat horrible tinned food three times a day. Eva marvelled at her redoubtability: four days into the voyage, only three of them were mustering for meals. One night a particularly large wave wrenched one of the Brazzaville 's lifeboats from its davits and it proved impossible to winch it back into its original position. The Brazzaville slipped back through the convoy because of the lifeboat's drag until – after furious signalling between the accompanying destroyers – it was cut free and allowed to drift away into the Atlantic. The thought struck Eva that if this unmanned lifeboat was found drifting wouldn't it be assumed that its mother ship had gone down? Perhaps this could be the little bit of luck she was looking for. She did not rest her hopes upon it, however.
They arrived at Gourock eight days later just before sunset and, as the sulphurous peachy light illuminated their surroundings, they found themselves docking in a harbour-graveyard of scuttled, listing and damaged ships, masts askew, funnels missing, bleak testimony to the U-boat gauntlet that they had managed to run unscathed. Eva disembarked with her pale and shaky colleagues and they were taken by bus into Glasgow 's Central Station. She was tempted to leave them there and then but decided that a discreet departure overnight en route to London would be more efficacious. So she stepped off the sleeper at Peterborough, leaving her sleeping colleagues unaware, and carefully positioning a note for Cecily, saying that she was going to visit an aunt in Hull and would rejoin them in London. She doubted she would be missed for a day or two and so caught the next train for London and headed directly for Battersea and Mrs Dangerfield.
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