21
WHEN FABER WOKE UP IT WAS ALMOST DARK. THROUGH the bedroom window he could see the last streaks of grey being inked out of the sky by the encroaching night. The storm had not eased; rain drummed on the roof and overflowed from a gutter, and the wind howled and gusted tirelessly.
He switched on the little lamp beside the bed. The effort tired him, and he slumped back onto the pillow. It frightened him to be this weak. Those who believe that might is right must always be mighty, and Faber was sufficiently self-aware to know the implications of his own ethics. Fear was never far from the surface of his emotions; perhaps that was why he had survived so long. He was chronically incapable of feeling safe. He understood, in that vague way in which one sometimes understands the most fundamental things about oneself, that his very insecurity was the reason he chose the profession of spy; it was the only way of life which could permit him instantly to kill anyone who posed him the slightest threat. The fear of being weak was part of the syndrome that included his obsessive independence, his insecurity, and his contempt for his military superiors.
He lay on the child’s bed in the pink-walled bedroom and inventoried his body. He seemed to be bruised just about everywhere, but apparently nothing was broken. He did not feel feverish; his constitution had withstood bronchial infection despite the night on the boat. There was just the weakness. He suspected it was more than exhaustion. He remembered a moment, as he had reached the top of the ramp, when he had thought he was going to die; and he wondered whether he had inflicted on himself some permanent damage with the last mind-bending uphill dash.
He checked his possessions too. The can of photographic negatives was still taped to his chest, the stiletto was strapped to his left arm, and his papers and money were in the jacket pocket of his borrowed pajamas.
He pushed the blankets aside and swung himself into a sitting position with his feet on the floor. A moment of dizziness came and went. He stood up. It was important not to permit himself the psychological attitudes of an invalid. He put on the dressing gown and went into the bathroom.
When he returned his own clothes were at the foot of the bed, clean and pressed: underwear, overalls and shirt. Suddenly he remembered getting up sometime during the morning and seeing the woman naked in the bathroom; it had been an odd scene and he was not sure what it meant. She was very beautiful, he recalled. He was sure of that.
He dressed slowly. He would have liked a shave, but he decided to ask his host’s permission before borrowing the blade on the bathroom shelf; some men were as possessive of their razors as they were of their wives. However, he did take the liberty of using the child’s bakelite comb he found in the top drawer of the chest.
He looked into the mirror without pride. He had no conceit. He knew that some women found him attractive, and others did not; and he assumed this was so for most men. Of course, he had had more women than most men, but he attributed this to his appetite, not to his looks. His reflection told him he was presentable, which was all he needed to know.
He left the bedroom and went slowly down the stairs. Again he felt a wave of weakness; and again he willed himself to overcome it, gripping the banister rail and placing one foot deliberately before the other until he reached the ground floor.
He paused outside the living room door and, hearing no noise, went on to the kitchen. He knocked and went in. The young couple were at the table, finishing supper.
The woman stood up when he entered. “You got up!” she said. “Are you sure you should?”
Faber permitted himself to be led to a chair. “Thank you,” he said. “You really mustn’t encourage me to pretend to be ill.”
“I don’t think you realize what a terrible experience you’ve been through,” she said. “Do you feel like food?”
“I’m imposing on you—”
“Not at all. Don’t be silly. I kept some soup hot for you.”
Faber said, “You’re so kind, and I don’t even know your names.”
“David and Lucy Rose.” She ladled soup into a bowl and placed it on the table in front of him. “Cut some bread, David, would you?”
“I’m Henry Baker.” Faber did not know why he had said that; he had no papers in that name. Henry Faber was the man the police were hunting, so he was right to have used his James Baker identity; but somehow he wanted his woman to call him Henry, the nearest English equivalent of his real name, Heinrich.
He took a sip of the soup, and suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He ate it all quickly, then the bread. When he’d finished Lucy laughed. She looked lovely when she laughed; her mouth opened wide, showing lots of even white teeth, and her eyes crinkled merrily at the corners.
“More?” she offered.
“Thank you very much.”
“I can see it doing you good. The color is coming back to your cheeks.”
Faber realized he felt physically better. He forced himself to eat his second helping more slowly, out of courtesy, but he still relished it.
David said, “How did you happen to be out in this storm?” It was the first time he had spoken.
“Don’t badger him, David…”
“It’s all right,” Faber said quickly. “I was foolish, that’s all. This is the first fishing holiday I’ve been able to have since before the war, and I just refused to let the weather spoil it. Are you a fisherman?”
David shook his head. “Sheep farmer.”
“Do you have many employees?”
“Just one, old Tom.”
“I suppose there are other sheep farms on the island.”
“No. We live at this end, Tom lives at the other end, and in between there’s nothing but sheep.”
Faber nodded. Good—very good. A woman, a cripple, a child and an old man…and he was already feeling much stronger.
“How do you contact the mainland?” Faber said.
“There’s a boat once a fortnight. It’s due this Monday but it won’t come if the storm keeps up. There’s a radio transmitter in Tom’s cottage, but we can only use that in emergencies. If I thought people might be searching for you, or if you needed urgent medical help, I should use it. But as things are I don’t feel it’s necessary. There’s little point; nobody can come to fetch you off the island until the storm clears and when that happens the boat will come anyway.”
“Of course.” Faber’s tone concealed his delight. The problem of how to contact the U-boat on Monday had been nagging at the back of his mind. He had seen an ordinary wireless set in the Roses’ living room, and he would, if necessary, have been able to rig up a transmitter from that. But the fact that this Tom had a proper radio made everything so much simpler…“What does Tom need a transmitter for?”
“He’s a member of the Royal Observer Corps. Aberdeen was bombed July of 1940. There was no air raid warning. There were fifty casualties. That was when they recruited Tom. It’s a good thing his hearing is better than his eyesight.”
“I suppose the bombers come from Norway.”
“I suppose so.”
Lucy stood up. “Let’s go into the other room.”
The two men followed her. Faber felt no weakness, no dizziness. He held the living room door for David, who wheeled himself close to the fire. Lucy offered Faber brandy. He declined. She poured one for her husband and herself.
Faber sat back and allowed himself to study them. Lucy was really quite striking: she had an oval face, wide-set eyes of an unusual, cat-like amber color and an abundance of rich, dark-red hair. Under the mannish fisherman’s sweater and baggy trousers there was the suggestion of her very good, fullish figure. Dressed up in silk stockings and, say, a cocktail sort of dress, she might be very glamorous. David was also handsome—almost pretty, except for the shadow of a very dark beard. His hair was nearly black and his skin looked Mediterranean. He would have been tall if he had had legs in proportion to his arms. Faber suspected that those arms might be powerful, muscled from years of pushing the wheels of the chair.
An attractive couple—but there was something badly wrong between them. Faber was no expert on marriage, but his training in interrogation techniques had taught him to read the silent language of the body—to know, from small gestures, when someone was frightened, confident, hiding something, or lying. Lucy and David rarely looked at one another, and never touched. They spoke to him more than to each other. They circled one another, like turkeys trying to keep in front of them a few square feet of vacant territory. The tension between them was enormous. They were like Churchill and Stalin, obliged temporarily to fight side by side, fiercely suppressing a deeper enmity. Faber wondered what the trauma was that lay at the back of their distance. This cozy little house must be an emotional pressure cooker, despite its rugs and its bright paintwork, its floral armchairs and blazing fires and framed watercolors. To live alone, with only an old man and a child for company, with this thing between them…it reminded him of a play he had seen in London, by an American called Tennessee something—
Abruptly, David swallowed his drink and said, “I must turn in. My back’s playing up.”
Faber got to his feet. “I’m sorry—I’ve been keeping you up.”
David waved him down. “Not at all. You’ve been asleep all day—you won’t want to go back to bed right away. Besides, Lucy would like to chat, I’m sure. It’s just that I mistreat my back—backs were designed to share the load with the legs, you know.”
Lucy said, “You’d better take two pills tonight then.” She took a bottle from the top shelf of the bookcase, shook out two tablets and gave them to her husband.
He swallowed them dry. “I’ll say good night.” He wheeled himself out.
“Good night, David.”
“Good night, Mr. Rose.”
After a moment Faber heard David dragging himself up the stairs, and wondered just how he did it.
Lucy spoke, as if to cover the sound of David. “Where do you live, Mr. Baker?”
“Please call me Henry. I live in London.”
“I haven’t been to London for years. There’s probably not much of it left.”
“It’s changed, but not as much as you might think. When were you last there?”
“Nineteen-forty.” She poured herself another brandy. “Since we came here, I’ve only been off the island once, and that was to have the baby. One can’t travel much these days, can one?”
“What made you come here?”
“Um.” She sat down, sipped her drink, and looked into the fire.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t—”
“It’s all right. We had an accident the day we got married. That’s how David lost his legs. He’d been training as a fighter pilot…we both wanted to run away, I think. I believe it was a mistake, but, as they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“It’s a reason for a healthy man to feel resentment.”
She gave him a sharp look. “You’re a perceptive man.”
“It’s obvious.” He spoke very quietly. “So is your unhappiness.”
She blinked nervously. “You see too much.”
“It’s not difficult. Why do you continue, if it’s not working?”
“I don’t know quite what to tell you”—or herself, for talking so openly to him. “Do you want clichés? The way he was before…the vows of marriage…the child…the war…If there’s another answer, I can’t find good words for it.”
“Maybe guilt,” Faber said. “But you’re thinking of leaving him, aren’t you?”
She stared at him, slowly shaking her head. “How do you know so much?”
“You’ve lost the art of dissembling in four years on this island. Besides, these things are so much simpler from the outside.”
“Have you ever been married?”
“No. That’s what I mean.”
“Why not?…I think you ought to be.”
It was Faber’s turn to look away, into the fire. Why not, indeed? His stock answer—to himself—was his profession. But of course he could not tell her that, and anyway it was too glib. “I don’t trust myself to love anyone that much.” The words had come out without forethought—he was astonished to note—and he wondered whether they were true. A moment later he wondered how Lucy had got past his guard, when he had thought he was disarming her.
Neither of them spoke for a while. The fire was dying. A few stray raindrops found their way down the chimney and hissed in the cooling coals. The storm showed no sign of letting up. Faber found himself thinking of the last woman he had had. What was her name? Gertrud. It was seven years ago, but he could picture her now in the flickering fire: a round German face, fair hair, green eyes, beautiful breasts, much-too-wide hips, fat legs, bad feet; the conversational style of an express train, a wild, inexhaustible enthusiasm for sex…. She had flattered him, admiring his mind (she said) and adoring his body (she had no need to tell him). She wrote lyrics for popular songs, and read them to him in a poor basement flat in Berlin; it was not a lucrative profession. He visualized her now in that untidy bedroom, lying naked, urging him to do more bizarre and erotic things with her, to hurt her, to touch himself, to lie completely still while she made love to him…. He shook his head slightly to brush away the memories. He had not thought like that in all the years he had been celibate. Such visions were disturbing. He looked at Lucy.
“You were far away,” she said with a smile.
“Memories,” he said. “This talk of love…”
“I shouldn’t burden you.”
“You’re not.”
“Good memories?”
“Very good. And yours? You were thinking too.”
She smiled again. “I was in the future, not the past.”
“What do you see there?”
She seemed about to answer, then changed her mind. It happened twice. There were signs of tension about her eyes.
“I see you finding another man,” Faber said. As he spoke he was thinking, Why am I doing this? “He is a weaker man than David, and less handsome, but it’s at least partly for his weakness that you love him. He’s clever, but not rich; compassionate without being sentimental; tender, loving—”
The brandy glass in her hand shattered under the pressure of her grip. The fragments fell into her lap and onto the carpet, and she ignored them. Faber crossed to her chair and knelt in front of her. Her thumb was bleeding. He took her hand.
“You’ve hurt yourself.”
She looked at him. She was crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The cut was superficial. She took a handkerchief from her trousers pocket and staunched the blood. Faber released her hand and began to pick up the pieces of broken glass, wishing he had kissed her when he’d had the chance. He put the shards on the mantel.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. (Didn’t he?)
She took away the handkerchief and looked at her thumb. It was still bleeding. (Yes, you did. And, God knows, you have.)
“A bandage,” he suggested.
“In the kitchen.”
He found a roll of bandage, a pair of scissors, and a safety pin. He filled a small bowl with hot water and returned to the living room.
In his absence she had somehow obliterated the evidence of tears on her face. She sat passively, limp, while he bathed her thumb in the hot water, dried it, and put a small strip of bandage over the cut. She looked all the time at his face, not at his hands; but her expression was unreadable.
He finished the job and stood back abruptly. This was silly: he had taken the thing too far. Time to disengage. “I think I’d better go to bed,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry—”
“Stop apologizing,” she told him. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Her tone was harsh. He guessed that she, too, felt the thing had got out of hand.
“Are you staying up?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Well…” He followed her through the hall and up the stairs, and he watched her climb, her hips moving gently.
At the top of the stairs, on the tiny landing, she turned and said in a low voice, “Good night.”
“Good night, Lucy.”
She looked at him for a moment. He reached for her hand, but she turned quickly away, entering her bedroom and closing the door without a backward look, leaving him standing there, wondering what was in her mind and—more to the point—what was really in his.