29
LYING ON ITS SIDE, THE JEEP LOOKED POWERFUL BUT helpless, like a wounded elephant. The engine had stalled. Faber gave it a hefty push and it toppled majestically onto all four wheels. It had survived the fight relatively undamaged. The canvas roof was destroyed, of course; the rip Faber’s knife had made had become a long tear running from one side to the other. The offside front fender, which had ploughed into the earth and stopped the vehicle, was crumpled. The headlight on that side had smashed. The window on the same side had been broken by the shot from the gun. The windshield was miraculously intact.
Faber climbed into the driver’s seat, put the gearshift into neutral and tried the starter. It kicked over and died. He tried again, and the engine fired. He was grateful for that, he could not have faced a long walk.
He sat in the car for a while, inventorying his wounds. He gingerly touched his right ankle; it was swelling massively. Perhaps he had cracked a bone. It was as well that the jeep was designed to be driven by a man with no legs, Faber could not have pressed a brake pedal. The lump on the back of his head felt huge, at least the size of a golf ball; when he touched it his hand came away sticky with blood. He examined his face in the rear-view mirror. It was a mass of small cuts and big bruises, like the face of the loser at the end of a boxing match.
He had abandoned his oilskin back at the cottage, so his jacket and overalls were soggy with rain and smeared with mud. He needed to get warm and dry very soon.
He gripped the steering wheel—a burning pain shot through his hand; he had forgotten the torn fingernail. He looked at it. It was the nastiest of his injuries. He would have to drive with one hand.
He pulled away slowly and found what he guessed was the road. There was no danger of getting lost on this island—all he had to do was follow the cliff edge until he came to Lucy’s cottage.
He needed to invent a lie to explain to Lucy what had become of her husband. She wouldn’t have heard the shotgun so far away, he knew. He might, of course, tell her the truth; there was nothing she could do about it. However, if she became difficult he might have to kill her, and he had an aversion to that. Driving slowly along the cliff top through the pouring rain and howling wind, he marveled at this new thing inside him, this scruple. It was the first time he had ever felt reluctance to kill. It was not that he was amoral—to the contrary. He had made up his mind that the killing he did was on the same moral level as death on the battlefield, and his emotions followed his intellect. He always had the physical reaction, the vomiting, after he killed, but that was something incomprehensible that he ignored.
So why did he not want to kill Lucy?
The feeling was on a par, he decided, with the affection that drove him to send the Luftwaffe erroneous directions to St. Paul’s Cathedral: a compulsion to protect a thing of beauty. She was a remarkable creation, as full of loveliness and subtlety as any work of art. Faber could live with himself as a killer, but not as an iconoclast. It was, he recognized as soon as the thought occurred to him, a peculiar way to be. But then, spies were peculiar people.
He thought of some of the spies who had been recruited by the Abwehr at the same time he had been: Otto, the Nordic giant who made delicate paper sculptures in the Japanese fashion and hated women; Friedrich, the sly little mathematical genius who jumped at shadows and went into a five-day depression if he lost a game of chess; Helmut, who liked to read books about slavery in America and had soon joined the SS…all different, all peculiar. If they had anything more specific in common, he did not know what it was.
He seemed to be driving more and more slowly, and the rain and mist became more impenetrable. He began to worry about the cliff edge on his left-hand side. He felt very hot, but suffered spasms of shivering. He realized he had been speaking aloud about Otto and Friedrich and Helmut, and he recognized the signs of delirium. He made an effort to think of nothing but the problem of keeping the jeep on a straight course. The noise of the wind took on some kind of rhythm, becoming hypnotic. Once he found himself stationary, staring out over the sea, and had no idea how long ago he had stopped.
It seemed hours later that Lucy’s cottage came into view. He steered toward it, thinking, I must remember to put the brake on before I hit the wall. There was a figure standing in the doorway, looking out at him through the rain. He had to stay in control of himself long enough to tell her the lie. He had to remember, had to remember…
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time the jeep came back. Lucy was worried about what had happened to the men, and at the same time angry with them for not coming home for the lunch she had prepared. As the day waned she had spent more and more time at the windows, looking out for them.
When the jeep came down the slight slope to the cottage it was clear something was wrong. It was moving terribly slowly, on a zigzag course, and there was only one person in it. It came closer, and she saw that the front was dented and the headlight smashed.
“Oh, God.”
The vehicle shuddered to a halt in front of the cottage, and she saw that the figure inside was Henry. He made no move to get out. Lucy ran out into the rain and opened the driver’s door.
He sat there with his head back and his eyes half-closed. His hand was on the brake. His face was bloody and bruised.
“What happened? What happened?”
His hand slipped off the brake, and the jeep moved forward. Lucy leaned across him and slipped the gearshift into neutral.
“Left David at Tom’s cottage…had crash on way back…” The words seemed to cost him a great effort.
Now that she knew what had happened, Lucy’s panic subsided. “Come inside,” she said sharply. The urgency in her voice got through to him. He turned toward her, put his foot on the running board to step down, and promptly fell to the ground. Lucy saw that his ankle was swollen like a balloon.
She got her hands under his shoulders and pulled him upright. “Put your weight on the other foot and lean on me.” She got his right arm around her neck and half-carried him inside.
Jo watched wide-eyed as she helped Henry into the living room and got him onto the sofa. He lay back with his eyes shut. His clothes were soaked and muddy.
Lucy said, “Jo, go upstairs and get your pajamas on, please.”
“But I haven’t had my story. Is he dead?”
“He’s not dead, he’s had a car crash and you can’t have a story tonight. Go on.”
The child made a complaining sound, and Lucy looked threateningly at him. He went.
Lucy got the big scissors out of her sewing basket and cut Henry’s clothes away: first the jacket, then the overalls, then the shirt. She frowned in puzzlement when she saw the knife in its sheath strapped to his left forearm; she guessed it was a special implement for cleaning fish or something. When she tried to take it off, he pushed her hand away. She shrugged and turned to her attention to his boots. The left one came off easily, and its sock; but he cried out in pain when she touched the right.
“It must come off,” she told him. “You’ll have to be brave.”
A funny kind of smile came over his face, then, and he nodded. She cut the laces, took the shoe gently but firmly in both hands and pulled it off. This time he made no sound. She cut the elastic in the sock and pulled that off too.
Jo came in. “He’s in his pants!”
“His clothes are all wet.” She kissed the boy good night. “Put yourself to bed, darling. I’ll tuck you up later.”
“Kiss teddy, then.”
“Good night, teddy.”
Jo went out. Lucy looked back to Henry. His eyes were open, and he was smiling. He said, “Kiss Henry, then.”
She leaned over him and kissed his battered face. Then carefully she cut away his underpants.
The heat from the fire would quickly dry his naked skin. She went into the kitchen and filled a bowl with warm water and a little antiseptic to bathe his wounds. She found a roll of absorbent cotton and returned to the living room.
“This is the second time you’ve turned up on the doorstep half dead,” she said as she set about her task.
“The usual signal,” Henry said. The words came abruptly.
“What?”
“Waiting-at-Calais-for-a-phantom-army…”
“Henry, what are you talking about?”
“Every-Friday-and-Monday…”
She finally realized he was delirious. “Don’t try to talk,” she said. She lifted his head slightly to clean away the dried blood from around the bump.
Suddenly he sat upright, looked fiercely at her, and said, “What day is it? What day is it?”
“It’s Sunday, relax.”
“Okay.”
He was quiet after that, and he let her remove the knife. She bathed his face, bandaged his finger where he had lost the nail and put a dressing on his ankle. When she had finished she stood looking at him for a while. He seemed to be sleeping. She touched the long scar on his chest, and the star-shaped mark on his hip. The star was a birthmark, she decided.
She went through his pockets before throwing the lacerated clothes away. There wasn’t much: some money, his papers, a leather wallet and a film can. She put them all in a little pile on the mantelpiece beside his fish knife. He would have to have some of David’s clothes.
She left him and went upstairs to see to Jo. The boy was asleep, lying on his teddy bear with his arms outflung. She kissed his soft cheek and tucked him in. She went outside and put the jeep in the barn.
She made herself a drink in the kitchen, then sat watching Henry, wishing he would wake up and make love to her again.
IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when he woke. He opened his eyes, and his face showed the series of expressions that were now familiar to her: first the fear, then the wary survey of the room, then the relaxation. On impulse, she asked him, “What are you afraid of, Henry?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You always look frightened when you wake up.”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, and the movement seemed to hurt. “God, I’m battered.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Yes, if you’ll give me a drink of brandy.”
She got the brandy out of the cupboard. “You can have some of David’s clothes.”
“In a minute…unless you’re embarrassed.”
She handed him the glass, smiling. “I’m afraid I’m enjoying it.”
“What happened to my clothes?”
“I had to cut them off you. I’ve thrown them away.”
“Not my papers, I hope.” He smiled, but there was some other emotion just below the surface.
“On the mantelpiece.” She pointed. “Is the knife for cleaning fish or something?”
His right hand went to his left forearm, where the sheath had been. “Something like that,” he said. He seemed uneasy for a moment, then relaxed with an effort and sipped his drink. “That’s good.”
After a moment she said, “Well?”
“What?”
“How did you manage to lose my husband and crash my jeep?”
“David decided to stay over at Tom’s for the night. Some of the sheep got into trouble in a place they call The Gully—”
“I know it.”
“—and six or seven of them were injured. They’re all in Tom’s kitchen being bandaged up and making a terrible row. Anyway, David suggested I come back to tell you he would be staying. I don’t really know how I managed to crash. The car is unfamiliar, there’s no real road, I hit something and went into a skid and the jeep ended up on its side. The details…” He shrugged.
“You must have been going quite fast—you were in an awful mess when you got here.”
“I suppose I rattled around inside the jeep a bit. Banged my head, twisted my ankle…”
“Lost a fingernail, bashed your face, and almost caught pneumonia. You must be accident-prone.”
He swung his legs to the floor, stood up and went to the mantelpiece.
“Your powers of recuperation are incredible,” she said.
He was strapping the knife to his arm. “We fishermen are very healthy. What about those clothes?”
She got up and stood close to him. “What do you need clothes for? It’s bedtime.”
He drew her to him, pressing her against his naked body, and kissed her hard. She stroked his thighs.
After a while he broke away from her. He picked up his things from the mantelpiece, took her hand, then, hobbling, he led her upstairs to bed.