Chapter 78
Cook lay in bed, the American journalist asleep beside him.
He’d made a mistake. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt the fact of it.
It wasn’t the sex. He wasn’t a puritan, and if a beautiful woman wanted him to spend the night in her luxury hotel room he felt it was perfectly reasonable of him to take her up on the offer.
But the feeling was there, whether it was logical or not.
Something felt wrong.
He thought back through the day. Taking the bus through the city, retracing the route the girl from the Lyons would have taken.
Perhaps that was it – getting into the head of a girl who was almost definitely dead.
Showing up at her home, sharing his thoughts with her parents as if he had any right to intrude on their lives.
Shattering their dreams that perhaps their daughter had walked a different way home, taken a different bus.
Met a chap, perhaps. Walked into a recruiting office and signed up for a war job that had meant she’d been spirited away to the country there and then, hush-hush and all that.
Fantasies her parents would have been spinning, rather than face the truth.
Meanwhile, he’d been spinning the same story about Ruby – making up an elaborate work-around, designing a world in which she hadn’t been killed by a German bomb.
Some kind of desire to be the hero, Cook suspected.
A life of solving problems when they came along, a pattern of expectation teaching him he had the power to over-write what the world had planned, whether it was him walking out of the trenches alive, when so many had fallen, or turning the farm around, when so many were failing.
Get lucky a few times, and you start to think it’s you who makes the luck.
Who’d said that? Was it Blakeney, his old CO?
Of course, there was the postcard. But that could have been written by someone else, despite Gracie’s faith in it being a coded message.
But who knew enough to know they needed to send it? For all everyone knew, Ruby was dead.
Perhaps it was Gracie who was reading too much into things. The simplest answer was that Ruby really was at the coast with a boyfriend. The odds were she’d walk into the pub in a few days’ time.
Cook slipped out of bed and dressed quietly. He needed to think, and he thought best when he was walking.
*
He breathed more easily as soon as he left the hotel.
He took a left into the park. Suddenly it felt important to have the grass under his feet, to be amongst the trees.
Instinctively, he headed for the deepest reaches of what could pass as a small wood, where a gentle slope gave the impression of the countryside, and the trees blocked out most of the city.
In the darkness, amongst the trees, he realised others had sought the same escape. Bodies rustled in the autumn leaves, some sleeping, some coupling. He walked on, to the far end of the park, crossed the road.
Hyde Park was larger. Wilder. All he could see was grass and trees. His kind of country.
Cook walked for five minutes, through grass that grew less manicured. As he walked, he became aware of someone following him. He slowed his pace, and his follower slowed. They were good, whoever they were, silent as they walked through the long grass, hardly more than a whisper of leaf on stalk.
He was completely cut off from the city. Cook wouldn’t have believed it, but here he was, in the heart of London, and all he could see on every horizon was the dark silhouette of grassland and trees. He could have been out in his own fields.
Time to deal with his shadow. He made for a thicket of trees – a wall of darkness against the glowing sky.
Even before he reached it, he’d be invisible to anyone behind him.
He dropped to the ground and crawled sideways, through the long grass.
If his pursuer followed in his footsteps, he’d see them against the sky.
Cook lay in the grass. He could smell damp earth and dry leaves. The smell of England, in autumn. A faint hint of coal-smoke from the invisible city, and fainter still, an acrid smell, from the burning docks. Or perhaps that was his imagination, filling gaps, telling stories.
He couldn’t hear the other man. It had been a minute since he’d last heard the crunch of a leaf or even the whisper of grass. Perhaps he’d been wrong. Imagining enemies. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Give it another minute. Worst case, you’re lying in the grass, the stars overhead, a chance to forget you’re in the big city.
A snap of a twig. He tensed. Listened. An animal. A fox, probably. On its own night manoeuvres.
Cook rolled, fast. Instinct had alerted him, and then launched his body into action while his conscious mind was still wondering about the bloody fox. Instinct, and then training.
It was training that stopped the roll, countering the movement to launch back, towards the attacker. Never do what your opponent expects. Take control, set the tempo. He was onto the man in an instant, using momentum to throw him.
The man was lighter than he’d expected. He’d thought it would be one of the brothers from the hotel. Big, bigger or giant. This assailant was half the weight of the smallest of those men.
‘Cook!’ she yelled, as she hit the ground with a thud. He was on top of her before he had a chance to think, pinning both arms down, his weight on her legs.
It took him a second to realise.
It was Margaret.
Impossible of course. The last time he’d seen her she’d pointed a gun at him, ordered him out of the rowing boat they’d both taken, then disappeared into the darkness, to rendezvous with a German U-boat out in the Channel, her pockets stuffed with details of a secret radio installation.
‘Whose side are you on?’ he’d shouted back then as she’d disappeared into the dark, heading out to sea, but she hadn’t answered. Her silence had been enough.
Now, she lay underneath him, writhing to get out from his grip.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he asked, his blood still up.
‘Good to see you too,’ she said.
She grinned. It annoyed him. This was no laughing matter. She’d crept up on him in the dark and attacked him. Cook could think of several men who’d tried that same trick who wouldn’t be trying it again.
‘What the bloody hell,’ he said.
‘Don’t be ticked off,’ she said. ‘Just a bit of fun.’
He kept her pinned down, in the darkness. He felt her pushing her body up, testing his weight, trying to escape.
Cook had a lot of questions. A lot of things he’d imagined saying since the night she’d left him. All led back to the big question – was she on his side, or theirs? He hadn’t known then, and in the intervening time he hadn’t come to any conclusions.
He still didn’t know.
She craned her head forward and kissed him. A surprise attack. He pulled back, better to look at her. He tried to think. To weigh the logic. But rational thought eluded him.
He kissed her back, keeping his hands on hers, either side of her head, pushed into the grass.
She pushed her body against his, a memory of the weeks they’d spent together, living as man and wife. She rolled, and he let her, reversing their positions, her above, looking down, her hair a curtain around her face.
‘Why the hell would I trust you a second time?’ Cook asked.
Margaret kissed him again. She let go of his hands, and he ran them down her back, finding bare skin under her dress, then back up, under the fabric.
He rolled her again, the grass whispering against her dress. She arched her back as he drew the dress up, over her shoulders.
‘You missed me,’ she said.
Cook kissed her. It seemed to be the best way to keep her quiet.
*
Cook sat with his back against a chestnut tree, Margaret leaning against him, his arms wrapped around her. He told her about Ruby, and Frankie, and everything that had happened.
‘There’s a lot going on at that hotel,’ Margaret said. ‘A lot of people with a lot of secrets. What are the odds she got caught up in something?’
Cook thought about Ruby, and the man she’d crossed, now lying dead in a back garden near Regent’s Park.
‘The hotel’s a distraction,’ he said.
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
They sat in silence, watching searchlights paint the underside of the clouds with light.
‘So there’s a woman out there who needs help, and you’re the man for the job. Or, alternatively, she’s dead and you’re chasing ghosts around the city.’
‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Cook replied.
‘Sounds pretty clear to me,’ she said. ‘Fifty per cent chance there’s a job to be done only you can do, with a young woman out there desperately counting on you doing it, even though she doesn’t know it. Fifty per cent chance you’re wasting your time. But what else would you be doing?’
An owl screeched. Cook listened to the sounds of the woods in the night.
Margaret was right. She had a way of putting things that cut through the noise.
They walked back through the park, past a humming generator powering a bank of searchlights. Past a winch and crew of balloon operators.
‘What’s it like out there?’ she asked.
‘Out where?’
‘The docks.’
‘Same as all wars,’ Cook said. ‘The rich play at strategy while the poor die by the thousand. I don’t see any reason why this one will be any different.
’ He thought of the island, more than half the warehouses destroyed.
The shelters, badly built, not fit for purpose.
A world away from the West End, even if it caught the occasional raid.
‘Bunny’s trying to sell the idea of the blitz spirit,’ Margaret said.
‘He might be selling it,’ Cook said, ‘but the people I’ve seen aren’t buying it.
Bunny should keep his fingers crossed the Luftwaffe try to bomb Buckingham Palace or Number Ten – might show the people we’re all in it together.
If Hitler keeps targeting the working class, he’ll turn us all into communists. And we’ve seen how that story ends up.’
Outside the Empire, a crowd of onlookers watched. An ambulance and a police car were parked in the street. Two ambulance-men carried out a stretcher, a man lying on it, covered with a bloodied sheet.
‘I can’t tell you what happened over there,’ Margaret said, as they both watched a second man being escorted out by the police. A pilot, judging by his uniform.
Margaret felt for Cook’s hand. She took his little finger and squeezed it, hoping to convey everything she couldn’t say out loud.
Cook didn’t answer. He wanted to tell Margaret it would be all right. That they could take up where they’d left off. Her, and him, and the evacuees, and the farm. A life they’d both had the barest glimpse of.
But that would be a lie. The life they’d left off was gone.