Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘You’re lucky, you know,’ she’d told Wolff a few weeks into their affair. ‘My friends can’t understand what I see in you.’

He was fifteen years her senior and only a year younger than her husband.

‘Why don’t you say you love me?’ she often asked him.

But she wanted him because he refused to and trusted him because he never spoke of the future. When Major Reggie Curtis returned from Belgium she would be waiting to fall into his arms.

Wolff sensed, even before the waiter dropped a napkin into his lap, that it was going to be an unpleasant evening. Violet had taken the seat opposite him and was bubbling noisily, drawing more hungry looks from the gentlemen at adjoining tables. Violet’s brother and his friends were in uniform and conversation turned to the war before they’d finished with the menu.

‘Do you think they’ll bomb London?’ they wanted to know.

‘Sebastian’s mother heard a Zeppelin, didn’t she, darling?’

‘They killed a fourteen-year-old boy. You see — that’s what we’re fighting against.’

‘They say the war won’t last more than another six months…’

‘Long enough for us to get out there, I hope.’

They talked like rugby-club hearties before a game. It put Wolff in a bad humour. Violet frowned at him as if to say, ‘Buck up, why don’t you?’ She was an astute judge of men’s moods and she’d seen him like this before. She smiled and sometimes she giggled but there were anxious little lines on her brow as if she also sensed that the evening would end badly.

He was a portly junior officer with the sort of sly moustache the war had made fashionable. He had been staring at Violet from the moment she’d entered the restaurant but it had taken time and wine for him to find the courage to approach her. Out of the corner of his eye, Wolff watched the man make excuses to his party, rise from his chair and walk unsteadily towards their table. His fleshy face was the colour of a Weissherbst rosé and he was perspiring profusely. Violet was too caught up in her own story to notice him at her shoulder, even when he’d secured the attention of her audience. He cleared his throat nervously and then again with more determination.

‘Oh, hello,’ she half turned to look up at him.

‘Mrs Curtis? My name’s Barrett. I have the honour of serving with Major Curtis.’

‘Oh? How wonderful.’ She blushed and her tiny hands began to wrestle with a napkin. ‘Did you hear that, everyone? Join us, Lieutenant, please,’ and she tried to summon a waiter for a chair.

‘No. Thank you. No, Mrs Curtis.’ The lieutenant took a deep shaky breath. He was preparing to step off his precipice.

Violet must have sensed it too because she began to chatter like a small child before an angry parent. ‘When did you last see him? My husband, I mean. It’s been so long…’ Her right hand strayed to her lip. ‘This is my brother, Adam…’

‘Out of respect for your husband, I must say, your behaviour, well, he deserves better,’ Barrett stammered.

Violet’s face began to crumple.

‘It isn’t my place—’ he continued.

‘You’re right. It isn’t,’ interrupted Wolff. ‘Your place is over there.’ He nodded to the lieutenant’s table. ‘I suggest you rejoin your companions at once.’

Barrett’s jaw dropped like a marionette’s at rest. ‘Who the devil –’ he said at last. ‘Who the devil are you, sir? My business—’

‘Sit down before you make a fool of yourself, why don’t you?’

‘Please, Sebastian.’ Violet gave him a desperate look. Her eyes were shining with tears. ‘Please, let him just say what he wants to say and go.’

‘Are you the fellow?’ Barrett’s dander was up, flushed with wine and a righteous resolve to have it out, his right hand in a fist at his side. ‘What are you smiling at? Not in uniform, I see,’ and he snapped his fingers theatrically in front of Wolff’s face.

‘Look, steady, old chap…’ This from Violet’s brother. He had dumped his napkin on the table and was rising. Wolff was conscious of a hush in the restaurant, broken only by the tinkle of knives and forks on china and the mumble of waiters serving the tables. The manager was moving swiftly towards them.

‘Leave now, Lieutenant,’ said Wolff quietly. But Barrett wasn’t going to surrender an inch of polished floor to someone in white tie and tails. ‘What is your name, sir?’ he demanded loudly. ‘It is my intention to write to Major Curtis…’

‘Please, sir.’ The manager touched Barrett’s elbow and he began to turn towards him. ‘I must ask—’

But his words were drowned by a clatter of plates.

‘No, Sebastian,’ Violet squealed.

It was too late. Wolff was on his feet and lunging for the lieutenant’s wrist. Grasping it in his left hand, he thrust at Barrett’s head with his right, as if trying to jerk it from his shoulders. The lieutenant whimpered with pain and bent double as Wolff twisted his arm and locked it at right angles to his body, the pressure on the elbow. Then, with a deft turn, Wolff forced Barrett’s arm behind his back, pulling him upright by the collar. No one had moved. There had been no time to cry out in protest. It was over in the blink of an eye, accomplished with a sleight of hand worthy of Houdini the handcuff king.

Violet buried her face in a lace handkerchief. Her brother was still hovering over the table with an expression of complete astonishment on his face. Wolff caught his eye. ‘Settle our bill, will you?’

‘Let me go at once, do you hear.’ Barrett had found his voice.

There was a rumble of disapproval as the restaurant began to stir at last.

‘Really, I say,’ one man shouted.

‘This is Rules,’ ventured another. ‘Let the fellow go.’

Wolff didn’t reply. Eyes front, he frog-marched Barrett across the floor, weaving between tables with the rough confidence of an East End landlord at closing time. Manager and waiters fussed about him, a young army officer made a half-hearted attempt to block his way — Wolff brushed him aside — but no one was willing to lift a finger to prevent him reaching the door.

Rain was beating on the restaurant’s awning, gusting down Maiden Lane and chasing couples on their way home from the theatre into the shelter of shopfronts. Within seconds Wolff’s trousers were clinging to his legs. A passing car sloshed into the gutter and a sheet of dirty water swept across the pavement on to Lieutenant Barrett’s perfectly polished boots. The button had come off one of his shoulder boards and it was flapping like a broken wing.

‘Let me go, do you hear?’ He was almost weeping. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this, you coward.’

Wolff twisted his arm tighter until he gasped with pain. It would be a simple thing to break it, Wolff thought, and for a moment he wanted to. Why shouldn’t Barrett be made to pay?

‘Let him go,’ screamed Violet, and she tugged at his arm. ‘For God’s sake, are you mad?’

‘How could you?’ she asked Wolff repeatedly. She cried and shouted — he had humiliated her in front of ‘everyone’ — but she refused to go home with her brother. She sat in smouldering silence in the taxicab to his apartment, and fell on him with her tiny fists as soon as he had closed the door, biting, scratching, then kissing — the desperate passion of those who wish to forget. Later, in crumpled sheets, her small round face pressed in sleep to his shoulder, he wondered if it was the darkness she’d glimpsed in him at the restaurant that had aroused her so.

He’d had many affairs. Short, intense, unrestrained and blinding for a time. He had told two women that he loved them but when it was over he couldn’t be sure. He cared for his mother. The thought made him smile: the spy and his mother. His father had died when he was five and his mother and paternal grandfather had brought him up, a little foreign boy, an only child in a lonely place — always running.