Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘My home,’ said Lindsay almost apologetically.

‘I’m sure it’s very nice.’

‘It’s gloomy.’

At the top of the stairs, Lindsay opened the door and turned on the light to reveal burgundy walls and a heavy mahogany hall table.

‘Mother’s choice,’ he explained.

Mary walked slowly around the small sitting room, picking up family photographs while Lindsay made them some tea.

‘I spoke to my mother last night,’ he shouted from the kitchen. ‘She needed cheering up so I told her about you.’

‘Why did she need cheering up?’

It was some time before he answered, but when he did:

‘I told her I was in a little trouble. She was upset. She thinks I should keep my head down — she does.’

‘And your father?’

‘He’s busy with the war effort: his company is turning out munitions now.’

Lindsay brought the tea into the room and they sat together on his mother’s uncomfortable sofa.

‘But my mother was pleased to hear about you.’

‘I’m glad. Are you close to your mother?’

Lindsay began to laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

‘Does your question have something to do with Dr Freud?’

Mary laughed too: ‘Well, you’re clearly a troubled soul.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said quietly. He put down his cup and reached across for hers: ‘The Navy, your brother, cups and a hard sofa — all very troubling…’

She let him pull her towards him and they kissed, slowly at first and then deeply, passionately. And after a time Lindsay led her through to his bedroom where they stood before the blue London night, kissing and caressing with growing urgency. Then he bent to lift her dress up and over her head, her hair falling loose about her shoulders. She stood there, self-conscious but trembling with excitement as he bent again to slip her pants down her thighs and then down her calves. And she could hear his breath sharp and short. Reaching under her hair, he pulled her head gently towards him. They kissed again, intense, wild kisses, until she broke free and pushed him away. And slowly, deliberately, she sat on the edge of the bed, and then she lay back on the bed, raising and parting her knees.

Later they lay quietly together, naked, wet with perspiration, her cheek against his chest. She could feel its easy rise and fall and the steady beat of his heart. And from time to time he leant forward to kiss and smell her hair.

‘You’re beautiful.’

Mary turned her head to kiss his chest, then said: ‘I’m not but thank you.’

‘Please allow me to be the judge.’

They were silent for a minute or so before Mary said: ‘I don’t want them to send you away, Douglas.’

‘Oh you’ll find somebody else,’ he said breezily.

She raised herself quickly, a cross frown on her face: ‘Why did you say that?’

‘Sorry. A silly joke.’

She stared at him as if challenging him to say more.

‘It’s just that I love you,’ he said, ‘…and I don’t want you to leave me, and I suppose I wanted to hear you say you wouldn’t.’

Mary bent again to kiss him passionately on the lips and his arms tightened about her. She lay there on top of him, her loose black curls falling to the pillow about his face, and she whispered: ‘I won’t, you goose.’

‘Good.’

‘I shouldn’t have to tell you, but you doubt everything.’

‘Myself most of all.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, Dr Henderson.’

She slipped off him and on to her back: ‘If I were a medical doctor I might say, “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone.”’

She paused for a moment, then said: ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with your background, your family, and this whole codes thing is part of it now, isn’t it? But you don’t need to prove anything. You’ve already distinguished yourself.’

‘Would you love me if I hadn’t?’

‘Honestly, Douglas…’

But Lindsay turned to place a finger on her lips: ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Look, I want to tell you about the Culloden .’

Mary reached across and with her thumb began to smooth the deep frown that was wrinkling his brow. ‘If you’re sure you want to,’ she said softly. Lindsay’s face suggested he was anything but sure.

‘You should know,’ he sighed and he rolled on to his back again to stare into the mahogany darkness.

‘She wasn’t much of a ship. The bridge was open to everything the Atlantic could throw at us. No matter how careful you were, the sea found its way down the back of your neck into your oilskins and into your boots. I joined her at Portsmouth on the tenth of May 1940. I’d been told the captain was a Tartar but I was confident we would muddle along somehow. I was wrong.’

Lindsay turned to look at her: ‘I need a cigarette.’ He swung his legs off the bed and padded across the room to his jacket which had been carelessly thrown on a chair beneath the window. Mary watched him as he took a cigarette and lit it, his neck and chest flickering in the lighter flame. He settled beside her again, sitting upright against the bedhead.

‘I remember Commander Cave’s first words to me were, “More horsemeat from the universities?”’ Pritchett Ernle-Erle-Cave; he considered himself to be among the nobility of the sea. His father was an admiral but the brains skipped a generation. After thirty years’ service Cave was lucky to be the captain of a vintage destroyer. He cursed like a stoker. I think he must have been the rudest man in the Navy and unfathomably ignorant. The Admiralty dusted him off at the beginning of the war and gave him Culloden . I sensed in my first hours aboard that she was an unhappy ship.

‘We missed Norway, Dunkirk and the fall of France. We muddled along that summer, escorting convoys in and out of the North-West Approaches. There was no hierarchy of misery at first. Cave treated everyone with equal contempt but then I did something very foolish. In an unguarded moment I mentioned my mother to one of the other officers. I don’t know why, it was something I had learnt not to do at school. A couple of days later Cave walked into the wardroom beaming from ear to ear and asked if I would care to join him in the captain’s cabin. He asked me about my family and was incensed when I refused to answer. After that, he brought it up time and again, anything and everything to do with my family, Germany and the war.’

Lindsay paused for a moment to look down at Mary: ‘But this isn’t only my hard-luck story, Cave made it unpleasant for all the officers. You know he must have been a very lonely man.’

Mary reached for Lindsay’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. In turn he lifted hers and, opening her fingers, kissed her palm tenderly.

‘A lot of ships were lost in the summer but our convoys were fortunate. Merchant ships began to call us “the lucky Culloden ”. And then convoy HX.70. I can remember the face of our Canadian sub-lieutenant John Parker very clearly. We’re leaving Liverpool, passing into the swept channel and Johnny’s excited because he’s met a nurse called Grace. There’s a big grin on his face. He was nineteen, a lawyer preparing for the Toronto Bar.

‘Four escort ships with Cave as senior captain in command of the group. We met the convoy north-west of Rockall Bank on September the fourteenth, some three hundred miles from home, a grey Atlantic sky and sea, the wind like a knife, nine columns of four ships five miles wide, all struggling to hold their station. Cave spoke to the Commodore of the convoy on the wireless and I remember the little-boy excitement in his face when he was told that five ships had been sunk the night before. With the convoy travelling at no more than six knots it was a racing certainty the enemy was still in contact. I swear it was the happiest any of us had seen him. His moment of glory had come, his chance to prove the Navy wrong after years of being passed over.