Ian Slater: World in Flames

“Yes.”

“No.”

“My God,” he said, “if you don’t let me, I’ll explode.”

“The answer’s still no. I won’t let you.”

His left arm curved beneath her and he raised her, kissing her nipples through the negligee. “I love you,” he said breathlessly.

“Are you always… like this?” she asked, her hand sliding beneath the warm sheets, squeezing him.

“When I’m with you—” he said, kissing her again, “all the time.”

“Robert—” her tone was soft, urgent “—don’t leave me.”

“I won’t, sweetheart. I won’t.”

Though fashionably smart in a tweed jacket, tie, and flannels that Rosemary had chosen for him, Robert still wasn’t used to being out of uniform and felt more self-conscious than his bride as they entered the B and B’s dining room. They were relieved to receive a jolly greeting, without any honeymoon jokes, from Mrs. McRae, a small, dumpy, and irrepressible Scot who had been running the B and B sixty-five miles southwest of Glasgow for the past forty years, and her husband, Alfred, a partially incapacitated veteran of the Falklands War. The battle that left McRae with a gammy leg and intense pain, especially now in the depth of the Scottish winter, had been the single most important event of his life. It had also left him with a growing conviction that next to Napoleon, Montgomery of Alamein, and Robert the Bruce, he was one of the great unsung strategists of warfare. His greeting to the honeymooners and the other five guests, two couples and a single commercial traveler, consisted of a throat clearing and a stiff nod as he read the latest war news in the Edinburgh Herald.

“What’ll it be, lass?” asked the ebullient Mrs. McRae. “Porridge to start?”

“No, thank you,” Rosemary declined, opting instead for corn flakes — a choice that she had the distinct impression Mr. McRae didn’t approve of. Robert asked for kippers, his request receiving an appreciative nod from Mrs. McRae and one of the other two couples.

Meanwhile Alfred McRae, head buried in the paper, let out his breath in short, audible bursts of disgust, his head shaking at something he’d just read. One of the other two couples, in their late twenties, were finishing their ersatz chicory coffee, excusing themselves from the table. Robert handed a dozen or so one-cup instant coffee packets he had brought with him from Roosevelt to Mrs. McRae.

“Och, mon, will ye look at this, Alfred? Real coffee from America.”

McRae grunted behind the paper while the other of the two couples, a pair in their early forties, Robert guessed, their accents distinctly upper middle class, beamed, as did the lone commercial traveler. “I say,” began the husband, sitting forward, the pale, cloud-sieved sunlight shining on his tan Dutch corduroy jacket. “Haven’t seen anything like that for months.”

“And ye’re no likely to again,” put in Mr. McRae suddenly. “And tha’s a fact. The convoys are doomed.”

“Oh?” said the Englishman in the corduroy jacket, who by now had introduced himself and his wife as James and Joan Price of London, a rather pinched yet tight good-humored look about him, his wife clearly deferring to him, though at the moment she was picking a pill of fluff from his jacket. Wearing a tartan shirt with nonmatching maroon necktie, he was the type of Englishman, Robert thought, who’d wear a necktie to the beach. His wife, a thin woman with mousy brown hair, wearing a beige tweed skirt, white blouse, socks, and what Rosemary’s father would have called “sensible” walking shoes, smiled pleasantly at Rosemary as she flicked the fluff away from her husband’s sleeve. Her husband looked up at the proprietor of the B and B. “Why do you say that, Mr. McRae?”

“What’s tha’?”

The commercial traveler, a tired, overweight, stocky man in his late fifties, was torn between listening closely to what appeared to be a developing argument and watching to see whether Mrs. McRae was going to offer him one of the packets of American coffee. “You say the convoys are doomed?” said Price.

“Aye — we’re all doomed.”

“Och — noo,” interjected Mrs. McRae, sliding the steaming kippers in front of Robert Brentwood. “It’s not as bad as that, surely!”

“Then ye’ve no read the paper.”

“I’ve noo had time,” she said, eyebrows raised good-naturedly.

“They’ve attacked Sullom Voe,” McRae announced gloomily, yet somehow sounding strangely triumphant. “Just as I said they would.”

Robert Brentwood, though he had difficulty understanding the Scotsman’s brogue, knew that Sullom Voe, one of the Shetland Islands, three hundred miles off Scotland’s northeast corner, was the site of a big oil refinery servicing the major part of the North Sea oil fields. He was interested but said nothing, finding McRae’s melodramatic air irritating.

“Aye,” went on McRae, “biggest terminal in Europe ‘tis, Sullom Voe. Tankers line up there like buses.” With that he suddenly swung the front page of the Herald —”RUSSIANS HIT SULLOM VOE!”—for all to see, the color photograph having captured great curling plumes of dense black smoke rising over a glint of gold sea, two tankers barely discernible in the bottom right of the photograph. “ Sooper tankers at that,” continued McRae, to add to the horror he was clearly enjoying. “God knows how many casualties. Och—” He put the paper down disgustedly on the linen tablecloth and pushed a large, thick china mug marked “British Rail” over his place that of Burns’s poetry toward his wife for more tea. “It was daft of ‘em not to have more air cover. What did they expect? I told them, Maggie — didn’t I? But noo — the experts in London knew best. Air-to-air missile batteries would be ‘sufficient,’ they said — with some fighter cover.” He shot a glance across at Brentwood. “Drained Scotland, they did, and sent everything across the water to save the Frogs. What do they care aboot Scotland?”

“A great deal, I should imagine,” put in Price. “It’s always a problem, I suspect — how many to put where.” He, too, looked across at the Brentwoods. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes,” said Brentwood. “There’s never enough to go around.”

“Precisely,” enjoined Price.

“Ye no think the oil’s important, laddie?” said McRae, wincing in pain as he abruptly turned around in his chair, left hand vigorously massaging his left kneecap, his right hand ladling heaping teaspoons of sugar into his milky tea.

“Not at all,” answered Price, while his wife, Rosemary noticed, tugged as surreptitiously as she could on her husband’s sleeve, her eyes rolling heavenward as she caught Rosemary’s glance. Rosemary smiled sympathetically.

But Price wouldn’t be restrained. “Oil’s vital, of course,” he said, “but I suppose there was enough in storage in the first few months until the convoys—”

“Och—” said McRae, his tone one of sneering contempt, his left hand continuing to massage his knee. “There might have been reserves for a wee while, but it was obvious right from the very first shot that we’d be in a right pickle. Started rationing straight off, they did. London wasn’t prepared, laddie — and that’s all there is to it. Only thing that surprises me is that the Russians haven’t hit it sooner.”

“I daresay they could use your prescience in London,” said Price. “You should be in the Admiralty.”

There was a flash of anger in McRae’s eyes, his face clouding. “I’ve done my bit, laddie. Aye — and got this for it.” He smacked his leg, glancing at the Brentwoods for moral support. Rosemary reached for more corn flakes while Robert, diplomatically, gave all his attention to separating the second kipper from its spine.