Ken Follett - Eye Of The Needle

The platform was becoming more crowded. Godliman sat down while there was still room, and found himself leaning against a man in bus driver's uniform. The man smiled and said, "Oh to be in England, Now that summer's here. Know who said that?"

"Now that April's there," Godliman corrected him. "It was Browning."

"I heard it was Adolf Hitler," the driver said. A woman next to him squealed with laughter and he turned his attention to her. "Did you hear what the evacuee said to the farmer's wife?"

Godliman tuned out and remembered an April when he had longed for England, crouching on a high branch of a plane tree, peering through a cold mist across a French valley behind the German lines. He could see nothing but vague dark shapes, even through his telescope, and he was about to slide down and walk a mile or so further when three German soldiers came from nowhere to sit around the base of the tree and smoke. After a while they took out cards and began to play, and young Percival Godliman realised they had found a way of stealing off and were here for the day. He stayed in the tree, hardly moving until he began to shiver and his muscles knotted with cramp and his bladder felt as if it would burst. Then he took out his revolver and shot the three of them, one after another, through the tops of their closecropped heads. And three people, laughing and cursing and gambling their pay, had simply ceased to exist. It was the first time he killed, and all he could think was, Just because I had to pee.

Godliman shifted on the cold concrete of the station platform and let the memory fade away. There was a warm wind from the tunnel and a train came in. The people who got off found spaces and settled to wait. Godliman listened to the voices.

"Did you hear Churchill on the wireless? We was listening-in at the Duke of Wellington. Old Jack Thornton cried. Silly old bugger…"

"…haven't had fillet steak on the menu for so long I've forgotten the bally taste… wine committee saw the war coming and bought in twenty thousand dozen, thank God…"

"Yes, a quiet wedding, but what's the point in waiting when you don't know what the next day's going to bring?"

"No, Peter never came back from Dunkirk…"

The bus driver offered him a cigarette. Godliman refused, and took out his pipe. Someone started to sing.

A blackout warden passing yelled, "Ma, pull down that blind Just look at what you're showing," and she shouted, "Never mind." Oh! Knees up Mother Brown…

The song spread through the crowd until everyone was singing. Godliman joined in, knowing that this was a nation losing a war and singing to hide its fear, as a man will whistle past the graveyard at night; knowing that the sudden affection he felt for London and Londoners was an ephemeral sentiment, akin to mob hysteria; mistrusting the voice inside hnn that said "This, this is what the war is about, this is what makes it worth fighting"; knowing but not caring, because for the first time in so many years he was feeling the sheer physical thrill of comradeship and he liked it.

When the all-clear sounded they went up the staircase and into the street, and Godliman found a phone box and called Colonel Terry to ask how soon he could start.

Faber… Godliman… two-thirds of a triangle that one day would be crucially completed by the principals, David and Lucy, of a ceremony proceeding at this moment in a small country church. It was old and very beautiful. A drystone wall enclosed a graveyard where wildflowers grew. The church itself had been there-well, bits of it had-the last time Britain was invaded, almost a millennium ago. The north wall of the nave, several feet thick and pierced with only two tiny windows, could remember that last invasion; it had been built when churches were places of physical as well as spiritual sanctuary, and the little round-headed windows I were better for shooting arrows out of than for letting the Lord's sunshine in. Indeed, the Local Defence Volunteers had detailed plans for using the church if and when the current bunch of European thugs crossed the Channel.

But no jackboots sounded in the tiled choir in this August of 1940; not yet. The sun glowed through stained glass windows that had survived Cromwell's iconoclasts and Henry VIII's greed, and the roof resounded to the notes of an organ that had yet to yield to woodworm and dry rot.

It was a lovely wedding. Lucy wore white, of course, and her five sisters were bridesmaids in apricot dresses. David wore the Mess Uniform of a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, all crisp and new, for it was the first time he had put it on. They sang Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd, to the tune Crimond.

Lucy's father looked proud, as a man will on the day his eldest and most beautiful daughter marries a fine boy in a uniform. He was a farmer, but it was a long time since he had sat on a tractor; he rented out his arable land and used the rest to raise racehorses, although this winter of course his pasture would go under the plough and potatoes would be planted. Although he was really more gentleman than farmer, he nevertheless had the open-air skin, the deep chest, and the big stubby hands of agricultural people. Most of the men on that side of the church bore him a resemblance: barrel-chested men, with weathered red faces, those not in tail coats favouring tweed suits and stout shoes.

The bridesmaids had something of that look, too; they were country girls. But the bride was like her mother. Her hair was a dark, dark red, long and thick and shining and glorious, and she had wide-apart amber eyes and an oval face; and when she looked at the vicar with that clear, direct gaze and said, "I will" in that firm, clear voice, the vicar was startled and thought "By God she means it!" which was an odd thought for a vicar to have in the middle of a wedding.

The family on the other side of the nave had a certain look about them, too. David's father was a lawyer; his permanent frown was a professional affectation and concealed a sunny nature. (He had been a Major in the Army in the last war, and thought all this business about the RAF and war in the air was a fad that would soon pass.) But nobody looked like him, not even his son who stood now at the altar promising to love his wife until death, which might not be far away, God forbid. No, they all looked like David's mother, who sat beside her husband now, with almost-black hair and dark skin and long, slender limbs.

David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man-his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark, ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, which he was, and sensitive.

The whole thing was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid, comfortably off, backbone-of-England-type families getting married in a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.

When they were pronounced man and wife both the mothers were dry-eyed, and both the fathers cried.

Kissing the bride was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought, as yet another middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages, when every man in the tribe was allowed to-well, anyway, it was time we got properly civilised and dropped the whole business. She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well… But it could have been worse. If it had been peacetime, father would have hired the Albert Hall.

So far nine people had said, "May all your troubles be little ones," and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, "I want to see more than a fence running around your garden."