Читать книгу Our Only Shield - Michael J. Goodspeed - Страница 11

5

London, 7 March 1940

RORY FERRALL STARED DOWN listlessly at a scarcely touched pint of bitter and wondered not for the first time why he had been so quick to accept the request to come to Britain. It was a Saturday night, he was a stranger in a strange pub, and he was depressed and angry. Despite strenuous attempts to force himself to look on the bright side of things, it was a struggle believing that he hadn’t been duped.

He looked about him. The lights in the Ship and Flag were dingy, the room was draughty, and the beer lukewarm. Groups were seated in the corners talking animatedly. In an hour, he was supposed to go out to dinner at Ewen Crossley’s house in Ealing. Until then, he was stuck. Rory didn’t know anybody else. He was starved for conversation and needed a change of location, but going to a dinner party wasn’t what he wanted to do, not tonight. He always found it much easier to keep to himself when this kind of mood enveloped him. When he thought about it, his feelings were ridiculous. Tonight he was even angry at himself for feeling ungrateful about Ewen’s invitation. The Crossleys certainly didn’t have to have him, and he was sure that they were holding the party for him.

Rory had been in England for upwards of five months now, and the work he had expected to be assigned had only been hinted at in a few disjointed conferences. Twice, briefing officers implied that the war effort was going to get into high gear any day now and before long he would find himself feverishly engaged in work more suited to his background and talents. It all sounded empty.

He took a deep drink of his beer. He had left a career and a job that he enjoyed only to find he was working by himself in a shabby office analyzing outdated military reports and worthless diplomatic intercepts. The work was boring, probably pointless, and he couldn’t discuss it with anybody. How did he let himself get into this situation? He put the beer glass down. One was enough. Drinking to cheer himself up wasn’t an option.

Something had to give. He wanted a new job. He had no real desire to go back to war, but he certainly wanted a change from what he was doing. In a way, it was humiliating. He had been happy as a policeman. In Manitoba, he had a position of influence and value; more importantly, he had self-respect. Here, he found himself anonymously dropped into a junior position where he was subordinate in rank to younger men of lesser ability, and there were no tangible results for his efforts. It rankled him.

He toyed with his beer glass and listened to a small but boisterous trio of soldiers in khaki battle dress uniforms in the background. They were young Canadian officers on their first leave, obviously enjoying themselves. Other than troops at training centres, the Canadian Army was the only large armed organization left in Britain, and the newspapers made much of the fact that some of the Empire’s finest troops were manning Britain’s defences. What the newspapers didn’t say was that the Canadian Army in March 1940 was almost completely untrained. It had been hastily recruited and shipped over to England with only the most rudimentary preparation and none of its major equipment. Like almost all the troops left on this island, they weren’t ready to fight anybody yet.

Rory looked vacantly at the blackout curtains over the windows. He wasn’t in a situation much different than these young men, except that they all seemed to be good friends and they had a sense of purpose, while he was living like some angry urban hermit.

The towns around London were rapidly filling up with troops such as these from the Dominions and the Empire. In the last few months, thousands of similar young men had been arriving across the country, most of them untrained but enthusiastic and willing to risk their lives in the service of a higher cause. In spite of their enthusiasm, so far the war effort looked like a huge bungle.

He knew he should go over and say hello to them, introduce himself as a fellow Canadian, a veteran, someone who was proud that they had volunteered to come here. It was the right thing to do: wander over, engage them in friendly conversation, and have a sociable drink with a few of the boys from back home. They were probably people he would like. Twenty-five years before, he had been in exactly the same situation. But tonight he was feeling tense and irritable. He needed a change.

He pulled on his coat and hat and stepped into the blackout and the icy March drizzle. Few people were on the streets. Those who were out seemed to loom up at him in the dark like something in a haunted house. Perhaps people who had two eyes and proper depth perception didn’t experience the blackout that way. Ruth had once told him that he looked like a hawk, because he had a habit of imperceptibly scanning back and forth to get a sense of distance. She’d laughed, but he took it as a compliment.

Rory walked briskly, struggling to put himself in a better frame of mind. A year ago who would have thought he’d be here: single, and doing his bit for the war in a relatively junior position.

He’d never agreed with much of the thinking so prevalent after the Great War. Since then, too many people who should have known better chose to view men as cogs in a machine, with little control over their lives. It was worse in the new violent ideologies in Germany and Russia; fascism and communism stripped men of their free will. In those creeds the destruction of individuality had become a philosophical foundation stone. He pulled his collar higher up around him. As long as he was alive, he couldn’t go along with that kind of thinking. It was no accident that both fascism and communism held the view that individuals were impelled by an inevitable mass destiny. History sucked people along like so much debris caught in the undercurrent of a river. It was a kind of fatalism that bred disaster on a colossal scale with massive social turmoil and unending repression and bloodshed.

He pulled his hat lower to keep the wind off his face. Perhaps that kind of tyranny and misery was inevitable for less fortunate nations. Even in stable countries, he had to admit, the range of individual choice for those trapped at the bottom of society’s pyramid was pretty much restricted. But there was still choice.

Then again, he might have looked at things differently at the end of the Great War had he been carried off a troopship in a wicker stretcher, missing limbs and permanently shell-shocked. No, he was fortunate. He was lucky enough to have survived and he lived in a decent country. Stable democracies gave people security. Although democracies weren’t perfect, they provided a greater range of choices – not an equal range, but certainly at all levels there was less repression and more opportunity. On an intellectual level, he certainly believed in what he was doing; but in his more despondent moments, like this one, he wondered if that lofty thinking was what really lay behind his volunteering to come over here.

Was there something else to it, something that he hadn’t admitted or even worked out? Despite people asking him every time he turned around, he’d avoided thinking too deeply about his motivation for coming here. He wasn’t certain why. As a police officer, he’d spent much of his professional life examining the motives of others; and here, in his own case, where he had so much to lose and so little to gain, he found himself evading the subject. If Ruth hadn’t died, would he have stepped forward so readily? He wasn’t certain what her death had to do with volunteering. In his most private moments, he suspected there was a connection with which he hadn’t come to grips. Maddeningly, he wasn’t certain what it was. It hovered at the edge of his subconscious like an elusive fragment of a dimly remembered dream.

Maybe it was a sense of obligation. Life had been good to him. He’d never wanted for much. Pre-war life in an exclusive Montreal suburb had been a sheltered existence – maids, gardeners, private schools, summers in Germany, travelling back and forth across the Atlantic in first-class berths, spring and autumn weekends at the cottage by Lac Saint-Pierre in the Laurentians. School had never been difficult, and university had come just as easily. And then came his time in the trenches, his wounding, his recruitment in England, and his period as a spy in Germany.

He had come back from the war more disoriented than angry. His father became exasperated and told him he was one of those men who couldn’t settle down after the war. But that hadn’t been the case. The war had unquestionably been a turning point in his life. God, how could it have been anything else? But he hadn’t spent a lot of time drifting afterwards. He tried working for his father for a few weeks. One sunny morning late in May of 1919 he left the business’s ledgers and order books and went off impulsively on a canoe trip to northern Quebec.

In the North, he’d met a retired Mountie who ran a fishing lodge. Despite their difference in age, they had a lot in common. The ageing pensioner seemed to understand what he had been through, and the pensioner’s descriptions of police work appealed to Rory. It was a thinking man’s life, with a healthy balance between activity and deliberation. That was almost two decades ago. It seemed like last week. He smiled. Had he become a cliché? Not likely. He knew his life had hardly been routine and he never regretted his time in the Mounted Police.

He walked quickly for forty minutes, and with the exercise, the rain, and the fresh air, his mood shifted. A few blocks from Charing Cross he called a cab. With the exception of a dull pain in the socket of his missing eye, a pain that he always got in damp weather, by the time he got to the Crossleys’ he was feeling more like somebody whose company he might enjoy.

Ewen Crossley met him effusively at the door of their large brick house. “Rory, so good to have you here at last. Sandra and I have been meaning to have you over for so long now, but this damn war, it’s always been getting in the way.” Crossley laughed good-naturedly.

His wife was attractive, probably at least a decade younger than her husband. Slender, wearing a tight-fitting blue cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt, she had her dark hair pulled back dramatically in a bun. She smoked a cigarette in a long tortoise-shell cigarette holder. Sandra Crossley could have stepped out of a Noël Coward play. Everything about her was a fashionable cliché, but she was genuinely friendly and more than attractive enough to get away with it.

When Rory first saw them together he was surprised that Crossley’s wife was so pretty and chic. From outward appearances there was a huge difference between the two. Ewen had matured into a pleasant, unassuming, and nondescript sort of man – the perfect individual for an intelligence officer. He was shrewd and personable, but entirely forgettable, while Sandra wasn’t the sort of woman one forgot easily. Despite these differences, Rory knew that they were both astute judges of character. They were a good match. Crossley was a solid type; Rory had known him on and off for twenty-odd years. He was a decent man, likeable with a strong character and a perceptive and alert mind. Rory had met Sandra on at least two other occasions. He enjoyed her company but couldn’t say he knew her well. They were one of those couples you instinctively like. They were completely relaxed in one another’s presence.

The evening at the Crossleys’ turned out to be more enjoyable than Rory expected. Ewen had invited some old friends he had known since his army days, and several other couples who cheerfully presented themselves with vague introductions of “… actually Ewen and I have worked together for years.” It was evident that in this line of work it was a forbidden conversational gambit to pry into anyone’s background. As for himself, he responded equally as imprecisely, “I’m in police work. I’ve spent years in northern Canada and I’m just here doing the odd job for the war effort.” It was a successful ploy. Nobody asked about his present employment, but he soon had a small circle of jolly looking faces quizzing him about his past exploits, and questioning him at length about his experiences in northern Manitoba.

“Did you ever have to go long distances by dog team?”

“Well, yes. Most of the major outposts are accessible by ski plane in the winter, but to get to the more remote locations we generally took dog teams up the frozen rivers.” This response earned him a cheer, an energetic round of “well dones,” and a flurry of questions on life in the North. It seemed that few in this small and friendly crowd seemed interested in anything but Rory’s life in the depths of winter, and he found himself fending off questions as to how often he had managed with frostbite and did he ever have to arrest mad trappers or whisky runners.

It wasn’t until later in the evening that Ewen joined him in one of these animated circles. “You seem to have made a big hit, Rory,” he said.

“No, not me. It’s a great party, Ewen.”

Ewen abruptly changed the subject and turned so his back was to the group, allowing a degree of privacy. He changed his tone. “I know that you’ve been sidelined since you’ve been here, and I want you to know that I’m aware that you are seriously underemployed. I’m sorry.”

“Fair enough. So what do we do now?”

“Well, I’m afraid there’s not a lot that I can do about it just now. You see, Colonel Harris, he’s got it into his head that he’s saving you for some other project. When the time’s right, he’s going to pluck you out and give you something dramatically different.”

“You could have left me in Canada to do that. How many others in our original group have you kept on ice like this?”

“None. All the others are from this side of the Atlantic. They’ve gone back to their original jobs. You’re the only one that we actually have a line on. The others all still have a degree of independence until we call upon them. Harris thought things would have turned out differently by now, but he’s still convinced that the situation is going to go downhill quickly once this phoney war ends. He’s very stubborn. Look, Rory, I’m really sorry about this. I’ve talked to Harris repeatedly. He’s a good man, honest as the day’s long, but he’s not an easy man to deal with. For one thing, he actually thinks you’re gainfully employed. He really does. He reads everything you put out and he likes it.”

Rory chuckled. “That’s not a good sign. We aren’t producing anything anybody with an ounce of common sense hasn’t figured out already.”

“If we push him into a corner, he’s as likely to do something he knows you don’t want just to prove he’s in control. Rory, I shouldn’t say it, but he’s one of those leaders who doesn’t quite know what he wants, but he’s damned certain that whatever it is, he’s going to control it.”

“We’ve both seen a few of those in our time. Anyway, I appreciate you telling me this.”

Ewen gave an understanding smile and turned back into the circle and struck up a conversation with the couple to his left. The moment of conspiracy was over.