Most Secret (11 page)

They clustered round him. “Will you have a drink, sir?”

“Did you say that you were over there in February?”

He said: “Oh, thank you. Half a pint of beer.”

“Did you mean, February of
this
year?”

Charles, said: “My French tongue slipped away with me. What I said was true, you chaps, but we will now forget it. Excuse me, please.…”

He stayed with them for half an hour, but resolutely refused to talk about the other side. He talked to them about the war in France, and about the French Army and the French Fleet, and enjoyed their evident pleasure in him as a mystery man. And then, feeling that he had drunk as much beer as he could carry satisfactorily, he left them and went out on to the quay.

There was still an hour and a half before dark, in the long daylight hours of war-time England. He strolled on idly beside
the river, and presently turned to a step behind him. It was a lieutenant in the R.N.V.R., one of the officers who had listened to him in the bar.

This was a tall young man, not more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, with red hair and the pale skin that goes with it, and a strained, puckered look about his face.

He said: “Look, sir. I want to have a word with you. I was in the pub just now, and I heard what you said about the other side. Do you mind if we have a chat some time?”

There was an urgency in his manner that compelled attention. Charles said: “Right-oh. I do not think that I can talk very much myself, you understand. But if you wish to talk to me, I am entirely at your service.”

They turned, and strolled along together. “I want to say first that I know what you said is true,” said the young man. “The Germans do that sort of thing. They do it for a policy, because they think it makes people afraid. And if we mean to win this war we must do horrible, beastly things to them. Torturing things, like they have done to us.”

Charles glanced at the strained face of the young man beside him, interested. He had not heard that sort of talk since he had come from France.

“So …” he said quietly.

“There’s a thing going on down here,” the young man said in a low tone, “that one or two of us are trying to work up. But we’ve never been able to find anyone who could tell us what things are like on the other side. If we let you in on what we want to do, will you keep it under your hat?”

“Of course. And I will give what help I can. But there are matters that I cannot talk about, you understand.”

The naval officer hesitated. “Look,” he said. “It won’t take more than half an hour. I want you to come across the river with me and see a boat. Would you do that? And then we can talk over there, where it’s quiet.”

They went down to the ferry close at hand. As they were crossing the young man said: “My name is Boden, sir—Oliver Boden. I’m in a trawler here.”

O
LIVER BODEN was the son of a wool-spinner in Bradford. George Boden, his father, was well known in the West
Riding as a very warm man and the firm that he founded in his youth, Boden and Chalmers, as a very warm firm. Henry Chalmers was, of course, the young man’s godfather.

The two partners, in fact, exchanged the function of godfather fairly frequently; George Boden having two girls and three boys and Henry Chalmers having three girls and one boy. The Chalmers lived in a large greystone house in Ilkley and the Bodens lived in a large greystone house in Burley-in-Wharfedale. The Chalmers, having mostly girls, had a hard tennis-court and the Bodens, having mostly boys, had a river running through their garden. Each of the partners took five thousand a year out of the business as a matter of course, and each lamented the disastrous state of the wool trade.

They were very happy people.

The partners used to stop on the way home sometimes, and drink a couple of pints of beer at a roadside pub, while their expensive motor-cars grew cold outside. It was at these times of relaxation that they swapped stories about newly-married couples, did their football pools, and talked about the education of their children. They were quite agreed about the boys. Boys had to work, there must be no nonsense about educating them. None of the Eton and Harrow stuff for the young Bodens or the young Chalmers. The boys would have to work in Bradford all their lives; it would only unsettle them to put ideas into their heads. Chalmers favoured Leeds High School for his sons and Boden favoured Bradford Grammar School, but they agreed that there was not much in it.

About the girls they were completely at sea. Each of them felt, inarticulately, that only the very best was good enough for the girls, but what the best was they were not quite sure. Henry Chalmers, turning in his perplexity to the guidance that had never failed him, came to the conclusion that since the best goods cost most money, Crowdean School near Lympne, on the south coast of England, must be the best school in the country for girls. He sent all three of them there. They came out four years later polished till they shone, but thanks to the sturdy simplicity of their parents, quite unspoilt.

Boden, yielding in his perplexity to the opinions of his wife, sent his two to an academy for young ladies in Harrogate. Then, at the age of sixteen, he sent them to a finishing school at Lausanne in Switzerland, for two years. He spent the next ten years kicking himself for a mug.

Oliver Boden, the second son, was born in 1916. He started
working in the business in the autumn of 1934 when he was eighteen years old; to console him for the loss of liberty he was given a Norton motor-bicycle, capable of an incredible speed. The first day he had it he rushed round on it to show it to Marjorie Chalmers, then fifteen years old and home on holiday from Crowdean. He always wanted to show things to Marjorie. She went off on the back of it with him far up into the hills, to Malham Tarn among the bleak crags and the moorlands. It was a fine, exciting day. They were late home for tea.

During the years that followed he showed Marjorie a twelve-bore shot-gun, a Harley Davidson motor-bicycle, a trout fly-rod, a Jantzen swimming-suit, a Brough Superior motor-bicycle, the inside of the Piccadilly Hotel in London, a Morgan three-wheeler, most of the dance-halls in Yorkshire, and how not to fly an aeroplane. He showed her everything he got as soon as he got it, and she was always interested. The parents looked on with amused resignation. It was quite obvious to everybody what was going to happen, and most satisfactory. The wool trade was built up on unions like that.

It was in 1936, I imagine, that he took to racing outboard motor-boats. He had a little thing more like a tea-tray than a boat that the two of them could just squeeze into, with a very large racing engine pivoted on the stern. To get it moving Boden used to open out the engine full and then stand up and rock it up on to the step, while Marjorie lay out upon the curved deck of the bow to bring the weight forward. Then it got going and they grabbed the steering-wheel, slipped back on to the thwart, and went flying down the river to the first turning-point. They raced a good deal, that summer. Frequently they upset at a turn and had to swim ashore; each time that happened the engine took a long drink of cold water at six thousand revs and had to be rebuilt. They thought it was tremendous fun.

Islanders have curious traits in them that break out in the oddest places. Neither the Bodens nor the Chalmers ever had much truck with the sea; for generations they had lived and worked in the West Riding. But presently it came to Oliver and Marjorie that there were more amusing ways of playing with the water than just flying over it upon a skimming-dish before a racing engine. Somewhere or other they saw a fourteen-foot International sailing dinghy, a beautiful, neat, delicate little thing, and longed for it with all their souls. The skimming-dish went on to the scrap-heap; in 1937 Boden got his dinghy and learned to sail it, more or less, before Marjorie came home
for the holidays. It was another thing for him to show her, that, and a new electric razor.

Racing the dinghy took them to the tideway, and they began to learn something about mud and moorings and gum-boots. And presently, one day in September, they were staring thoughtfully at a two-and-a-half-ton sloop, a little yacht in miniature. She was Bermudian-rigged and had a little engine and a little cabin with a little galley, and berths for two. She was not much bigger than the dinghy, really.

“You could go anywhere in her,” Oliver said thoughfully “I mean, you could sail her round to Bridlington or Scarborough.”

Marjorie said: “Do you think one’d be sick?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind trying. You’d have to have charts and things.”

“And a sextant,” said Marjorie. “That’s what they have in books.”

They crawled all over it, opening all the lockers, examining the warp and anchor, enormous to their eyes. They were enchanted with the little boat. “It would be good fun to have a thing like this,” said Oliver. “Fancy anchoring off somewhere for the night, and getting up and cooking breakfast in the morning!”

“All very well for you to talk like that,” said his young woman. “I’d never hear the last of it from Mummy.”

They stared at each other in consternation. Both of them realised that they were up against a major difficulty. They always had done things together in the holidays, ever since they could remember. One day, they both knew, it was extremely probable that they would marry, but that time was not yet. It seemed such a soft, unenterprising thing to do to go and marry the kid next door, just because you’d known each other all your lives.

“We could get over that one somehow,” said Boden unconvincingly. “Anyway, there’s an awful lot of day sailing we could do.”

The International dinghy went, and by the Christmas holidays he had his little yacht. She was all new and shining, with stiff white sheets and halliards, and tanned sails. She was laid up that holiday, but they had fun with her all the same. They called her
Sea Breeze
, a name which they considered was original, and were only slightly dashed when someone showed them seven others in Lloyd’s Register. They bought charts of
the Humber and the Yorkshire coast, and binnacles, and patent logs, and signal flags, and a foghorn, and distress flares, and all the books that they could find in Yorkshire dealing with yacht cruising. They had a fine time that holiday, quite as good as if they had been sailing.

Sea Breeze
was laid up at Hornsea, rather more than eighty miles from Ilkley. If anything, that made her more attractive still. Two or three days each week—the firm was generous to young Oliver Boden during the school holidays—he would get up at half-past six and drive over to Ilkley. A sleepy maid would let him into the big greystone house, and Marjorie would come down and they would drink a cup of tea. And then they would start off. He had a little Aston Martin at that time, a two-seater very low upon the ground and capable of a high speed, pretty with French blue paint and chromium plate. In the half-light they would set off with a thunderous exhaust and step on it to York, where they used to stop for breakfast at the Station Hotel. Then on to Hornsea, to paddle about in gum-boots all the day, painting and varnishing and doing minor carpentry. They would have tea in Hornsea and be back in Ilkley by seven o’clock, in time to change their clothes and join a party to go dancing at the Majestic in Leeds. They were never tired.

The Easter holidays came round, and the fitting-out season, and the spring. They got
Sea Breeze
afloat before Easter, and for a week the firm saw nothing of young Oliver. He was over at Hornsea every day, ecstatic at his new possession, and every day Marjorie went with him, because there was always something new that he wanted to show her. And if he wanted to show her something, she just had to go. It always had been like that, ever since they could remember.

But there were complications now.

It occurred to Oliver Boden that his Marjorie had changed, disturbingly. All his life he had taken her for granted; she was just Marjorie, somebody that he might marry one day if he couldn’t find anybody more exciting and if she didn’t marry someone else. He could hardly have described her, unless to say that she had short brown hair and danced quite well. He knew she smoked De Reszke minor cigarettes, because that was what he paid her when he lost bets with her, and he knew that she liked ices, but that was all he really knew about her tastes.

Now, rather to his own embarrassment, he found himself glancing furtively at her long, slim, silk-stockinged legs as she
got into the car, at the line of her figure, and at the nape of her neck. She had filled out since Christmas and had changed a lot; she was nearly nineteen and she was leaving school at the end of the summer term. She was learning to wear pretty clothes. She was still the same old Marjorie, but Boden was forced to admit that she was turning into a very pretty girl, and a most disturbingly attractive one. He did not know what might not happen if the night was warm, and the moon shining on the water, and soft music in the distance; certainly something that he had never before associated with Marjorie.

It was all very difficult.

They did a good deal of sailing together during the Easter holidays, in short, timid ventures of an hour or two on calm days between Hornsea and Bridlington, and they did a good deal of dancing. Then Marjorie went back to Crowdean in the south to complete her education, and Boden began to venture farther each week-end upon the deep. Sometimes he took young Freddie Chalmers with him, Marjorie’s brother, but Freddie was frankly bored by sailing and only came for the sake of driving the Aston Martin. By the end of the summer term they had worked the little yacht round to Brough haven, in the Humber. That was in the summer of 1938.

Marjorie came home then for good, and as soon as Oliver Boden set his eyes on her he knew, deep down inside him, that there would probably be trouble before the summer was out. Marjorie’s mother had the same feeling, and for all I know Marjorie had it herself, but nobody seemed to be able to do much about it. They plunged into the usual round of dancing and sailing together. And presently, the inevitable happened. They went sailing too far down the Humber and got stuck on the mud at about seven o’clock at night, upon a falling tide. At least, that’s what they said.