Wives at War (51 page)

‘Choice? What choice is that?'

‘To change.'

‘To go straight?' She felt more comfortable challenging and teasing him as if he were just another chap and not her husband at all. ‘Counterfeit banknotes wafting about Blackstone, a body or two buried in the woods and,' she lowered her voice, ‘diamonds, a hundred thousand pounds worth of industrial diamonds purchased with fake money, salted away in a pig sty with only Dougie Giffard to look after them. Good God, Dominic, do you call that “going straight”? I certainly don't.'

‘Clever, though,' he said, ‘don't you think?'

‘Too clever by half.'

He ground out the cigar, leaned over the table and took her hand. ‘I'd like to claim that I could see it all coming, that when I cheated the Germans out of all that counterfeit cash I was motivated by patriotism, not self-interest. But you wouldn't believe me, Polly, would you?'

‘You're right. I wouldn't believe you.'

‘Well,' he said, ‘I didn't see it coming, not the way it did. I love the way it's worked out, though, don't you?'

‘How has it worked out?' said Polly.

‘The money the Germans leaked into the system has blown back on them and will help, just a little, to bring the system down. I'm no more Communist than I am Fascist but I do know how to use people. That's my strength, Polly, my forte. I'm entirely untrustworthy. What better quality can you hope to find in a double agent?'

‘Is that what you are, a spy?'

‘I prefer to think of myself as a negotiator,' Dominic said. ‘The Americans will make use of me for as long as they possibly can. If I prove my worth, when the war ends I'll be a villain no more. I'll be a hero, unsung and largely neglected to be sure, but a hero none the less.'

‘And then what?'

‘Then I'll go home.'

‘Home?'

‘To Scotland,' he said. ‘To start up clean and fresh.'

‘With my forty thousand pounds?'

‘Precisely.' Dominic released her hands. He sat back. ‘You haven't looked at the photographs yet, darling. Aren't you interested in the children?'

‘Is that why you're doing all this, for the sake of the children?'

‘Is there another reason?'

‘Why
did
you take them away from me?'

‘Because,' he said, ‘if I'd left them behind, you wouldn't be here now. You'd have written me off, wiped me out of your life completely, wouldn't you?'

‘Probably,' Polly admitted.

‘I knew you wouldn't let them go.'

‘What if you're wrong, Dominic?' Polly said.

‘Wrong? Wrong about what?'

‘What if I'm as relieved to be rid of the children as I am to be rid of you?'

‘Then you wouldn't be here.'

‘What if I came not because you asked me to,' she said carefully, ‘but to please someone else?'

‘Who? Fin? What's does he have—'

‘Not Fin.'

Dominic shook his head, frowning. ‘Cameron?'

Polly said nothing.

‘Oh God,' he exclaimed, ‘not Christy Cameron!'

‘Perhaps you should have been a little more careful, Dominic, a little less devious and sure of yourself.' Polly lifted the sheaf of photographs and rose from the table. ‘Now I'm going upstairs to bathe and change and lie down for a while,' she said. ‘What time do they serve lunch?'

‘Twelve or twelve thirty.'

‘See you then,' she said and, pressing the photographs to her breast, made her way out through the dining room in search of a place to rest.

*   *   *

‘Absenteeism,' Archie yelled into the telephone, ‘isn't my responsibility. For God's sake, man, how do you expect me to be able to tell just by looking at them if they will or will not drag themselves out of bed of a morning? I agree that some
are
obvious candidates for the funny farm but the co-relationship between sheer inbred laziness and being a raving nutter has so far escaped me. Now hold on, just hold on: I'm not accusing
you
of being a nutter, Mr Macdonald, and, yes, I do realise that you have a factory to run, but…'

Babs paused in her typing and squinted at Archie through the half-open door of the office. She enjoyed watching Archie working himself up into a paroxysm of indignation. Experience told her that quite soon he would begin to wax sarcastic with Mr Macdonald, who managed a small asbestos factory on the far side of Renfrew and who, war or not, stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence of unions or workers' councils. Four days was the average tenure of new employees, and several had even had the gall – or the gumption – to return to the Welfare Centre to register their complaints in person.

Archie stood up, pushed away his chair, turned his back and brought his voice down to a rasping whisper; always a bad sign.

Babs leaned over her Underwood, eavesdropping unashamedly.

‘I will not,' Archie hissed, ‘be talked to in this manner, sir. If you have a grouse about the quality of employees sent you by this office then I suggest you notify the Ministry of Labour who will, I've no doubt, be only too delighted to send round a team of Health and Safety inspectors to establish the facts behind complaints on both sides of the managerial divide.' He paused and raised a hand to heaven. ‘No, Mr Macdonald, I said “managerial divide”, which phrase, as far as I'm aware, does not imply a threat.'

‘Excuse me.'

Babs had been so intent on listening to Archie that she hadn't heard the street door open. She swung round, bashing her elbow on the Underwood, and blinked up at the woman who stood before the desk.

‘May I help you?' Babs asked, rubbing her elbow.

‘Is he busy?' the woman said. ‘Yes, I can see he's busy.'

She was just a little older than Mammy, Babs thought, and had a delicate, powdery style that Mammy had never acquired. Archie had a textbook phrase for the social type to which this woman belonged: middle-class aspirants Archie called them. It struck Babs that the classification might have been coined with just this woman in mind.

She couldn't imagine what the woman could possibly want in a recruitment office for she was clearly too genteel to undertake any sort of hard labour apart, perhaps, from flower arranging.

‘I won't wait if he's busy,' the woman said.

‘Perhaps I can be of assistance,' Babs suggested.

‘I'll just leave him these, shall I?' the woman said. ‘I'll just put them down here and you'll give them to him, won't you, dear?'

‘Give him what?'

‘He left his sandwiches, such a rush this morning, went off without them, too conscientious for his own good sometimes.'

‘San— Oh!' said Babs. ‘Are you—'

‘His mother, Archie's mother, yes, just an old fusspot, I suppose you'll think I am, but he gets so cross when he doesn't have a proper lunch.'

Babs stared at the neat greaseproof packet that Mrs Harding had placed on the desk before her. She could have sworn that an identical package was tucked into the pocket of Archie's overcoat in the cloakroom but she tactfully kept this information to herself.

The woman was still going on in a rushed little voice, so low and self-effacing that you had to strain to hear it, the sort of voice that would bore you to tears in no time. Babs was well aware that the sandwiches were only an excuse and that Mrs Harding had made the trip across the river not to ensure that her son and heir was properly nourished but to cast an eye on his female assistant.

Babs got to her feet and offered her hand.

‘Why, Mrs Harding,' she said, laying on the treacle, ‘it's a great pleasure to meet you. I've heard so much about you from Archie.'

‘Have you, have you?' the woman said. ‘And you are…?'

You know bloody well who I am, Babs thought, and any second now you're going to take out your lorgnette, put me under the microscope and start asking all sorts of impertinent questions.

‘Barbara Hallop.' Babs offered her hand again.

Mrs Harding closed both her gloved paws over it. ‘The widow, yes, I'm so sorry for your loss, my dear, yes, it must be terribly hard to bear, losing a husband at your age, do you have children?'

‘Only four,' Babs said.

Archie's filial instinct came into play. He straightened, growing taller. The hand that held the telephone tightened until the knuckles turned white. He kept talking, though, kept right on haranguing the manager of Resins & Asbestos as he swung round and, noble as a stag at bay, glowered out at Babs and his mother cosily holding hands and chatting like dear old mates. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, he extended his left hand, balled the fingers into a fist and punched down on the telephone cradle, cutting Macdonald off in mid-flow.

He laid the receiver on its back on the desk and, with a smile that would have made Dr Goebbels proud, advanced out of the office with arms wide spread.

‘Mother,' he said, ‘what an absolutely splendid surprise!'

*   *   *

The taxi-cab dropped them at the back of the Arsenal. They continued on foot up the Rua dos Remédios into the maze of lanes, and steep-stepped alleyways that made up the old Moorish quarter of the Alfama. They walked in single file on narrow pavements, Dominic leading and Christy bringing up the rear.

The old houses tucked back in secretive recesses blocked out the breeze from the Tagus, and it was hot now. Polly had chosen to wear a summer frock and cotton jacket. She was tempted to take off the jacket and carry it over her arm but Dominic wore a heavy black overcoat and Christy his reefer jacket and neither of them seemed to be feeling the heat.

She wondered if she was coming down with some vague inopportune malady that would defray the necessity of making decisions. She would, she thought, be perfectly happy propped up in bed in the airy high-ceilinged room in the Avenida Palace Hotel with Dominic or Christy bringing her cool drinks and fresh fruit, and bathing her forehead with a linen cloth.

Eight days at sea, and meeting Dominic again, had eroded her sense of reality and she felt as if she were drifting through the landscapes of a dream.

The blue sky was streaked with motionless wisps of cloud and slotted between the roofs of the houses she could glimpse the walls of an ancient Moorish citadel, the Castelo de São Jorge, high above. The tall buildings reminded her a little of the cluttered tenements of the Calcutta Road back home in Glasgow, except that they were draped with foliage and topped by flowering shrubs, and smelled not of beer and coal smoke but of sun-baked brick and spices.

There had been no sign of Jamie Cameron at lunch and Christy hadn't turned up until the meal was almost over.

Polly had seized the opportunity to give Dominic all the news from home. In turn he had told her about the children. In fact she had spent the latter part of the morning kneeling in her room upstairs with the photographs spread out on the floor, struggling to recall what manner of mother she had been and why she had become so distanced from her children. She had never been able to see herself in them, to catch sight of her own childhood in those smug, scrubbed, scared little faces; nor did she find it even in the broad smiles and casual poses that Dominic's camera had caught, for the children in the snapshots seemed more like likeable strangers than her own flesh and blood.

What had passed between Jamie Cameron, Christy and Dominic in Christy's room in the Avenida Palace she neither knew nor cared. She was in Dominic's hands now. She would do just what Dominic told her to do.

Comical really, Polly thought, as she trudged up the steep stone steps, to realise that Mammy was at home fretting about hambones and mutton chops, that Rosie was focused on weaning an Irish foundling and Babs in finding jobs for misfits while she was about to meet with a man who might hold the fate of the Italian nation in his hands. It was all so fraudulent, so contrived, and yet, Polly thought, perhaps this is how agents and spies stumble into the game, nudged on not by pride and patriotism but by pettiness and petulance, by little bits of guilt and a great deal of greed; power too, she supposed, but unlike Dominic, she knew nothing of power or the damage it could cause.

‘You sure you know where you're going?' Christy called out.

Dom glanced round. ‘I'm looking for a red-painted wooden gate. The
pension
's at the end of the garden behind it.'

‘Haven't you been here before?' Polly asked.

‘Only once, at night,' Dom answered.

‘Maybe we should wait until it gets dark,' Christy suggested.

‘Or ask someone,' said Polly.

They came to a halt at a corner. Broken cobbles, drains, a trickle of clear water, washing hung out to dry on iron balconies; the lane dived off downhill. Above the corner, though, it broadened out into something that was almost if not quite a street.

‘You can't ask anyone,' said Christy. ‘If you do then the Nazis might be able to trace our footsteps and track Emilio down. Right, Dominic?'

‘That is a danger,' Dom agreed.

Polly had an almost irrepressible desire to laugh. Nobody in the street remotely resembled her concept of a Nazi. There were a few women pushing handcarts, one or two old men seated on chairs outside their shops, and near the top of the hill a rusty three-wheeled vehicle with chickens in wicker crates piled up behind the driver.

She said, ‘What'll happen to Emilio if the Germans do find him?'

‘They'll kill him,' Dominic said.

He kept his hands in his pockets, kneading a little bag of diamonds in each fist, clinging to them as if they were ballast.

What sort of racket could her husband hope to run in Portugal when he couldn't even find a boarding house with a red-painted gate? She looked uphill at a fat-armed woman, not unlike Mammy, hanging over the rail of a balcony, watching them. Was
she
, Polly wondered, in the pay of the Nazis? She was just on the point of calling out to the woman when a head appeared out of the plane of the wall. It was there and then it wasn't.