have you any idea who sent the message?’
‘No, queen.’ Vi honestly had not. It could only have come from Gerry, and Gerry was dead. ‘That Lilith’s a good guesser and we’re goin’ to keep away from her and her funny religion, aren’t we?’
They said they were, though they knew it was not true. They would be drawn back to that table and its shining glass, nothing was more certain. Vi knew it too, for how she could prevent it she was too shaken, at the moment, even to contemplate.
‘Load of old nonsense, that’s what. Forget Lilith Penrose, eh? Even her name’s funny, innit?’
‘Lilith?’ Lucinda shrugged. ‘It was the first name in creation, some say.’
Vi gathered her forehead into a frown. ‘Who says?’ Everybody knew that Eve was the first woman. It said so in the Bible, plain as the nose on your face.
‘I-I don’t know. Someone must have said it, I suppose – that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, I mean.’
‘Well, that someone was wrong,’ Vi said grimly. ‘Just you forget such things, Lucinda. Like I said, we’d all better keep away from cabin 10 and all that carrying on. She’s been nosing around in the regulating office, bet you anything you like she has, and she doesn’t fool me!’
The smile was back on Vi’s lips again. Leading Wren Lilith Penrose would have to get up very early in the morning to catch Vi McKeown on the hop.
‘An’ it’s still me birthday, innit, and if we’re not too late for the transport into Craigiebur, I’ve got a spare ten bob I feel like spendin’. My treat. Anybody interested?’
Jane fidgeted with the signal pads on her desk, plucked a thread from the sleeve of her jacket then stared blankly at the chewed end of her Admiralty-issue pencil. What was this phenomenon? Why did everyone sit, breath indrawn, like figures in a tableau? Why this silence, a silence so unexpected and inexplicable that it screamed ‘Listen to me!’ Through the half-open door of the coding office she could see Lofty’s back; beside him Lucinda sat unmoving, her left hand relaxed on a dial.
‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ The sudden dense hush was so uncanny that Jane felt compelled to whisper. ‘Has the war stopped, or something?’
‘It happens.’ Jock shrugged. ‘Sometimes, it’s as if it takes a breathing space.’ Sometimes, he said, no hand depressed a Morse key or lifted a telephone or received a signal, and even the teleprinters, tired of their own unending chack-chacking, switched themselves off. It was only minutes, the duration of that fleeting armistice, but such a stillness was so unaccustomed, embraced a silence so complete that it was always noticed, and wondered at. Such moments happened mostly during the ungodly first hours of a new day, those breathless hours when a soul sighs away from a dying body. They were to be expected in that, the middle watch, when eyes were gritty with tiredness and the air stale and limbs cold, but it was less usual in a busy forenoon watch as this.
‘It’s as if everyone is waiting for something, isn’t it?’
‘I know what you mean.’ Jock blew out rings of cigarette smoke then watched them widen and disappear. ‘It’s just one of those things, so try to remember what it’s like next time there’s a panic on, eh? And there’s no’ a thing you can do about it, lassie, so why don’t you sit back and enjoy it? Or maybe you’d like to watch the boat coming alongside?’
‘Which boat? Is Sparta back from trials?’
‘No. This one’s Taureg, a T-boat. A big one, home from patrol. She’s had a bad time, so the buzz has it. Landed herself in big trouble in the Bay, but managed to get out of it. The skipper and commander are going to be there, so it’ll be caps in the air and three cheers and all that. You might find it interesting. Away with you, now. I’ll let you know when things get going again. Just nip up the steps outside the navigator’s sea cabin. You’ll get a good view from there.’
Reluctantly Jane pushed back her chair. In truth she wasn’t really interested in Taureg’s arrival, but anything that broke the self-imposed purdah of her existence was welcome, she supposed, for she still stood outside the real world, looking in; a part of her still waited in Yeoman’s Lane and none of this strangeness around her was really happening. She wished it were not so. She wanted to come alive again and fall in love again; but that was not possible, for no one but Rob MacDonald would do – and Rob was gone.
‘Okay, Jock. Thanks.’ Smiling, she pulled on her hat. ‘Won’t be long.’
The navigator’s sea cabin was small, wedged between the CCO and the signal deck, and one he seldom used since the depot ship rarely went to sea. Indeed, the whole total of Omega’s movement was a half-swing around her mooring buoy with the incoming tide and a half-swing back again on the ebb. But the view from the coding-office portholes was varied and interesting, a slowly changing panorama for those with time to gaze.
She lifted her face to the sun, half closing her eyes against the silver dazzle that bounced across the water, breathing deeply on the tangle-scented air. The two submarines which had lain alongside Omega at the start of her watch now stood off in the loch, still as two sentries, awaiting Taureg’s arrival, and she wondered how any man could volunteer to serve in such a craft; how he could live in quarters so cramped, with no privacy at all. And that was apart from the danger. So small a boat in so vast a sea. She tried to imagine what it would be like to sink to the sea bed and stay there, calmly, with only a steel hull between a man and the enormous, pressing waters.
I would panic, she thought. My mind would go numb. She who loved the fields and trees and the wideness of the North Riding could not have endured so claustrophobic an existence. She wondered which of the escort vessels would bring Taureg in. She still found it hard to believe that any British ship could be in danger so near to home; even when Jock had explained that unless a submarine was in water deep enough in which to dive, an escort was essential.
‘It’s the Brylcreem boys. Those Coastal Command laddies are inclined to bomb first and ask questions later.’
She hadn’t really believed him, but so much of her new life had still to make sense to her that she had not challenged his statement.
Her eyes swept the broad waters of the loch. Capricious and Lothian, two of the flotilla’s escort frigates, swung at their buoys, which could only mean that the Jan Mayen had gone out to bring the submarine in. She felt a moment of sorrow for the Jan Mayen’s crew: Dutchmen who had brought their little ship to Portsmouth when Holland was overrun by the Nazi armies, choosing to leave their country and fight on with the British Navy rather than give their ship into enemy hands. How sad for those sailors never to receive a letter from home; never to know if the families they had left behind were safe and well and managing to get enough to eat; not even daring to wonder if they were still alive. Yet those people, the fellow countrymen of Jan Mayen’s crew, would put their lives at risk to give help and shelter to British airmen. Foolish, wonderful people.
Tears of pride stung her eyes and she brushed them away with an impatient hand. God, when it’s my turn, please let me be brave, too …
‘Penny for them, Jenny.’
‘Uh?
