The submarine docked alongside the fat bulk of a depot ship, suddenly cramped and made insignificant. McBride, looking down at the jetty from the conning-tower, could see the two figures waiting for him. Then the lieutenant joined him next to the submarine's captain. McBride shook hands with the captain.
"Thanks."
"Almost a pleasure." The submariner tossed his head towards the jetty. "Have fun."
"Are you ready, Commander?" the professional asked, not so much in impatience as with due attention to time and required expertise. McBride nodded, rubbed his face as if massaging it, and took off the duffel-coat. "I'll go down and check the arrangements." The lieutenant climbed over the side and down the ladder.
"I'm glad to say not all RNVR chaps are like him," the young Lt Commander observed after the head had disappeared. "Cold fish, I should think?"
"Professional," McBride observed.
"And you're an amateur?"
"Sure I am," McBride replied in the broadest brogue he could summon. "Thanks again."
He climbed lightly over the side of the conning-tower, and down the ladder. He jumped the narrow space of oily water onto the jetty. One of his reception party, almost to his surprise, was a Wren — his driver, he presumed. He grinned at her, but she ignored him. The Commander, RN, of NOIC staff, Portland, seemed to expect him to salute, then appeared to lump him with the lieutenant as a professional agent to whom naval discipline was an unreality.
"Shall we go?" he asked.
"Where's Walsingham?" McBride asked, suddenly not wishing to clamber into a car and sit out some unlit night drive along the south coast.
The commander seemed to sense his reluctance at once, and said with a smirk: "You haven't anything against women drivers, have you, McBride?"
McBride felt suddenly irritated, unreasonably so. He supposed it to be the aftershock of his escape, or simply his weariness.
"Where the hell is Walsingham? I want this debriefing over so I can sleep!"
"Walsingham's at the Otterbourne house — you're being taken there."
McBride raised his hands, as if to wring them in protest and frustration, then he seemed to subside, grinned tiredly, and merely said, "Very well, your honours, let's get on with it, shall we?"
The noises of the submarine releasing its crew behind them seemed safe and familiar to McBride as they walked to the Austin at the end of the jetty. A jeep was parked behind it, with an MP sergeant leaning on it, and a driver and two more MPs inside. Armed escort. After Guernsey, it all seemed piffling and unnecessary to McBride.
"The prisoner leaps to loose his chains—" he sang softly. The Wren, standing next to him, looked up into his face and smiled.
They left the commander standing watching their departure, McBride and the lieutenant in the back seat of the Austin, the jeep ahead of them, and turned out past the depot and along the short stretch of Chesil Beach to Ferry Bridge and the outskirts of Weymouth. The intelligence officer seemed disinclined to converse, as if his task were accomplished. McBride surrendered to the expertise of the driver as she tailed the jeep. He tried to sleep, dozing off occasionally, waking often and catching the moonlight glinting like steel on Weymouth Bay, the trees along the A352 like sentries, the snail-like progress through blacked-out Poole and Bournemouth, the darkness-moonlight alternations of the New Forest, the stop-start and sense of a bigger, more frightened town as they passed through Southampton.
And came awake at the burning, the smell of it in the car and the light playing disturbingly on his closed eyelids. There had been another raid on the port. The Wren had to thread her way behind the jeep through undamaged side-streets to the north of the city centre, which seemed a chain of fires linked by darkness. There were fires, too, down in the dock area. McBride, half awake, saw them from a seaward vantage, Southampton Water reflecting the glare down as far as Hamble and beyond.
The car jolted over fire-hoses, paused at hastily erected barriers — McBride saw in the light of a fire begun by a stray bomb a bath hanging crazily out of the torn side of a house — and moved slowly on until they turned onto the main Winchester road. As if he had felt obliged to witness the damage to Southampton, he now slid down in the seat again, and began to let the thoughts of his village, Leap, and the cottage and his wife, Maureen, repossess his dreaming. There had been something stinging and salutary about Southampton, diminishing his own previous night on the run in Guernsey. It was no great matter beside the dead and burned in the seaport behind them. Reflected firelight still shimmered just above his head on the roof-lining.
Whenever he finished a job, there was time for the slowness of Ireland, for the cottage, for his wife and the gleam of moonlight on the ceiling of their bedroom and the frame of the brass bedstead; and the water jug which was frozen over on winter mornings. He settled to the work of memory, hardly noticing as they turned off the A33 just south of Otterbourne, entered lodge-gates, and passed down a drive lined with oaks, finally drawing up before a small eighteenth-century country house which seemed to disdain the modern encroachment of a guard-hut on its gravel drive.
The Wren parked the car, and McBride was shaken awake by his companion. He groaned, stretching and feeling stiffer than he had done between the coal-bunkers or the rocks. Maureen slipped away from him, smiling, and he felt intense irritation with his companion. He climbed out of the car, nodded to the occupants of the jeep who were already at ease and smoking, then saw Walsingham on the steps of the house, waiting for him.
He consciously prodded himself forward, wanting nothing more than to return to sleep.
Lieutenant Peter Gilliatt, RNVR first officer of HMS Bisley, hefted his grey hold-all down from the carriage and over his shoulder. He had got as far as Cardiff, and the variety show at the New Theatre and then a pub called The Moulder's Arms where some of the female customers had inspired anxiety rather than desire — before the local police had caught up with him. He had put aside the thin, warm Welsh bitter almost gratefully, surprised more that the PC had found him than by the order to return immediately to Milford Haven and his ship.