She jerked out a long leg and kicked the oven door shut. The telephone was in the cubby-hole which passed for a hall, and when it had rung she’d yanked it into the kitchen without getting up from the leatherette-covered revolving high stool; and she was glaring with distaste at half a dozen eggs, a tin of sardines, a stale loaf of hard-looking bread (steam-baked a l’anglaise, and scarcely worthy of the name of bread at all), a hunk of mousetrap cheese aged to a nasty-looking yellow transparency, half a bottle of milk that had gone sour in her absence. A lovely London supper — and it had cost a small fortune. Somehow you didn’t mind so much spending a fortune in Paris. She said into the phone, “Coming round for me?”
“Of course. I’d thought of Martinez.”
He hadn’t really; but he was going to Spain, and the name had just at that moment suggested itself — and, of course, the food was excellent. Might be a good thing, too, just to look through a Spanish menu again. He said, “I’ll be round in half an hour, Debbie. Just as quick as I can make it.”
“Give me time to doll-up and put a face on.”
Actually she didn’t use make-up to any extent — for one thing, she just didn’t need it. She gave a little gurgle of happiness and blew a kiss down the unresponsive receiver. As she clicked the call off her eyes were very slightly misty.
Shaw didn’t talk much in the taxi. A drip of rain ran down his collar from where he’d squelched through London’s filthy weather from Great Portland Street station to Albany Street. And that damned pain in his guts nagged at him, as it would nag all the way to the Spanish-Gibraltar frontier at La Linea. He felt abominably ill in body, depressed in spirit; but he did his best to shake himself out of it by just sitting there and consciously relaxing, liking the nearness of the girl in the intimacy of the dark taxi, enjoying her perfume and the nice feeling that to-night was all theirs, the bitter-sweetness of having to get the most out of the short, calendar-threatened time before good-bye.
During dinner, across the wine-glasses and the gleaming white napery of their table, beneath the softly shaded lights of the room walled with tiles from the ancient Andalusian orange-town of Seville, he gave her the cover-story. Quietly he said, “I’m off the day after to-morrow, Debbie.”
The tawny body gave a small shiver, and she felt a little knot of sadness gathering in her throat; she crumbled a piece of bread, looked at his sensitive face outlined sharply against the red glow from the electric ‘brazier’ by the wall behind their table. She thought — suddenly compassionate and understanding: He’s worried, very worried, and a lot of that is my fault, because I’ve only to say the word and he’d be happy, or at least as happy as he’s ever likely to be until the outfit finally take their hands off him. But that’s the way I’m made and I can’t help it. Or I could help it if I really wanted to, and there’s the rub; the whole point being that I don’t really want to, or rather not altogether and definitely not yet, and really that makes it all the worse. Get me a psychiatrist, she thought, and he’ll tell me I’m nothing but a crazy, mixed-up kid!
All she said was, “I thought you were on the move, darling,” lowering her gaze now to fiddle with the gold watch-bracelet that Shaw had given her some while before. She knew her security record was absolutely O.K., Grade A, first-class, and all the rest of it, but she made a point of refraining from asking questions. In general it was safe enough for Shaw to talk to her, and he knew it, and did sometimes ask her for ideas, but he always had to do the volunteering; and in a restaurant you obviously had to stick to the cover-story anyway.
He said, “I’m leaving the Service, Debbie.”
He saw the query in her eyes — she couldn’t help that; it wasn’t in the least what she had been expecting, and he answered the unspoken plea. He shook his head slightly, his eyes wary. He said, “The Navy — the whole show. I’m going on the retired list.”
She didn’t know whether or not to believe him. Joy and relief showed for an instant, before the automatic thought came to her: There’s more behind this! They wouldn’t be retiring him, even with the Golden Bowler, chucking a useful man on the shelf, not unless it was at his own request, and somehow she didn’t think it would be. But she made herself smile at him, and she said:
“Oh, goody! Now you’ll have to let me get you that high-level job with E.P.C., Esmonde.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got a job already.”
“Quick work!” She lifted an eyebrow. That little gesture, so wonderfully attractive, was like a knife in the heart to Shaw, sent the most extraordinary feelings through his whole body. He grinned at her, mouth tight and drawn as though it resented being forced into a grin.
“I suppose it is,” he said. “But it’s a case of a job for the boys, I’m afraid. I’m an Admiralty civilian — Inspector of Establishments in Armament Supply.”
“Which is?” she queried.
Briefly he told her. He added that his first routine inspection was to be of the Gibraltar depot. Shaw was a good agent, and he convinced people. Debonnair was almost convinced after a while; it sounded genuine enough, but there was one test which couldn’t fail, and it was a test no one but she herself could make. Because of it she said no more, but just waited for him to say something. While she waited she studied him obliquely, saw the hurt that he couldn’t keep out of his eyes as he talked on, almost aimlessly, covering up what he was leaving unsaid. That hurt was there because he wasn’t sure that she would understand… understand the way his mind worked. But she did; she thought, if he tells me it’s all right for us to get married now I’ll know he really is retiring. If he doesn’t — then all this is hooey, and he’s off, as I suspected, on another job. Because he’s too goddam decent to make this an excuse for getting me to change my mind and say yes; it would be under false pretences, and he’d never do that to me even for the outfit, even for England. Shaw, she knew, was the kind of man who put homely things first, and believed that national decency, which he wouldn’t confuse with some narrow concept of morality— he wasn’t the kind of man, for instance, to take up silly postures about people sleeping together if they felt so inclined — was firmly based on the decent feelings of the ordinary people who made up the nation. A queer sort of agent — yes, maybe; but she hadn’t noticed that he was the less thought of because of it.
When he didn’t say anything she knew — and, of course, she understood. Her hand stole under the table to squeeze his. For an instant their thighs touched; emotion showed momentarily in Shaw’s face. His quick thoughts had been running on bitterly behind the gay chatter from the other tables, the inconsequential rubbish, the laughter aroused by shared jokes, the lights, the hovering attentions of the waiters, the olive hand which deferentially plied the half-forgotten carafe.
Shaw took up his glass, lifted it, frowning as the girl watched him; squinted through the red glow as the lights shone behind the crystal, saw the pinky-red pool of its reflection thrown on to the cloth. Like blood, that glass… He thought of a man dying in a dark alleyway, of the sudden flick of steel behind a dirty bar in a Tunis back street, a body somersaulting over rocks outside Mers-el-Kebir, in North Africa, somersaulting into a ripple of silver moonlight on the Mediterranean. All these things and so many more he had seen and done; and all were there yet in his mind, a dark backcloth to his imaginative thoughts. But maybe Spain would be a piece of cake compared with the past. Couldn’t be worse. He ran his fingers slowly along the edge of a table-knife… the blade was thick, blunt. That surprised him. Ridiculous. In a way it had been a shock to find that knife so blunt to the touch — all knives weren’t blunt like that. But Spain, now… the full red glow on the tablecloth, the blood in the glass, the blood which was only wine — it could be symbolic merely of the blood on the sand — bullfights, bottles of wine, a maddened crowd sweating in the close-packed stone seats of the ring, the vicious dark-red spurt as the picadors thrust home with their lances, shielded legs dangling from the scraggy horses’ sides, straw-bloated against the gashing horns of the sacrificial victim…