Everyone was watching the boat, willing it on. Above us, harsh searchlights picked out the launch, making the waves glitter. Then three cracks split the air and I looked up to see a guard in the watch tower lower his rifle.
I stared out to see if the young man had been hit. We all did. But the boat was still moving – the guard had missed. I felt my heart lift as if I were in the little vessel with that young man putting his life at risk to get to a northern shore. From the west, one of our patrol boats appeared, racing in his wake, hugging the shoreline.
‘Will he make it?’ I asked Tibbot, putting aside, for a moment, our own purpose that afternoon. But it struck me that our task wasn’t unconnected to this sight. Whatever had, ultimately, pushed this young man to speed between air-cutting bullets in the Thames Estuary was surely the same cause that had left Lorelei shimmering under cold, drifting water in London. ‘If he can get to the middle, he might. That’s where the mines are – our boat won’t follow.’
He was only a few hundred metres from the centre line. It couldn’t take him long.
‘Won’t he set off the mines himself?’
‘Maybe little boats don’t set them off. I don’t know.’
The people around us were egging the pilot on. The men in particular were shaking the wire fence. The children kept trying to climb the links but were dragged down and slapped by their parents, who pointed to the watch towers that were spitting more and more bullets.
‘Will he get through?’ I asked aloud.
‘Yes!’ a young man shouted back, abandoning discretion. Another patrol boat roared in from the east, but they were both holding back.
‘What are they doing?’ I said.
Tibbot jerked his thumb to the towers. ‘Too many rounds. They don’t want to get hit themselves.’ The young man kept changing his course, apparently trying to make it harder for the soldiers to aim.
‘He’s going to do it!’ shouted one of the men. But, just as he did so, there was another volley of gunfire and the pilot disappeared from view.
‘Did he fall in?’ cried one of the women.
‘No,’ Tibbot said quietly. ‘He’s in the boat.’ The little craft began to steer a wild course, wheeling in a circle, before the engine cut out. It bobbed gently in the water, drifting along with the tide. There was silence now from the people watching. ‘Let’s go,’ Tibbot said.
18
We walked quickly up the hill to find the railway line emerging around a corner. We bought two tickets at the station counter and sat in the small, empty waiting room. ‘My wife was from Kent,’ Tibbot said after a while. It was the first time he had spoken about her.
‘From near here?’
‘Quite near. Maidstone. She was devoted to Julie, of course,’ he added, as if he hadn’t stopped thinking of either of them for a second. ‘Poor flowers.’ I looked at him. I got the impression that he wanted to talk about it, but wasn’t used to it. He stared at the floor.
‘What do you mean?’
He shifted in his seat. ‘Julie, she… It was Elsa’s shift at the pub that she was going to when she was caught up in that demo. Elsa was poorly and I told Julie to cover it for her mum. She didn’t want to because she was going to meet some of her pals, but I said her mum would get into trouble with the landlord.
‘After it happened, Elsa and I never said anything, but I was always thinking, “If you hadn’t got ill” and she was always thinking, “If you hadn’t told her to take my place.” Well, you can’t stop those thoughts.’ He cleaned his glasses and pressed them back into place.
I thought about my own mum and dad. How they had always done their best for me and how their own lives had ended, like so many others, with the indignity of TB. Really, though, I should be thankful that at least I had had a chance to say goodbye to them. Millions over the past decade had never had that.
A youngish man with neat hair and shining shoes sat on a bench on the other side. Tibbot glanced at him and quietly suggested we wait out on the platform.
‘You’re a teacher, you said?’ he asked, as we emerged.
‘Yes. Only I haven’t worked for some time. No one will give me a job.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I trained in the old era. I can’t be trusted. Do you know, there’s been a standing directive for a few years: any children who were at school in the DUK before the Wall went up can’t be in the same class together because they could form factions and pollute the others? It just seems normal now. God, that’s awful.’
The train arrived and we boarded it. Tibbot was silent for a minute. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Look, Jane, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but we’re crossing a line here. I can’t tell them I’m a copper so we won’t have that protection. If NatSec or whoever found out, we would be–’
‘I know what we would be.’ He didn’t need to warn me. Maybe as a policeman he didn’t experience the visceral fear that the rest of us had to live with. But it was as much as I could do not to catch the first train back to London and wait quietly at home for whatever was going to happen to me and Nick. ‘I was wondering,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Back in Lorelei’s house, when we were looking at the posters, you started to tell me something but you stopped yourself. It was something you had seen in them.’
‘Did I? Oh, yes, something did occur to me. Those dates on the posters – they meant something but not just the code in the book. Something else.’ I waited again for him to explain. ‘It’s that they were all years ago. The last one was in ’48. No more in the last four years.’
‘So?’
‘Oh, twenty years ago it must be. I was sent to a house up in Golders Green. I was living north of the river then. Actress by the name of – I won’t forget it – Lillian Hall-Davis. She was a big star for a while. Silent era – before your time. Then the talkies came and the parts dried up. Well, poor girl did for herself. Do you think–’
‘Lorelei would never do something like that.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because she liked herself too much.’
It was fully dark when we alighted at a tiny station formed of nothing but a platform and a brick hut for the guard. The village it served was a vision of the rural England that used to be, and in my mind’s eye I could see old maids cycling to church, waving to mothers with prams, while the menfolk played cricket on the village green. There were pockets of that left, with the new way of life taking its time to creep out from the towns and cities, but there was talk now of collectivizing the last remaining private farms to make them fairer and more efficient – no longer would the farmer have a fat belly while the factory worker starved, they said.
Following directions that the station guard gave us, we picked our way along a country lane. The hedgerows eventually gave way to a high brick wall that we followed for a kilometre before it opened to show a large country house, the sort a wealthy industrialist might have retired to in the last century. Thousands of these grand homes had rotted away after the Great War had left their owners’ sons lying in shallow, muddy graves in Flanders and beside the Somme. Behind its closed wrought-iron gates we saw a little wooden gatehouse with a man inside dressed in a white uniform. He was reading the football reports on the back page of the Morning Star and looked up when I tried the gates. They were locked, I found. He slid open a window. ‘We’re looking for a Dr Larren. Is he here?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t seen him go out.’
‘But he does work here?’
‘He’s medical director.’ He was becoming curious about us.