‘But you were too selfish to avoid it.’
‘I was in love, Carla.’
‘Ah,’ she said quietly. ‘That explains everything.’
He sat on the bed beside her, and took her hand, with its short, unvarnished nails. ‘I love you. But I was in love with her. The difference is…’
‘You need not tell me what the difference is, Artú.’
‘But do you understand? You are my life. You are the mother of my children. I could not survive without you. We have spent a lifetime together. But with you, I am an old man. With her, I was young. Time had not passed. The fire had not burned down.’ He stared at her masked face. ‘Do you understand?’
Her mouth was bitter. ‘What are you telling me all this for? Do you think it’s going to make me change my mind?’
Tears trickled from the corners of his eyes, sliding along the wrinkles on his face. He bowed his white head down until his forehead was resting on her thigh. ‘There is a demon inside me, Carla. I cannot control it. I cannot. Because it is the same demon that gives me my art. It gives me my life.’
At last she pulled off her mask and sat up, pushing him away. ‘Do you think I don’t have my own demon, Artú? Do you think I don’t want my own pleasures, my own life? But I gave everything up for you. So that you could have your life, your pleasures. I asked very little.’
‘I know you did,’ he sobbed.
‘I asked only for some dignity, some respect—’
‘I know, I know.’
‘But you wouldn’t even give me that.’
‘I cannot live without you.’ He seized her hand again and covered it with wet kisses. ‘Forgive me, Carla, forgive me!’
Carla looked at him with a mixture of disgust and pity. ‘You beg me not to leave you, and in the same breath you tell me you will not give up your women.’
‘I will give them up. I will give them up. I swear it, Carla. We will start a new life together. Look.’ He jumped up and pulled the curtains open. Through the window, the towers of Manhattan could be seen, crowded together in the morning sun. ‘Look, my dear. Everything is new today. We’re not too old to start again.’ He smiled at her tremulously, the light making a halo out of his white hair.
‘You are an old fool,’ she said. ‘But I am even stupider.’ She heaved herself off the bunk. ‘Let’s go.’
Fanny Ward, the Indestructible Ingénue, had prepared for her own interview carefully, starting before dawn. One of the things she most regretted leaving behind in London was her lady’s maid of the past twenty years. Lucy had been a treasure. Getting ready to face the flashbulbs and the microphones was terrifying these days. But she had faced it without Lucy to help her dress and put on her make-up, and now she gave the assembled newspapermen her gayest smile.
‘I really don’t think I can fit any more of you in,’ she protested as they crowded her little stateroom. Some of them remained in the doorway, angling their cameras over the heads of the men in front of them.
Miss Ward had positioned herself against the window, as she always did, but there was no escape from the cameras. The popping and sizzling of the flashguns was dazzling, heating up the room as though a miniature battle were being fought in it. Panic rose in her breast. They were too close, too bright. She was going to look ghastly. The best she could hope for was that sub-editors would blue-pencil the photographs as too frightful to publish.
‘Please, my dears, have mercy with your flashguns.’ She dabbed the sweat that had begun to clog her face powder.
‘What can you tell us about London, Miss Ward?’
‘Oh, my dear man. Too, too sad. Like a plague city. The streets deserted at night and everything buried in sandbags. No gaiety, no bright lights, so triste. I wept to see it like that.’
‘And what do you expect to see when you go back to London?’ one of the others called.
Miss Ward opened her baby-blue eyes very wide, just in time for the pop of another flashbulb. ‘I expect to see everything gay again, those hideous dirigibles gone from the skies, and of course, everything just as it has always been.’
‘So you think you’ll see the Union Jack still flying over Buckingham Palace?’
‘Well, you know, that would mean the King wasn’t at home. I would hope to see the Royal Standard. That would mean he was in residence.’
‘Do you think Britain can win this war?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Britain must win this war, mustn’t she?’
‘Miss Ward,’ a man called from the back of the group, ‘Walter Winchell has just written in his column that you’ve inherited two and a half million dollars from your late daughter. Is that true?’
Miss Ward’s smile faltered, and for a terrible moment she felt she was going to crumple to the floor, like some creature shot in the heart, in full view of the cameras. She forced herself to remain upright. ‘No parent should ever have to inherit anything from a child. It’s the saddest thing in all the world. But yes, it’s true. My darling Dotty left me everything in her will.’ Mentally, she was preparing what she would say to Walter Winchell about revealing that little snippet of news. The man held nothing sacred and everything in contempt.
‘Tell us about the submarine, Miss Ward.’
She fixed the smile back on her face. ‘I wasn’t going to let any German submarine catch me déshabillé, gentlemen. I slept in a flying suit all the way.’
There was laughter, and another volley of photographs. She managed to get the reporters out of her cabin and shut the door on the last of them, sagging wearily. She was ready to leave the ship.
HMS Amphitrite
They let Hufnagel out of the sickbay to get some fresh air. The two burly sailors who went with him everywhere, as though he were a wild beast who might at any moment lash out or leap overboard, had finally relaxed their vigilance. Weakened as he was, he presented little danger to anyone. One of the sailors even solicitously draped a blanket over his shivering shoulders.
‘There you go, Fritz. Don’t catch a chill.’
He nodded his thanks. Clutching the blanket around himself, he went to the rail and looked across the bay at the distant towers of Manhattan. He was remembering his last visit here as a midshipman. The precise phrase which formed in his mind was ‘in my youth’. It was an odd phrase, considering he was not yet twenty-five. But he felt old. Much of himself had gone down with U-113. He was no longer what he had been.
He glanced down at his right arm, which now ended in a bandaged stump, just above the elbow. It was a pity to lose the arm. And the other arm, thanks to Todt’s first shot, still had a doubtful future. He knew the British naval surgeon had done his best, but he was inexperienced and over-eager with the knife. Anyway, there was no use crying over spilled milk. What was done was done. He had saved the Manhattan, and perhaps hundreds of lives. That was something. He had no idea who those passengers were, whose lives had been in his hands for a trembling moment. And they would never know who he was. But that was war. Where ignorant armies clash by night.
He looked again at the New York skyline, thinking of the teeming streets his younger self had once walked, so long ago. It would surely not be long before the might of America joined with Britain against the Axis powers. Then – for all Hitler’s contemptuous dismissal of a ‘mongrel nation’ – the war would take a very different turn.
It made little difference to him now. He would be spending the rest of it, however it turned out, as a POW. He would see the world from behind a fence for years to come, perhaps a decade. Nobody could tell. And after that, he would have to face his life as an amputee, a wounded bird pecking crumbs on windowsills.