A guarded middle-aged woman answered my knock. She fitted the house, but not my idea of the wife of Major Tony Caldwell. She seemed too reserved, sullen almost.
On the other hand, you usually find the extrovert needs someone to lord it over.
Caldwell wasn’t quite a bully, but he certainly liked getting his own way.
Unless her appearance belied her strength of character, Mrs Caldwell would have been no match for our Tone. Which probably explains Kate Graveney. Which reminded me, I would have to watch what I was saying here.
“Mrs Caldwell? Sorry if I’m a little early…” I took my hat off.
“No, no it’s quite all right. You must be Mr McRae. Or is it Captain? It was in your message.” Her voice was tight with nerves. She held the open door for me and tried not to stare too hard at my face, at my scars. She hung my coat in the hall.
“The rank was handed back with the uniform. It’s just plain Mister. Danny, if you’re OK with that?”
“Mister it is, then. Go in.” She pointed into a room off the hall. “Please take a seat. I’ll make us some tea.” She kept touching her mouth and avoiding my eyes. What did she have to feel guilty about? She wore a good dark frock and her brown hair was carefully combed back and pinned up in a style she probably hadn’t changed since she was sixteen.
As she went to the kitchen I looked around. It was a good-sized room in a tall thin house, but a bit stark and smelling of polish and stale air. It was clearly the “best” room, with an outlook on to a back garden with high hedges to keep out the neighbours. The antimacassars sat in perfect regimen on the backs of two brown armchairs and a couch. There was a heavy wood table and chairs, and an upright piano squatting on a plain brown rug. On the piano were photos. I got to my feet and walked smartly over. Sure enough, it was Tony Caldwell, in all his army finery, smiling out at me. There was a black ribbon edging the frame.
Another photo showed Tony and Liza – Mrs Caldwell to me, obviously – smiling and looking several years younger.
“I see you recognise him.” Mrs Caldwell had silently materialised. She was bearing a tray with all the tea accoutrements on it.
“Yes, of course. As I explained…”
“… you used to work together in the SOE.” She began clattering cups around.
“Right. And I was trying to look him up. Someone said… well that he was…”
“Dead?” Her eyes looked accusingly at me, as though I might have something to do with it. Then she was dabbing away at them.
“I’m sorry. That was very clumsy. I…”
She was shaking her head. “No. It’s all right. I still can’t believe it. To go through the whole war and then… a bit ironic, don’t you think Mr McRae?” She was pouring tea as she spoke.
“So Major Caldwell is dead? I’m very sorry.”
“He died, as you may have heard, in a friend’s flat. An unexploded bomb. Which finally did. Explode, I mean. There’s a lot still lying around they say. But that doesn’t seem to make it any less stupid. Do you believe in fate, Mr McRae?”
She went on without waiting for a reply. “I used not to. Now I’m not so sure.
Sugar?”
“Two please. I’m afraid there’s been a lot of fateful events these last few years. We’ve all lost something.”
“What did you lose, Mr McRae?” Her voice was sharper suddenly, and I caught a glimpse of steel beneath the softness. Her eyes seemed brighter, more penetrating.
“My memory.” I pointed to the scar. She’d already noticed it and only glanced briefly at my forehead. “I lost the best part of a year of my life. Only some snatches come back to me. And it’s hard to know what’s memory and what’s imagination.”
“Does it matter? It’s sometimes better not to remember.” Her lips pinched tighter. This woman needed more sugar in her tea.
“You may be right, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d like the chance of choosing what I want to forget. That’s why I wanted to find Tony. He recruited me to SOE and briefed me for my mission. I wondered what other gaps he might have been able to fill in for me.”
“That’s all you remember? Tony sending you off?” She was quite still now, as though this was the most important bit of our conversation. I assumed she was hungry to hear about him, to rub his memory. I thought I should oblige.
Tony organised six months of training at stations, as we called the several country houses scattered around England. I expanded my repertoire of unarmed combat. The Seaforth Highlanders had kept it simple: head first, then the boot.
Glasgow rules. Not cricket, but then we weren’t big on cricket. I learned explosive handling and radio communication, and buffed up my schoolboy French to a level that might fool a deaf German but would be ridiculed by a native speaker. Despite my protestations about the number of red-haired Frenchmen, they made me dye my hair black to look less conspicuous. At the end of my training Tony met me in Baker Street.
He took personal charge of the last session which went on all day, repeating and repeating our instructions and our communications plans till he was satisfied.
He had quite a temper if you got it wrong; his handsome face would go red, his eyes would pinch up, and his voice would rise a few notches till he got control again.
We shook hands and smiled at the end of it, and I set off down Baker Street in the car that was taking me to the airfield and France. My last sight of him was him standing in the doorway, stroking and twisting his moustache with both hands.
“That’s Tony,” Liza was saying. “I kept telling him not to play with his moustache. It looked affected. Like biting your nails. And you can’t remember anything else about him?”
I shook my head. I could have told her that in some of my nightmares I could see his face leering down at me. But I guessed that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“Mrs Caldwell, I’m sorry about your loss and I’m sorry that I found you too late. The office wouldn’t tell me anything about Tony. As though they were shielding him from me.”
She sized me up for a moment. “I suppose I should tell you.” She took a breath.
“Tony mentioned you. Said you’d been brought home and were in hospital. He said that you had problems and that it might get a bit difficult when you were let out.”
I felt my face colouring. I didn’t ask what sort of problems. “Difficult for whom?”
She studied me. “For him. For us. For the people you worked with.”
“That I might become a nuisance? Is that it?”
She shrugged and said nothing more.
“So your husband told SOE not to talk to me about him? Is that it?”
“I have no idea, Mr McRae,” she lied. “More tea, or do you have to be going?”
As I pulled on my coat, Liza Caldwell watched me as though she had something else to say but wasn’t sure how I’d take it. I gave her a second or two after buttoning my coat to see if the silence would draw her out.
“Did you know he was with a woman the night he died, Mr McRae?”
Now, that was unexpected. My face must have given it away.
She was nodding. “I suppose everyone knows about it.” It wasn’t said as a question. “You can always tell with a man. They can’t help themselves. They have needs that seem to override all sense. Tony was like that.”
She seemed to be summing him up. I stared at her not knowing what to say. She was talking in a flat, calm voice. As though she had been resigned to his ways.
It might explain why she didn’t seem quite as distraught as a woman should be who’d lost her husband barely a month ago. I wondered if she knew Kate.
As I walked back towards the tube I thought about how SOE had blocked me. A word or two planted by Tony would have been all it took, so that when I showed up, I’d be treated like a leper. With my scar it was like walking around with a label saying warning – madman.