“If a bomb were to blow us up now,” said Francis, one night when they had disobeyed the sirens and stayed in the warm bed when they ought to have gone to the nearest chilly shelter, “I would feel I had died at the peak of my life.”
“Don’t worry, Frank. No bomb is going to get you. Don’t you remember your horoscope at Düsterstein? Old age and fame for you, my darling.”
“And you?”
She kissed him. “That’s Classified Information,” she said. “I’m the decoder, not you.”
On the night of December 29, when the great fire-raid struck, Francis was on the job, watching a door through which nobody came or went, until it became impossible to keep at his post any longer, and he went to a Tube station, where he lay on the hard pavement with some hundreds of others, unsleeping and in terror. When at last the all-clear sounded he went as far toward Ruth’s flat as was possible, for fires were raging and whole streets of houses had disappeared.
She had been rescued, and in a shorter time than he had dared to hope he found her in a hospital. Rather, he found a body swathed in packs of saline solution, a body so heavily sedated that only one hand could be seen, and he sat for several hours, holding it, and praying as he had not prayed since childhood that by holding it he was being of some comfort. But the time came when the ward sister beckoned him away.
“No use now. She’s gone. Was she your wife? A friend?”
“A friend.”
“Do you want a cup of tea?” It was not much, but it was everything the hospital had to offer. Francis did not want a cup of tea.
So ended the greatest comfort he had ever known, which had lasted, he reckoned, a little less than ten weeks. Nothing during the forty-one years of life and a kind of distinction that remained to him brought anything to equal it.
A hero of romance might have undergone what is called, not very descriptively, a nervous breakdown, or might have thrown away his letter of exemption and pushed his way into the armed services, seeking death or revenge. Francis’s heroism was of another sort; he pulled about him a harsh cloak of stoicism, shut the door on love, and drudged on at his tedious work until Uncle Jack, perhaps sensing a great change in him, or finding new worth in him, promoted him to something a little more interesting. He next sat for several months in a small office in a building that did not in the least suggest MI5, and coordinated reports that had been brought in by watchers like himself, and tried to make sense of information that was usually uninformative. Only once, in all this time, did he have any certainty that he had been instrumental in uncovering an enemy agent.
It was not wholly loneliness and drudgery. Early in 1943 his father turned up, now revealed as MI5’s Security Liaison Officer for Canada, and rather a bigwig, for he stayed at Claridge’s and could have commanded a car for his use, if he had not preferred to walk. The Wooden Soldier was more wooden than ever, and his monocle was, if possible, more a part of his face than it had been before. He brought news of home.
“Grand’mère and Aunt Mary-Ben won’t be long with us, I’m afraid. They’re old, of course; the old lady is well over eighty, and Aunt is eighty-five if she’s a day. But it isn’t age that ails them; it’s parsimony and bad food. That miserable Doctor is even older, but he is remarkably bobbish and keeps the old girls ticking. I never liked him. The worst sort of Irishman. Your mother is well, and as beautiful as the first day I saw her, but she’s developing some odd tricks; faulty memory—that kind of thing. The surprise of the pack is your young brother Arthur. No university for him; he says you went to two and that’s enough for the family. He’s been deep in the business already, and very sharp. But he’s in the Air Force now; I expect he’ll do well.
“And you’re doing well, Jack Copplestone tells me.”
“I wish he’d tell me once in a while. I sometimes think he’s forgotten me.”
“Not Jack. But you’re not the easiest man to place, Frank. Not a swashbuckler, thank God. He’ll use you when the right thing turns up. Still, I’ll say a word to him. Not as though you had said anything to me, of course. But just to keep the wheels turning.
“You know that both the O’Gorman boys are in the Army? Very junior, mind you, but keen. Unfortunately not very bright—not in a Service way—but full of beans. And of course O’Gorman is up to his neck in what he calls his War Work—selling Victory Bonds and that sort of thing. I suppose somebody has to do it. You know, I think that fat ass is pushing for some kind of official recognition. He’s never recovered from that Knight of St. Sylvester fiasco. He wants something non-retractable.”
It occurred to Francis that his father could not be very young. He must be at least ten years older than his mother. But Sir Francis Cornish, never having looked young, had not grown to look old, and as he was still part of the profession he must have been good at whatever it was he did. Certainly he looked like a revenant from an Edwardian past, but his step was light, and he was slim without being scrawny.
“You know, Frank, looking back over the years, and the Canadian part of the family, I think I liked the old Senator best of all. If he had had a chance, he might have been a remarkable man.”
“I always thought he was remarkable. He certainly became very rich.”
“And founded the Trust. You’re right, of course; I was thinking of—well, of social advantages. The Cornish Trust—that always surprised me. He thought I was a figure-head, and I suppose I was, really. We lived in different worlds, and it’s rum that our worlds should ever have intersected. But they did, to everybody’s advantage.”
“Grand-père was a man of deep feeling.”
“Ah? I suppose so. I never understood much about that, myself. Y’know, Frank, you really must get some decent clothes. You look dreadful. It’s still possible to get good clothes, y’know. You’ve got lots of cash, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so. I never think about clothes. They don’t seem relevant to what’s going on.”
“Trust me, my boy, they’re always relevant. Even in the profession, you know, protective colouring is of different kinds. If you look like an underling you’ll be taken for an underling, because people haven’t always time to find out what you really are. So do smarten up. Go to my man, and get him to make you the best suit he can for your coupons. You should wear a school tie, or a college tie. Suppose you get knocked over in one of these raids? When they found you, how would they know who you were?”
“Would it matter?”
“Of course it would. Looking like a lout when you aren’t one is just as much affectation as being a dandy. Affectation in death is as ridiculous as affectation in life.”
The next day Francis was marched to Savile Row, measured, and promised a suit of dark grey, to be followed by a blue one, in God’s and the ration’s good time. Sir Francis, having cowed his son, pressed his advantage and gave Francis some decent socks and shirts from his own wardrobe. They were not too bad a fit. To be dressed by one’s father when one is thirty-three perhaps suggests unusual compliance of character, but Francis took it humorously; he had been aware for some time that his profession as a lurker had made him look like a lurker, and that something would have to be done about it. The Major provided the necessary shove.