the wood swept from end to end. Get going, everybody. And I mean everybody. Drivers, batmen, the lot. I said move.'
When the first group of men, swearing unfeignedly, had jumped the ditch and begun pushing through the undergrowth, Leonard turned to the QMS.
'Well done, Q. Now I want you to go and take my car and drive up to the rest of the convoy and say what's happened. They're probably only a few hundred yards ahead. Report to the Adjutant. Quick about it.'
'Right, sir.'
The QMS departed. Leonard leaped the ditch and crashed and shouted his way out of sight. Hunter looked round for Venables, who proved to be sitting in the remains of the cab of the vehicle reading his typescript. He looked up uninterestedly as Hunter crossed in front of him and entered the wood in his turn.
After half an hour or so Hunter decided he had had enough of dirtying his uniform and being bitten by insects. His head was aching. He had seen no sign of Best, nor even of Leonard. The only people he had found in the wood were two infantrymen having a quiet smoke in the middle of a particularly dense thicket. These he pretended not to have seen. He took his time about returning to the road.
Within another half-hour Leonard and his men had returned empty-handed, the stores had been reloaded and a tow fixed up for the stores vehicle, and the convoy was on the move again.
Dr. Best watched it go.
Part Three
Operation Apollo
ABOUT nine hours later Churchill was lying awake in bed with one arm round Catharine's waist and the other behind her shoulders. Every minute or so he listened carefully to her breathing. It remained deep and steady, and she had not moved for what he thought was a long time, but he had no idea whether she was asleep or not. She had said she had taken a sleeping-pill. The bedside alarm-clock was set for seven-thirty, when the two of them would get up and dress, doing so together for the first time, and drive over to the hospital in the town. Here, after Catharine had been admitted, Churchill was to have an interview with the doctor in charge of her case, an arrangement made without reference to her. Then he would return to camp, arriving there an hour or more after his pass was due to expire. He felt this would not matter.
He turned his thoughts back to the previous evening, not because he hoped to establish anything about it, but because the unmistakable fact of its having taken place reassured him. Every so often, perhaps when he momentarily came closest to falling asleep, he was visited by the illusion that he and Catharine had moved off the track of ordinary existence into an autonomous, self-sealing pocket of fear and helplessness. Among the advancing and retreating blankets of color which his eyes imposed on the darkness he had several times seen, or imagined he had seen, a geometrical replica of the lethal node he had described to Hunter. It was in the form of a broad horizontal disc, vague and granular at the periphery, thickening towards the middle. Through the exact center a taut vertical thread ran both ways to mathematical infinity. You entered the node, or it moved across you, until you arrived at the thread. Thereafter, instead of moving or seeming to move on towards the farther edge of the disc, you could only move up or down the thread. Presumably if your motion across the disc were along a chord instead of along the diameter you could continue to travel laterally until you reached the far side of the circumference and emerged. Hunter, Ayscue, Naidu, Pearce, Lucy were traveling along chords at varying distances from the center. But Catharine had been on the diameter and had reached the center and the thread. And so he too, Churchill, Lieutenant James Churchill of the Blue Howards, was on the thread.
Hunter had arrived at the house just as Churchill, Catharine and Lucy were finishing, or abandoning, the meal of cold roast beef, pickles and potato salad that Mrs. Stoker had prepared for them. There had been some talk of the later phases of Exercise Nabob and speculation about the role of Dr. Best. Only when an account of the events in the lane came round for the second time in a quarter of an hour had it occurred to Churchill how drunk Hunter was. He was paler than Churchill had ever seen him before and was evidently unable to sit still, leaning forward in his chair and continually stroking and kneading the outsides of his thighs, jumping up from time to time and going over to tap without result at the bars of Sadie's cage. Nobody had taken up his suggestion of a round of whist and eventually he had fallen silent, except for an occasional muttered remark in praise of the drink he was drinking or of drink in general. But his presence had made the circle less totally withdrawn and chilly, less committed to, as it seemed, smoothing over some unforgivable lapse or sitting out an episode of supreme boredom.
Catharine had sat in a corner of the couch with her feet tucked up under her and her arms clasped round her knees, as if avoiding unnecessary movement. Her hair looked darker than usual. Every time she caught Churchill's eye, or Lucy's, she smiled briefly and drew her chin inwards. When she smiled, a part of the inner surface of her lower lip became visible in a way he thought he had not seen before, although he was not certain. She had refused drinks and cigarettes, but had eaten a fair amount of the beef and pickles.
'How are you feeling?' he had asked her.
'Oh, not too bad. Except it's a shame I've got to be such a misery. You know, having to be sat with like somebody's mother-in-law. There doesn't seem to be any way of organizing this part. It'll be different tomorrow. Everything'll be done for me then. Not for you, though. I expect you'll find yourself doing a lot of drinking. But try not to do too much of it on your own. Try to stick to Max.'
'Yes. Would you like to go for a drive?'
'No thank you, darling. I think I'll do better here, where I can see you and the others. You have another drink now and keep Max company.'
'Are you sure you won't?'
