She stared at him as if challenging him to say more.
‘It’s just that I love you,’ he said, ‘…and I don’t want you to leave me, and I suppose I wanted to hear you say you wouldn’t.’
Mary bent again to kiss him passionately on the lips and his arms tightened about her. She lay there on top of him, her loose black curls falling to the pillow about his face, and she whispered: ‘I won’t, you goose.’
‘Good.’
‘I shouldn’t have to tell you, but you doubt everything.’
‘Myself most of all.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, Dr Henderson.’
She slipped off him and on to her back: ‘If I were a medical doctor I might say, “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone.”’
She paused for a moment, then said: ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with your background, your family, and this whole codes thing is part of it now, isn’t it? But you don’t need to prove anything. You’ve already distinguished yourself.’
‘Would you love me if I hadn’t?’
‘Honestly, Douglas…’
But Lindsay turned to place a finger on her lips: ‘Please don’t be cross with me. Look, I want to tell you about the
Mary reached across and with her thumb began to smooth the deep frown that was wrinkling his brow. ‘If you’re sure you want to,’ she said softly. Lindsay’s face suggested he was anything but sure.
‘You should know,’ he sighed and he rolled on to his back again to stare into the mahogany darkness.
28
‘She wasn’t much of a ship. The bridge was open to everything the Atlantic could throw at us. No matter how careful you were, the sea found its way down the back of your neck into your oilskins and into your boots. I joined her at Portsmouth on the tenth of May 1940. I’d been told the captain was a Tartar but I was confident we would muddle along somehow. I was wrong.’
Lindsay turned to look at her: ‘I need a cigarette.’ He swung his legs off the bed and padded across the room to his jacket which had been carelessly thrown on a chair beneath the window. Mary watched him as he took a cigarette and lit it, his neck and chest flickering in the lighter flame. He settled beside her again, sitting upright against the bedhead.
‘I remember Commander Cave’s first words to me were, “More horsemeat from the universities?”’ Pritchett Ernle-Erle-Cave; he considered himself to be among the nobility of the sea. His father was an admiral but the brains skipped a generation. After thirty years’ service Cave was lucky to be the captain of a vintage destroyer. He cursed like a stoker. I think he must have been the rudest man in the Navy and unfathomably ignorant. The Admiralty dusted him off at the beginning of the war and gave him
‘We missed Norway, Dunkirk and the fall of France. We muddled along that summer, escorting convoys in and out of the North-West Approaches. There was no hierarchy of misery at first. Cave treated everyone with equal contempt but then I did something very foolish. In an unguarded moment I mentioned my mother to one of the other officers. I don’t know why, it was something I had learnt not to do at school. A couple of days later Cave walked into the wardroom beaming from ear to ear and asked if I would care to join him in the captain’s cabin. He asked me about my family and was incensed when I refused to answer. After that, he brought it up time and again, anything and everything to do with my family, Germany and the war.’
Lindsay paused for a moment to look down at Mary: ‘But this isn’t only my hard-luck story, Cave made it unpleasant for all the officers. You know he must have been a very lonely man.’
Mary reached for Lindsay’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. In turn he lifted hers and, opening her fingers, kissed her palm tenderly.
‘A lot of ships were lost in the summer but our convoys were fortunate. Merchant ships began to call us “the lucky
‘Four escort ships with Cave as senior captain in command of the group. We met the convoy north-west of Rockall Bank on September the fourteenth, some three hundred miles from home, a grey Atlantic sky and sea, the wind like a knife, nine columns of four ships five miles wide, all struggling to hold their station. Cave spoke to the Commodore of the convoy on the wireless and I remember the little-boy excitement in his face when he was told that five ships had been sunk the night before. With the convoy travelling at no more than six knots it was a racing certainty the enemy was still in contact. I swear it was the happiest any of us had seen him. His moment of glory had come, his chance to prove the Navy wrong after years of being passed over.
‘All gun crews at action stations before sunset. I remember a thick white strip of moonlight rippling across the sea to the horizon and I could sense the enemy close by. Fear. Then at a little after eight o’clock it began. There was suddenly a small bright yellow light on the starboard side of the convoy. We weren’t sure what it was at first and we were under Admiralty orders to maintain wireless silence for as long as possible. Cave tried to signal the other escorts with an Aldis lamp but there was no reply. Then one of the merchant ships hoisted a red lantern and…’
‘A red lantern?’ asked Mary.
‘Torpedoed. And a few minutes later, there was an enormous explosion in the heart of the convoy: a tanker some two miles from us, a blazing mass of white flame, smoke rising in a huge column hundreds of feet into the sky. Then, on the far side of the convoy, another burst of flame and then another and another.
‘As we approached the tanker, we could hear thump, thump, thump against the sides of the ship as if a giant sea creature was trying to batter a hole in our hull. Cave shouted, “Go and see what that is, Number One.” The ship slowed and I made my way down to the fo’c’sle. The sea was heaving with timber, heavy wooden pit props. Then one of the crew shouted, ‘Over there, sir, look’, and there was a collection of little red lights dancing on the water, tossed towards us by the swell. We must have passed within a couple of hundred yards of them. I couldn’t see their faces but I could hear them: ‘Help, help, please God help…’
Lindsay reached over to the bedside table and lit another cigarette, smoke curling to the ceiling. Mary felt suddenly tense and cold and conscious that it was late, the still time between two and three o’clock when the night is at its darkest. In the silence she wrapped the sheet more tightly about herself. Lindsay did not look at her, but after a couple of minutes he began to speak again, quickly, harshly: ‘But I can’t blame Cave for leaving them, the convoy was under attack. We threw Carley rafts and promises, “We’ll be back.” But we didn’t go back. And then we were closing on the tanker. The sea was calmer about her, heavy with a sticky blanket of oil, and in places it was on fire. The ship was burning from stem to stern, the bridge just a twisted shell. We weren’t that close but I could feel the heat and hear the whoosh and roar of the flames, and the smoke was a billowing, choking black mountain even against the night sky. The convoy scattered. The Commodore must have despaired of the escorts and with good reason, never mind the enemy; we hadn’t even managed to make contact with each other. Honestly, it was a shambles, really a total shambles.
‘I’d returned to the bridge to find Cave in an impotent rage, cursing the other escorts and his own crew. It was a little after eleven, and I remember thinking, “Oh God another four or five hours of this.” Of course, we know now it was one of Donitz’s first pack attacks and there were four, perhaps five, U-boats chasing in and out of the convoy. They were all there, the
‘Mohr?’ said Mary with surprise. ‘Mohr attacked the convoy? When did you find out?’
But Lindsay ignored her question: ‘We zigzagged to and fro for more than an hour, firing round after round of star shell over the sea in the hope of catching sight of a U-boat but we didn’t see anything, we didn’t hear anything. The Asdic detector was useless, just an empty echo…’
