him asleep, her hands had traced his face and shoulders and hair again and again in delicate butterfly-touches, something she would not do, feeling herself not permitted, when he was conscious. Waking was a barrier between them; he was never helpless enough when his eyes were open.
'You're all right?' Drummond asked while Maureen made tea for him. McBride nodded, seemed instantly to regret the motion of his head, and grinned tiredly.
'He wanted to kill me,' McBride observed without emotion. 'He could have run at first, but he wanted to kill me. And he was an expert.' He had lowered his voice and kept his eyes on the door to the tiny kitchen. 'Now, why do they send that kind of man, all of a sudden, do you suppose?'
'I wonder if the man they landed last night was of the same ilk?' Drummond murmured.
'Another one?' Drummond nodded.
'Oh, yes — becoming quite a popular holiday resort, the Cork coast. That's four we haven't traced, four in the last couple of weeks. Hardly a sniff of them, from Cork to Bantry, but they're all in the area somewhere.'
'Are they working as a team?'
'I don't know. Your chap was on his own — before last night. Perhaps the others are, too?' He spread his hands as if warming them at the fire. 'Whether they're here on the same job would be a more profitable speculation, perhaps.'
Maureen McBride brought in the teacups on a tray, and poured out tea for the three of them. Drummond was polite, but made no attempt to engage her in conversation while he drank. For some obscure reason, Maureen McBride disturbed him. Her silences were not abstractions so much as vivid, careful attention. He felt as if he were being spied upon; and he felt that too little of the woman appeared on the surface, a sense of her withholding herself, to disarm his suspicions as to her opinion of him.
When he had finished his tea, he said: 'If you're fit, I think we should have our own scout about, don't you?' He watched Maureen for signs of agitation, but she merely studied her sewing. Mending one of McBride's shirts, it appeared. McBride nodded in reply.
'You've checked out the cottage?'
'Oh, yes. I think he had a pushbike in one of the outhouses.'
'Yes, I let the tyres down with a skewer.'
'He came back for it. His puncture kit was on the floor, and the bowl of water to look for the bubbles.' McBride looked crestfallen. 'Don't worry. It just shows he wasn't going far, mm? He ran off, then came back after you'd left. Cool customer. He must intend staying on for a bit yet.'
He stood up.
'Goodbye, Captain Drummond,' Maureen said suddenly. Drummond nodded to her, and went out to wait for McBride in the car. McBride studied his wife as if he had just received a new and surprising insight into her character. He crossed to her, pulled her to her feet and kissed her quickly.
'Now, don't worry. Drummond will look after me.'
'I'm not worried. But, take care, just for a bit of a change, will you?' She touched his face, once, with her right hand. He did not seem to resent the gesture, kissed her again.
'All right, I'll be careful, Maureen.' He saw concern flicker in her eyes despite her control, and witnessed in that moment the small, important distance they had travelled back towards each other since the beginning of his work for Drummond and the British. He had acquired a mistress she could not rival, and she accepted that. To himself, he had emerged from some chrysalis state into a self his pre-war personality could not match. He kissed her again, more gently and in understanding, and squeezed her to him as if to erase all distance between them. Then he let her go as Drummond sounded his car-horn, and his attention, she could see, was instantly elsewhere. The moment had only a diminished and awkward meaning for him. 'I'll be back tonight,' he said almost guiltily, and went out. She watched him shut the door behind him, shutting her off.
She clenched her teeth, sniffed loudly once, then began to clear the tea things. If she ever apportioned blame — rather than standing beside her marriage staring dumbly at it as if into a new, unnerving bomb-crater — then she blamed Michael and not herself. She had remained still, it was he who had travelled in another, and unexpected, direction.
His parents' former cottage in the hamlet of Leap had crumbled by the side of the road. Nettles thrust through the remains of floorboards, infested empty windows, filled the open doorway, while heavy trees leaned towards the decaying, and partly missing, roof. It was impossible to enter the house without difficulty, and pointless to try. Nothing remained. Tinkers had used it as a staging-post for a while, but periodic storms and its habitual emptiness had made it uninhabitable. McBride was sorry he had suggested that Claire Drummond show him the place. There was nothing of his father there, except a sense that he might never have lived there, lived at all.
Their first awkward embrace in the front seat of the small MG — hood down on a day of fine, cool sunshine — had, however, more than compensated for the empty cottage that had lost its power to evoke even qualified melancholy. Claire Drummond had responded to his kiss lightly, but without reluctance, even perhaps with promise. McBride was enlivened, sensed himself at the beginning of something. Claire was desirable, and pliable in spite of her self-assurance.
After she had driven up into the hills behind Leap, they sat in the car looking down over the Skibbereen- Clonakilty road winding below them and towards Glandore Harbour, its sound dotted with the low humps of tiny islets. They shared cold chicken and a bottle of Moselle from the hamper she had packed, and McBride began to luxuriate in her proximity, the small airy space that enclosed them, and in the prospect of an affair with the woman. There were only the briefest moments where a sense of his lack of direction, his Pavlovian response to outside and immediate stimuli, disturbed his equanimity; they occurred only in the silences between their words.
'What will you do now?' she asked him, finishing her wine and smoking a cigarette. 'What's the next step?'
It was as if she had awoken him to a less than perfect state of affairs.
'Go back to London, I suppose. Begin working on Admiralty records, and try to dig up some harder facts concerning Emerald Necklace. That guy Walsingham, if I can get to him—'
She was surprised at his diffidence. 'You're still interested in it, then?'
He looked at her carefully. She seemed to be appraising him.
'I suppose I am. Look, it's like a light I can see in the distance, mm?' She nodded, prepared to follow the analogy. 'It gets brighter and then it fades, and I seem to get closer then seem to be further away?' Again she nodded. 'Well, I guess that's this book of mine. I can see it on the best-seller lists, I can feel the money— yet I wonder whether there's anything real out there, you know?'
'Do you want to write the book?'
'Maybe I should never have gotten out my doctoral thesis — should have started fresh on something else.'
'But this is leading you to this Emerald Necklace thing, isn't it? That's new.'
'You sound like my agent—' He grinned. 'Sorry. Your interest is appreciated.' He sighed, leaned back in his seat and stared at the clouds moving above him. 'Yes — yes, your interest is appreciated. And maybe
Claire Drummond seemed relieved, pleased. 'Perhaps it should. For your sake.'
'I guess my father — distracted me?' He nodded, agreeing his supposition. 'Mm. Gilliatt and the old man may have been involved, but they're both as dead as that cottage down there—' He nodded in the direction of Leap. 'I never knew him, and maybe I have to get used to never knowing him.' He grinned disarmingly. 'I have a big book to write. London calls—' He let a theatrical regret enter his features. Claire Drummond smiled.
'I'll come with you,' she announced.
McBride and Drummond had explored the coastline between the western shore of Glandore Harbour down to Toe Head. The search had taken most of the day, especially because they had to wind north then south again around the inlet of Castle Haven. They were looking for some sign of the landing of a German agent, to give them a more precise area of search when they moved inland. Drummond had received a report of a landing the previous night which was no more than a sighting of lights on a stretch of beach between Horse Island and Scullane Point — and lights four miles further up the coast. Either or both of them could have been a little smuggling, even an IRA attempt to land guns and explosives, but Drummond could not afford to ignore any such report.
