'Not quite. But their nuggets of wisdom are buried rather deeply these days.' Blackshaw appeared surprised at his own epithet, but, emboldened, added, 'We have begun to disbelieve the existence of the gold, Professor McBride.' He smiled, letting his lips have an unaccustomed freedom to form the expression. McBride responded with an open, easy grin.
'Thanks for the warning. How long may I have with them?'
Blackshaw looked at his watch. 'Between races, you mean? Tea will be coming round to them in half an hour. You'll not have their attention for some time after that. Here we are.'
The television room was darkened because the colour set was facing the window and the reflections of the day had to be shut out so that they did not interpose themselves between rheumy eyes and the racing. Blackshaw stood beside McBride in the doorway for a moment, as if at a loss. Then he whispered, 'The two sitting watching the TV.'
There was a third old man, impeccably tidy and wearing a collar and tie, asleep in the darkest corner of the room, apparently at ease with and unconscious of the excessive volume of the set. The commentator's voice was approaching a climax, stringing together the names of the leading horses in a meaningless gabble which did not seem to impinge on the fixed and still attention of the two old men Blackshaw had pointed out.
'I'll leave you,' he said. 'That one's Mills, and the other one's name is Laker. They've forgotten their seamen's ranks, so I shouldn't worry.'
McBride watched Blackshaw scuttle away down the corridor, then entered the television room. The race had finished. The old man pointed out as Mills shifted in his chair, but his companion continued to stare at the screen with all the attention he might once have given to a personal crisis. McBride approached them.
'Good afternoon — Mr Mills and Mr Laker?' Both heads moved suddenly, in accord, and four preternaturally bright eyes watched him. He represented some obscure threat, the eyes exclaimed. The third old man slept on. McBride sat down, dragging a chair near them, then leaned forward towards them, displaying the cassette-recorder he removed from his briefcase. The television had given him a means of impressing himself on them. 'I'm from the BBC,' he announced.
'American,' one old man said to the other, who merely nodded, mouth open as if to catch the information like an insect on the wing. 'Bloody American.' The face puckered to an imitation of vehemence, but there was no emotion left to hold the expression and it loosened into senility almost at once.
'That's right,' McBride said brightly. 'I'm working for the BBC for a time.'
'Know that Sylvia Peters, do you?' Laker asked. 'On the news.'
'I've met her.'
There was silence. Jaws worked, masticating the morsel of information, tasting the suggested proximity to celebrity. 'And Alvar Liddell?' Mills asked. McBride was nonplussed, regretting he had adopted the role he had. He merely nodded while both pairs of eyes watching him gleamed interrogatively behind the lenses of their National Health spectacles. Mills, McBride decided, was even older than Laker. They were twinned in old age; once they might have been different in build or colouring or feature, but now they were almost identical — hairless, wrinkled, grey-skinned. Strangely, however, their hands recollected youth, and suppleness and strength, lying curled like small, sharp-toothed animals in their laps.
McBride switched on the recorder, drawing their attention immediately. Mills nudged Laker, who nudged him in return.
'I'd like to interview you two gentlemen, if I may,' he said. 'About your wartime experiences. You were both serving on the SS
'Mm,' Mills offered, committed to nothing. His companion made a similar noise at the back of his throat.
'You were on convoys across the North Atlantic, I believe?' The tape numbers rolled on into the thirties. The microphone he held towards them picked up the gentle snores of the sleeping man.
Then Mills turned his head slowly like a compass unsure of magnetic north, and looked at McBride. Then he cackled. 'Nowhere near Liverpool.' He nudged Laker. 'Was it?'
'Was what?'
'Liverpool.'
'Near where?'
'Cork.'
McBride hesitated a moment too long, expecting an elaboration that didn't come or simply indulging the small prickle of excitement in his stomach. When he was ready to prompt them, they were watching two enlarged hands folding paper.
'You said Cork.' There was a distinct lack of interest. 'Cork is in southern Ireland. Were you in Cork?' Laker turned his head, irritated that the intruder had not yet left. The tape numbers rolled mutely into three figures. Laker appeared about to add something, then his attention was directed towards the set by another nudge from Mills. The folded paper had become a boat which was launched upon a bowl of water. Mills looked across at McBride.
'We were in the water for hours, just waiting for the Jerries to surface and machine-gun us. Oil in the lungs, a lot of 'em.' Even his voice was clearer, sharper, insistent with momentarily recaptured emotion.
'Yes?'
The camera had cut from the boat to a glove puppet. A rather supercilious sheep's head which minced its words. McBride recognized an import from his own country.
'Mint sauce,' Laker said, cackling and leaving McBride bemused.
Mills, however, seemed to dislike the puppet, or was now burdened with a memory he wished to be rid of.
'A fishing boat picked up a few of us, only because we'd been swimming all night and taken inshore by the current. Irish buggers, but all right. Saved our lives.'
'You landed in Cork?' Already McBride could envisage a journey to Cork to seek traces of British sailors brought ashore in late November 1940. Mills merely nodded in reply.
'Most of them dead,' he added. A story with pictures was being narrated by the television, and his attention slowly returned to it. McBride could sense the exact moment when he lost him, his attention slipping beneath age's dark water and drowning in an almost-life. He did not know whether a lot of men died in 1940, or had been claimed since. Reluctantly, he switched off the recorder and stood up.
Neither old man saw him leave. Mr Blackshaw, too, perhaps guilty at abandoning him to two of his charges, was nowhere in evidence. McBride emerged into the bright sunshine, waving to Claire across the car park.
Something. Not much, but enough to encourage him. Somewhere, maybe in Hastings or Great Yarmouth or Bognor Regis there would be someone who wasn't senile and who remembered exactly how the British convoy had been sunk — by British mines.
Maureen McBride was washing up in the small downstairs kitchen at the rear of Devlin's grocery shop. Her father's assistant was serving in the shop while Devlin himself was out making deliveries. She seemed unsurprised to see her husband, Gilliatt thought, until she became fully aware of his blackened and dishevelled appearance.
'You look as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards, Michael McBride,' she said, soap bubbles wreathing her forearms, a gleaming, willow-patterned plate in her hands. It fell and smashed on the stone floor of the kitchen as McBride grabbed hold of her and squeezed her against him. Maureen saw the tall stranger watching in relief and amusement, and was embarrassed; surprised, too, at the sudden display of affection by her husband.
'Thank God you're safe,' he murmured in her ear as she pushed out of his embrace. He, too, was suddenly aware of Gilliatt's presence.
'Safe? And why shouldn't I be safe?' She sniffed loudly, scenting the burned cottage on his clothes. 'What is it?'
