the last few pages of the file. Churchill seemed to guess his feelings.
'Nervous, Commander?' he asked, almost slyly.
'I—'
'You wonder how much of
Walsingham, summarily dismissed, obediently made his way to the door. As he glanced back, he saw that Churchill was idly flicking over the pages of the
Lt Commander David Guthrie watched the slow dawn crawling across the sound and the low hills behind Milford Haven, innocent and with the promise of a fine day. Yet a greyness not entirely created by the seeping of the day into the landscape lingered across the waters of the sound, and the two minelayers, his own
The thoughtfulness, the guesswork had now, for some inexplicable reason, become foreboding. Perhaps only for the convoy which would now be rerouted through the much more dangerous North Channel to the Mersey—
Yet that seemed insufficient to account for his chilliness, for the persistent greyness of the dawn, for the sense of quiet almost unbroken by gulls' cries that seemed to hang over the sound as heavily as a blanket.
Through the remainder of the night and the early morning — which came with a grey clinging mist full of winter and a seeping drizzle that soaked them — they moved at first east until they skirted the tiny hamlet of Liss Ard, then McBride took them south, into the hills and towards the coast at Toe Head, where he had now decided they must acquire a boat of some kind. His thinking was imprecise, instinctive. Dominating everything was his betrayal by Drummond — he studiously ignored all Gilliatt's doubts and hesitations on the matter — and the need now to stay free long enough to get back to Crosswinds Farm in Kilbrittain. Both Maureen and Gilliatt receded in importance to him, considered only as encumbrances. Whenever a cooler perception of himself arose from looking at his wife, or from the workings of memory aroused by the familiar landscape, he crushed it beneath his hatred of Drummond. He was on a pinnacle of egocentricity.
The hills were draped in thick mist and Gilliatt and Maureen were tired and dispirited with little or nothing to drive them. Gilliatt, like McBride, assumed that the Germans could not have landed without attracting the attention of agents — British or Irish — and the Admiralty would know within hours. Gilliatt worried about the outcome of events, but accepted his powerlessness in the face of them. More and more, he fell into step and feeling with Maureen.
They came down from the hills, where there was no sign of German troops. McBride moved through the landscape like an angry dreamer, as if he exuded the mist that blotted it out, while Maureen leaned against Gilliatt with chill and weariness. Gilliatt felt diminished by his role, and angry with McBride, yet he felt the growth of some obscure responsibility for the woman, even as he recognized that his image of her and her marriage was based on the briefest acquaintance and was probably worthless. She seemed to accept and use him like a coat or a fire.
Lickowen, the tiny scattering of cottages overlooking Toe Head Bay, where McBride expected to find a boat, had already been occupied by Germans. The mist betrayed them, allowing them a sense of unchanged calm in the hamlet until it was too late to run. One startled young soldier on guard raised one shout before they saw him at the crossroads, which brought without seeming delay three more soldiers on the run from behind a white-painted, blind-windowed cottage. McBride raised the machine-pistol, but Gilliatt knocked it from his grasp with his MP40, then threw down his gun. McBride looked at him in hatred, but Gilliatt merely shrugged and raised his arms tiredly above his head. The sleepless night, the gnawing emptiness of his stomach, Maureen's flagging body, the suddenness of the surprise — all conspired to drain him of resistance. Even as he raised his hands, he had an image of Ashe, telling him of the defeatism riddling the Admiralty. He'd thrown down his own gun in a similar mood. The Germans were here, everywhere. There was no point to it—
An Unteroffizier inspected the two machine-pistols, then stepped back, a grin on his face. He was younger than either of them, and he was enjoying their capture without thinking of the Germans they had killed to get the guns. He spoke in a thick Bavarian accent, but both McBride and Gilliatt understood him.
'We've got them. Well done, Willi. These are the bastards who turned up in the middle of the landing—' He seemed to remember something then, and stepped half a pace towards McBride, whose face showed more defiance.
McBride tensed, almost inviting some suicidal encounter. Then the Unteroffizier said in bad English, his pleasure at their easy capture unalloyed: 'We invite you to breakfast,' and laughed. He directed them, with, his own MP38, towards the cottage from which they had appeared.
There was one other soldier in the cottage, already devouring bacon and eggs, cooked by an old woman with wispy grey hair trailing the shoulders of her black dress. She hardly looked up from the stove and the frying pan as they entered, merely seemed to register, waitress-like, the arrival of extra mouths to be fed, and the Unteroffizier motioned them to chairs round the table. As he sat down, Gilliatt accepted the weariness that sidled up from his feet and ankles and calves, encasing him like shroud. Maureen laid her head on the table, closing her eyes with relief. She was simply glad to stop running. The instant she laid down her head, she felt something loosen from her body and mind, received the sensation that she was physically dissolving. She hated Michael for making them run, for the night and the killings and for her tiredness and hunger and the cottage that was burned and the death of her father. Images seemed to unwind her like a mummy, peel her like the layers of an onion.
McBride sat staring at the Unteroffizier, who placed himself opposite the Irishman.
'What do we do with them?' the young guard asked him.
'Officer's business that,' the Bavarian replied.
'We're moving on in an hour—'
Then our Irish friends will have to look after these.' He studied McBride intently, his head slightly on one side, as if mentally fitting him with various items of clothing. He nodded, eventually. 'You're not a farmer,' he observed in English.
'Drummond,' McBride replied, 'where is Drummond?' He asked the question in German, which seemed only to confirm something to the Bavarian. He shook his head.
'Who is this Drummond? You are the ones in the field last night,
'I'm Irish.' McBride added no more, returning to an inward contemplation of Drummond where he could not be distracted by the trivialities of his capture. Nevertheless, when breakfast came he fell upon it hungrily, as if restoring necessary strength.
As soon as he had finished, and Maureen and Gilliatt, too, were drinking tea from chipped mugs, the Bavarian said to the guard at the door whose MP40 had been on them all the time, 'Go and tell the Herr Hauptmann we have some guests for him to entertain.' The guard ducked out of the low door.
'It's tonight, is it?' Gilliatt suddenly asked in German, lighting a cigarette he had cautiously taken from an inside pocket. The Unteroffizier was surprised, then he smiled.
'It is tonight.'
'This will be one of the beaches, will it?' Gilliatt continued. 'The U-boats will off-load onto Toe Head Bay. How many other beaches are there — can't be more than two thousand men, surely?' He puffed smoke at the ceiling. The Bavarian looked puzzled and angry, but snapped his mouth into a steel line without replying, almost feeling that he had given something valuable to the man who already knew so much about
'
'
The Hauptmann appeared startled. His young face under the peaked cap seemed white and worried. 'How do you—? You're guessing, of course.'
'What I know, the British government knows,' Gilliatt observed, marvelling at the courage transmitted by
