Emerald Decision

and Gilliatt decided that Maureen could remain in the car until he had made his report to London. He postponed sorrow until he had done his urgent duty.

As he waited for Drummond to unlock the door to the cellar, the hall window was suddenly illuminated by a garish orange glow from the sea.

* * *

Fitzgerald was awoken — thrust into consciousness — by the first explosion. He was tumbled from his bunk, and his head banged painfully against the bulkhead. His vision became foggy, and the weak blue light in his cabin became sinister and frightening. He scrabbled with his hands as the whole cabin lurched sideways, spilling forward, disorientating him and making him suddenly aware of the cold water of the St George's Channel beneath the ship. The cruiser was suddenly made of paper, easily crumpled.

A second explosion, banging his shoulder against the bulkhead, rolling him along the wall of the cabin — along the wain. He groaned from fear rather than pain. The blue light was extinguished, and he was in complete, cold darkness. He called out, to hear his own voice. The cruiser was listing more. Footsteps outside, drumming through the bulkhead, men cursing. Dryness still beneath his hands and knees. His genitals were chilly with anticipation of the creeping, drowning water he knew must come for him. The shudder of a more distant explosion.

Blood seeped into his left eye. He wiped roughly at it like an embarrassing tear. His body was shivering, as if registering all three explosions. His mind was clear, but could not react. He knew they were under attack, even understood that the cruiser was sinking, but there seemed no urgency. Panic was still, sedative, calming.

It was some minutes — it seemed minutes, perhaps longer, perhaps only moments? — before he felt terror return, unfreezing the icy calm. He scrambled to his feet, against the sloping bulkhead, seeming alone in the silent, dark ship, and reached for the door handle. He turned it, and pulled.

The door did not move. He heaved at the handle, but the door remained wedged and buckled into place by the effect of the two explosions.

He heard a siren, but could not be certain because he was screaming by that time and what he heard might have been the sound of his own demented voice. Siren — voice — hands banging on the door. The useless noises went on for some time, even after the cabin tilted forward. He heard the slither towards and past him of clothes and toilet gear and framed pictures of his wife and family and papers and the books he had been reading, then they stilled into an unseen heap against the forward bulkhead. Eventually, he had to grip the door handle with one hand to keep himself sufficiently upright to pound with increasing, weakening hopelessness on the cabin door. His voice had gone by that time, and it seemed the ship's siren was screaming for him.

All his awareness seemed to be in his bare feet and ankles, awaiting the arrival of the icy water that he somehow knew was already reaching through the cruiser towards him.

* * *

Churchill seemed to have acquired the company of Walsingham more exclusively than any other officer present. None of them would openly demonstrate their hostility to the Prime Minister, but they had overtly avoided Walsingham since the moment Churchill announced his decision regarding the convoy. It was as if they knew the authorship of Emerald. They may have done, but Walsingham, though he disliked the proximity of the Prime Minister because it so clearly marked him off physically from his companions, could not be disturbed by their animosity. He was bound to Churchill, Emerald would be with him for the remainder of his life — but he was beyond regretting that now. It was done, or soon would be when the report came in, and it would have either to be lived down or lived up to in the coming years and after the war.

If it was not buried efficiently by the Prime Minister— Churchill's face was blank of expression. He had drunk a good deal during the night, alternating alcohol with amounts of coffee, but he did not appear drunk so much as having slipped away from himself and from any pressure or guilts that might assail him. He seemed curiously at peace.

A telephone rang, and it was answered by a Wren. She carried the set over to Churchill.

'The Tracking Room upstairs is receiving morse from the convoy, sir.'

Churchill roused himself, the face closed up around the suddenly alert eyes. The other occupants of the room stopped work, watched Churchill's broad back as he leaned over the telephone.

'Yes?'

'Prime Minister, we're getting reports that the convoy is under U-boat attack—'

'What is the convoy's position?'

'That's what's strange, sir. They're well into our new — channel, they should be safe from attack.'

'You mean the U-boats are in our channel?' Churchill exploded. The intelligence colonel's face behind him wrinkled with contempt and self-disgust, and he looked up at the wall map and the marked position of the convoy.

'It must be, sir! Sir, two of the merchant ships have been hit by torpedoes, and the cruiser—!'

'My God—'

'The cruiser is signaling abandon ship, sir—'

'You know what to do. We must save as many as we can. Report to me every half-hour.'

Churchill put down the telephone. Only the few people in this operations room, Walsingham thought, know the truth about Emerald. They will not be allowed to tell the truth. No one will ever know. Churchill's face was blank of all expression. He put the receiver down on the floor beside his chair. Less than two minutes, Walsingham thought, suddenly and briefly appalled, was all the time that was necessary. Upstairs, they would already be saying how shocked and moved the old man was, how terrible after the secrecy of the southern route through the minefield, even as they began the attempt to rescue the survivors. The subterranean reality in this cramped bunker room was different, but now it was robbed, somehow, of real significance. Voices on the telephone, an awaited radio report from an RAF Anson of Coastal Command, and that was how it was done. No blood anywhere near this room.

'Colonel,' Churchill called.

'Sir.' The colonel was standing in front of Churchill, his back deliberately to Walsingham, in calculated insult.

'You understand, Colonel? A tragic fact of war — we have lost a cruiser, three heavy merchantmen and God knows how many men — by U-boat attack.' The colonel nodded, his face transferring guilt to the old man in the chair, adopting the fixed lines of unthinking duty, the clear brow of necessity. Churchill could see it happening to him, and was satisfied. 'I will inform the American Ambassador in due course. That will be all, Colonel.'

'Prime Minister.' The colonel walked away with almost light step. Churchill studied Walsingham, as if the expression on his face was of the utmost importance, just at that moment. Walsingham understood from the nod he was given that the Prime Minister was satisfied. To Walsingham, the satisfaction was a recognition of something failed or broken or missing within himself. But he dismissed the thought.

Churchill closed his eyes for a moment, as soon as Walsingham returned his gaze to the wall charts. In a sudden, clear, visionary moment, he could hear insects in the garden at Chartwell. All those years, well spent, recollected with affection, had only been an interlude. His destiny was to be the only man capable of making decisions like Emerald. That was why his country needed him, he acknowledged. Not for the V-sign, or the cigars, or the bulldog expression or the black homburg. Because he could make decisions like Emerald and not despair of himself, of his country, or of human nature. It was not having the courage, or even the ruthlessness, to do it that mattered. It was the ability to perceive necessity, to bow to that strange deity's commands.

'Sir,' the radio operator called from the other side of the room. 'I'm beginning to get a transmission.' The colonel moved to the radio, and Walsingham got to his feet. Churchill nodded his permission, but made no attempt to move himself. The volume on the radio was turned up, and the voice of the distant R/T operator aboard the Anson could be heard through a mush of static, stung and obscured occasionally by severe crackling.

Walsingham stood next to the colonel behind the radio operator. The army officer looked at him, and there was complicity in his features. A complicity of duty and transferred guilt and personal innocence. Walsingham nodded to him. The colonel seemed relieved. The authorship of Emerald did not matter. The old man in the chair had committed the atrocity.

'We've sighted the U-boats on the surface, but we're flying low and keeping out of sight.' The absence of jargon and the hesitancy of the words indicated that the radio operator knew he was being listened to by Churchill.