Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) (37 page)

And his father; he seemed to have changed more than
anything. Only a few months since that last leave, when they had parted with scarcely a word, but he seemed to have opened out, boisterous and very much in charge.

He was wearing a new suit, and his hair was well trimmed and slicked down over his shining forehead. And he was drinking gin, a lot of it. Lincoln had never seen him touch anything but mild and bitter before, unless it was Christmas or somebody’s wedding.

In the few hours since he and Downie had arrived by taxi from the station it had not stopped. Some of the people he recognized; others seemed to be his father’s friends or working acquaintances. It seemed he had become a somebody in the district, had even been elected to membership of the local council. His mother had managed to toss him fragments of information while she had been busily refilling plates and fetching fresh glasses.

‘Your dad may stand for mayor one day, Michael. Just think of that! And he’s so
proud
of you – just look at him, will you! Pleased as Punch.’ She had winked at him. ‘Won’t do his chances any harm either, will it?’

He had not spoken to his father very much. Not alone. He had seemed surprised to see Downie, and when he had been taken aside by one of his minions had murmured, ‘An ordinary sailor? What are you thinking of? Your fellow officers might not care for that!’

Lincoln could not remember how he had managed to remain so calm. Detached. His fellow officers were the ones his father had once referred to as ‘stuck-up’ and ‘toffee-nosed bastards’. He had changed indeed.

He had already told them about Downie’s parents in
a letter to his mother. Maybe his father had forgotten, or was using the moment to put the boot in again. Just to remind him where he stood.

‘He’s my assistant, and he’s been with me on every job, and many more before that. We have to take this leave together. He’s got nowhere else to go.’

His father had grinned. ‘That’s okay, then. We don’t want the neighbours giving us the old nudge-nudge, do we?’

His mother had been more tactful.

‘The spare room’s been made into another office for your dad. We can fix your young assistant with a camp bed, if that’s all right.’

Lincoln had hugged her. She was getting so old, so frail, in stark contrast to his father, he had thought.

‘He won’t complain, Mum. And call him Gordon. We’re not here as officer and rating, you know.’ She had hurried away, smiling and shaking her head.

He saw his father pushing another man through the noisy throng and tensed. It was the editor of the local paper, the
South London Courier
. It was his father’s idea. Pride? Or thinking of his own chances for mayor?

He should have expected it. He had been warned.

‘You remember Frank Mason, don’t you, Mike? He runs the
Courier
.’

‘We’ve met a couple of times.’ They shook hands. Mason’s was like sandpaper.

‘You’ve been making a name for yourself, Mike. I know we’re not supposed to print anything until it’s official, but I’d like to use the local angle for my paper. I
get little enough to crow about!’ He laughed, but Lincoln noticed that it did not reach his eyes.

Mason glanced around. ‘You brought your helper with you, I hear?’

‘He has nowhere else to go. He lived in Coventry.’

‘Enough said. Too bad. I’d like to chat with him, all the same, if that’s all right by you.
His officer
!’

Lincoln smiled, and wanted to hit him. ‘I’ll find him for you.’

He did not have to look far. Downie was in the kitchen, drying glasses while a woman he did not know washed them in the sink.

Downie listened with the characteristic frown and said, ‘If you think I should.’ He glanced at the woman and lowered his voice. ‘I could slip away and get booked into the Union Jack club or somewhere. Don’t want to be a nuisance.’

‘I invited you. I want you to stay.’ He touched his arm. ‘And if you think you’d find a billet at this time of day you’d be in for a shock!’

Someone had started to bang out ‘There’ll Always be an England’ on the old piano, and there was a ready response from most of the guests; his father’s voice was the loudest of all. More like the father he had known before, especially on Saturday nights after the Royal George had turned out.

Mason of the
Courier
ushered them into the tiny room which had been added to the house just before the war. It was littered with fire-fighting gear and work clothes, and some old ledgers, as if it had not yet made up its mind what it was supposed to be.

‘Now, you work with an officer all the time, right? And you’ve been at it for some while, I believe. With another officer originally?’ He was making notes in shorthand. ‘He died, is that right?’

Downie gripped the dish towel and was twisting it in his hands. ‘Yes. He was very brave. He was awarded the George Cross, the highest . . .’

Mason held up his pencil. ‘You get pretty close to somebody in those circumstances, I’d say?’

‘Yes.’

Mason smiled. ‘And what about
Mister
Lincoln here? You can tell me – how does
he
rate?’

Downie looked away. ‘That’s not for me to say, sir.’ He faltered. ‘We work well together.’

Mason nodded. ‘And he saved your life.’

Downie looked at Lincoln. ‘He saved my life. Yes.’

Mason scribbled a few more notes and closed his pad with a snap.

‘I’ll send you a copy when it comes out. Your mother has given me a photo. Should do the trick.’

Lincoln tried to relax, muscle by muscle. The
Courier
only came out once a week, and was very local in its news and views.

Mason had gone. Downie said, ‘Was that all right, sir?’

Lincoln tried to laugh it off.
He saved my life.
‘You did fine.’ He looked around. ‘Now I do need that drink!’

What would his father say and do, in front of his friends and the people he was obviously using to his own advantage, if he knew the truth?
That I was afraid.
Unable to move. Not only once, but other times. Because I tried to prove something. To match something which wasn’t worth the effort.

It seemed an eternity before the guests departed, some pausing to slap him on the shoulder, others too far gone even to speak. A few remained with his father in the front room, where more serious matters would be under discussion.

Eventually Lincoln made his way upstairs to bed. Once he stopped to adjust a blackout curtain, and saw the matching roofs of the houses on the opposite side of the street. A full moon: it was like daylight. He thought of the first mine; he had been told that if it exploded it could knock down six streets. Like this one.

He
had
had too much to drink after all.

If the sirens wailed tonight, somebody else could do all the running.

He saw the camp bed at the end of the passageway; Downie was already fast asleep, or pretending to be. Probably like me, he thought, regretting he had ever agreed to come here.

He stripped off his uniform and struggled to untangle his tie. Maybe he could think of some excuse tomorrow. Go somewhere, just to walk and talk. Find out things.

He almost fell onto the bed. The sheets were crisp and clean. They would be; his mother did everything. While he . . .

He did not know how long he had been asleep, or what had awakened him. A sound, a dream? He opened
his eyes and saw a shaft of moonlight shining from the window, where it had not been before.

The house was completely still and silent. Until the next time.

He stared again at the moonlight, and realized that Downie was there, holding the curtain aside while he looked out at the night.

‘Gordon?’

He saw him turn and drop the curtain, plunging the room into darkness again. Not before he had seen the moonlight reflecting on his skin like silver.

It was a dream. In a moment he would wake up and . . .

He reached out and gripped his hand, then felt the sheet being pulled down, the pressure of his body beside his.

‘I’m here.’ As if he was trembling. ‘Mike?’

This time, it was not a dream.

Chris Foley stood on the waste-littered slipway and looked up at the raked, overhanging bows, and despite his borrowed duffle coat he could not contain a shiver. Excitement, disbelief, even doubt. It was certainly not the breeze from Falmouth Bay.

It was a fine, clear morning, after a stay overnight in a commandeered boarding house. Unable to sleep. Pacing the room. Waiting for today. Now.

The boat builder was watching him with interest. His name was Gilbert Tregear, and he was as Cornish as you could find anywhere; his family had been building boats for as long as anyone could remember. Tough,
square and with skin like leather, Foley could imagine him without effort as a smuggler or a pirate, or one of Nelson’s men.

Tregear said, ‘Well, this is the moment. You can walk a deck, test every nut and bolt, test the joinery with your fingers, but down here you really gets the
feel
of a fine craft.’ His pride was something lasting, a legacy of all those years.

Foley shaded his eyes and studied the flared bows. Despite the dangling wires and hoses, power lines and streaks of grease and oil, he could see the grace of the hull which appeared to be leaning over him, preparing to kick free of the land.
The feel of a fine craft.

It was all true, but something he found hard to accept. What he had not believed possible after 366.

Tregear must have taken his silence for doubt. ‘I’ll have her in the water day after tomorrow. Two more days after that, an’ she’ll be yours. Not your first command, I hear?’

Foley walked slowly down the slipway. Beyond the square, business-like stern he could see the stretch of Falmouth Harbour and Carrick Roads. A few more paces and the impressive silhouette of Pendennis Castle would be visible on the headland, and St. Mawes on the opposite one. He had been here once for a holiday with his parents, long ago, before Claire was born. He had never forgotten the place, the fishing boats, the yarn-telling sailors, local people much like Tregear. Enough to excite any eight-year-old boy.

When his father had been taken ill; it had seemed to happen more often in those days. The coughing, the
breathlessness, the aftermath of gas attacks in Flanders in that other war.

How Falmouth had changed. Grey or camouflaged hulls of all shapes and classes, building, being repaired, or just pausing between convoys or patrols along this coastline where smugglers had once roamed. Still did, according to a customs officer he had met.

And in the River Fal itself he had seen newly finished landing craft lying in groups, waiting for the invasion which only the armchair strategists dared to predict.

He looked up at the hull again and saw a sailor’s head and shoulders vanish instantly. That had happened a lot. Quick, curious, even nervous glances. Some of the newly drafted hands, faces he would come to know like those he had left behind. The wags and the characters, the skivers and the skates. Those you could rely on, come what may. Those you might have to watch. But all volunteers for Special Service. Jack always moaned about everything. That was his strength.

He thought of the man who was to be his first lieutenant. Not some eager, partly trained subbie but a full two-ringer, a professional sailor of the Royal Naval Reserve. What the regulars had once termed
Really Not Required
. That joke had misfired a long time ago.

Lieutenant Peter Kidd was a tall, strongly built sailor who had lived by the sea until it had claimed him for its own. He had served his time in small freighters and a collier, and was five or six years older than his new commanding officer. A man who would be hard to know, Foley thought, but well worth knowing. Blunt, almost brutal in his descriptions of the work in
progress, or the service of some particular rating. He had been blown up twice, and had joked about it.
The sea can’t stomach a proper sailor, so it spat me out again!
And there was another officer, a ‘third hand’, in their small company, Sub-Lieutenant John Venables, twenty years old and very determined, and straight from a course on tactical minelaying. He looked as if butter would not melt in his mouth. He seemed in awe of his first lieutenant, but inclined to be a little sharp with the men working under him. Kidd had said casually, ‘I’ll soon hone him into shape!’

It was still hard to remember everything. The boat was a few feet longer than 366, and broader in the beam, the bows impressively flared to allow for the extra speed, and to retain stability in all but the worst seas.

Foley had met the senior motor mechanic for a few minutes, but his name had slipped his mind. A calm, intelligent-faced man with a faint accent, Welsh or somewhere close. His excitement over his new appointment was infectious. He had spoken of the four-shaft Bristol motors as if they were almost human. ‘Seven thousand B.H.P., sir! Thirty-six knots, see? Like a bird, she’ll be!’

He had found himself thinking of Shannon, 366’s chief; would he still be brooding over his unfaithful wife? How would he react to Dick Claridge’s command?

It was behind him now. It had to be.

Designed originally as a motor gunboat, his new command was well armed with machine-guns and Oerlikons. But nothing heavier: she
would
need to fly like a bird if things proved difficult.

And the mines, all twenty of them. They would still take some getting used to. 366 had laid mines several times, and swept them, too, under special and difficult circumstances. There had not been much she had not done or attempted.

He pushed the memories away and said, ‘She’ll do me, Mr. Tregear. I’m lucky to get her!’

He was still not sure if he meant it.

He would miss young Allison,
Tobias
, just as he had missed the bright and abrasive Harry Bryant when he had been promoted and gone off to a command of his own. And those who had trusted him even when all hell had broken loose. And those who had died.

Like the old R.N.R. skipper who had lost his little ship, but had somehow survived. When Foley had gone back to the sick quarters to collect his personal belongings he had found the other bed empty and stripped. The old skipper had apparently died of a heart attack.