The Easter Sunday service at St John’s was a dreary affair. Mary left before communion. Her uncle had invited two elderly colleagues from the Commons and their perjink wives to lunch. To the clink of silver and old china, they talked of defeat, of the losses in the Atlantic and the collapse of Yugoslavia, of thousands dying in the streets of Belgrade. As Mrs Leigh was clearing the plates the telephone rang in the hall. It was Lindsay.
‘Rescue me,’ she whispered into the handpiece.
He laughed: ‘From what?’
‘Please be quick.’
He arrived in Lord North Street between dessert and coffee. Mary left him on the doorstep and collected her coat and scarf before her uncle could draw them into conversation. A jeep from the Division’s transport pool was parked a little way along the street, its engine still turning. Lindsay had spent the morning at Section 11’s small office in nearby Sanctuary Buildings and was still in his uniform.
‘Hyde Park?’
‘Anywhere,’ she said.
Bowling through the streets, the wind plucking at her scarf and hair, Mary’s spirits began to lift. It was a warm blue afternoon, the sun was twinkling through the windshield and the plane trees in Park Lane were tipped with a promise of spring.
‘I’m so glad you rang,’ she shouted above the rattle of the engine.
‘But surprised?’
‘No. Why?’
‘It’s so soon after the party. But there were things I didn’t have a chance to say.’
He turned into a street off the Bayswater Road and parked in front of the shell of a once handsome early Victorian terrace. A muddy crater had cut the road in half. On the other side, Mary could see a house belonging to a friend of her mother’s. Mrs Proctor kept a large pram in her hall full of papers and clothes and a strongbox of jewellery, just enough of her life to wheel to the shelter. But she was fortunate; until now her home had been spared.
They walked south-east across the park, away from the hum of traffic and the Serpentine with families and spooning couples ambling at its edge.
‘Did Winn tell you?’ Lindsay asked. ‘Security has decided that none of our codes has been compromised, and there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all, it’s just gossip.’
‘No, he didn’t tell me.’
‘But you don’t sound surprised.’
‘No.’
‘You know, they didn’t investigate it properly,’ he said with a little shake of the head. ‘They didn’t even speak to my prisoner, the wireless operator Zier.’
Mary said nothing.
The Royal Artillery had built a wire fence across the path to protect a battery of anti-aircraft guns and they were forced on to the grass, through the shaking daffodils.
‘Did I give the impression at the party that I was suffering from a conflict of loyalties?’ Lindsay asked suddenly.
‘Your cousin Martin, the U-boat officer?’
‘I want you to know, he despises Hitler.’
‘He’s fighting for him.’
‘He’s fighting for Germany.’
‘It amounts to the same thing,’ she said with slight irritation.
Lindsay shook his head: ‘Really, no.’
She stopped walking and turned away from him a little, hands buried deep in her coat pockets, shoes and stockings wet with dew the April sun was too weak to burn away.
‘This war, you know, I believe we’re fighting a new darkness,’ she said with quiet feeling. ‘Something evil. Really evil.’
‘Your brother said you were religious.’
She turned back sharply to look him in the eye: ‘I haven’t taken vows. But yes, I feel it’s my Christian duty to do something, don’t you?’
The question was flung like a gauntlet.
‘Perhaps my cousin feels the same,’ said Lindsay tartly. ‘German bishops say it’s a sin not to fight for the Volk.’
‘My goodness, you do sound confused.’
‘How patronising.’
They stared at each other for a frosty moment, then she reached across and touched his sleeve: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.’
He smiled at her: ‘I haven’t forgotten — you like to be direct. But don’t apologise, we’re as bad as each other. And I’m rather protective of my cousin.’
Small white clouds were rolling east over the city now, their cold shadows scudding across the grass. They found the path again and walked on at a brisker pace. Lindsay asked Mary about her family and university and the years she had spent studying archaeology: ‘I can’t imagine you in a muddy hole.’
‘I’ll let you have my paper on Norse burial rites.’
He laughed. ‘Background for the new dark age.’
Mary hesitated, then said, half in jest: ‘My brother may have told you I’m an academic bluestocking. I deny it.’
‘He said men were frightened of you, and now I understand why.’
‘Don’t tease me. James’s friends are frightened of any woman who has something to say for herself but you must stick up for me. We’re both outsiders, thrown into the same den of lions.’
‘Then it is my duty to protect you.’
‘Duty?’ She looked at him steadily, chin slightly raised, daring him to catch and hold her eye. It was an unmistakable, thrilling challenge.
And he held her gaze: ‘Duty? No. Not a duty.’
It was not until the following weekend that they were able to see each other again. By then the Germans had bombed the Admiralty, forcing daylight into dim, remote corridors, shaking even the sub-basement of the Citadel. Yugoslavia capitulated and Greece was on the point of doing the same. Lindsay took Mary to the Coconut Grove night club.
There was an expensive air of hysterical gaiety, with Society girls wrapped around young men in Savile Row suits. The Latin Orchestra was very fine but there was almost no room to dance. They sat at a table sipping martinis, upright and self-conscious and too far apart for conversation. Lindsay said something she took to be an invitation:
‘Yes, if you like.’
‘I didn’t ask you to dance,’ he shouted. ‘We can’t, can we, it’s too crowded?’
He looked ill at ease, unhappy. ‘What’s the matter?’ She reached across for his hand: ‘Come and sit next to me.’
He squeezed in beside her, shoulder to shoulder, and she took his hand again, its palm a little rough and dry: ‘Are you all right?’
‘I haven’t been to a place like this for a long time.’
‘We can go?’
‘No, no, it’s fine.’
He smiled and raised her hand to his lips.
Later, she floated home, his arm around her, drunk with warm anticipation. They kissed in the blackout shadows at the end of Lord North Street, quiet, deliberate, intense kisses. And he pressed himself against her, breathed the scent of her hair and felt the weight of her head against his shoulder.
‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ he whispered.
At last they broke apart and Lindsay held her hands tightly and bent to rest his forehead against hers: ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to see you for a while.’
‘Tired of me already?’
He laughed and kissed her forehead: ‘I’m meeting prisoners in Liverpool, the crew of the U-112 and then there are the interrogations.’
‘Winn’s very interested in the commander, Jurgen Mohr. He’s quite a catch.’
‘Perhaps it was your brother’s idea to send me to Liverpool, to save his sister?’
‘Perhaps he’s right.’