Of course, she could excuse it. Mike’s injuries did not seem life-threatening. He had told her not to come to the hospital. Without him she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. But that begged the question of what she had been doing in Warwick Court in the first place. To have an affair with a married man was bad enough. To make love with that married man in the bed he shared with his wife …
The flat is empty all weekend. We can take our time …
He had made it sound like nothing. But it had added an unnecessary extra layer of deceit, of cruelty really, whereas if they had simply gone to a hotel as they usually did, they would still be together. It was absurd to think it – she had long since lost her faith – but she couldn’t help seeing the V2 as a punishment from God. The notion nagged at her, went round and round in her head.
At Bourne End, a trio of giggling young WAAFs came into her compartment – aircraftwomen, second class. They saluted when they saw the braid on her sleeves and went quiet. Their deference made her feel even more uncomfortable. She took down her suitcase from the overhead rack and went into the corridor. At the carriage door, she pulled down the window. The Thames flowed beside the track, high and wide from the recent rain, a pair of swans in the middle, motionless in the current.
She put her face into the wind and breathed in deeply until she could no longer taste the dust and coal gas.
At Marlow, she let the WAAFs leave first and waited until the platform was empty before she made her way through the station to the lane. An army lorry was waiting. The aircraftwomen were in the back.
‘Do you want a lift, ma’am?’
‘No thanks, girls. I’ll walk.’
Past the brick-and-flint cottages and into the broad Georgian high street: ivy-covered coaching inns and tea rooms, little shops with bow windows made of small-paned glass, timbered whitewashed houses, thatched roofs – the whole thing was absurdly picturesque, a Hollywood image of England, like a scene from Mrs Miniver. A football match was being played somewhere. She could hear a whistle, men shouting, a cheer. She left the town and walked along the Henley road, between fields and high hedges, occasionally glimpsing the river to her left. It was only after a mile or so that the war began to reassert itself. An anti-aircraft battery became visible in the woods. A squad of sweating, red-faced soldiers in PT kit ran past her. A camouflaged lorry emerged from a drive ahead. There was a guard post.
She showed her pass at the barrier.
‘Do you want a ride to the house, ma’am?’
‘I’m fine, Corporal, thanks. The walk will do me good.’
A lot of Britain’s secret war was fought at the end of long, sweeping drives like this one, running through neglected parks, between overgrown rhododendrons and dripping elms, to hidden country houses where codes were broken, special operations planned, the conversations of captured Nazi generals bugged, spies interrogated, agents trained. Kay had walked this drive for the past two years – always with an unwanted memory of school – and at the end of it stood Danesfield House, a mock-Elizabethan mansion, built at the turn of the century, as sparkling white as the icing on a wedding cake, with crenellated walls, steep red roofs and tall red-brick chimneys. Its ornamental gardens ran down to the Thames. When she had first arrived, the grounds had provided a pleasant place to stroll between shifts. Now they were disfigured by dozens of long, low temporary wooden office blocks and ugly semicircular corrugated-steel Nissen huts that served as barracks, in one of which she lived with eleven other officers, four to a room.
She stood on the threshold of her hut for a moment and offered up a prayer that no one would be in, then braced her shoulders, opened the metal door and clumped in her heavy WAAF shoes along the wooden floor. Four doors led off to the right of the corridor – the toilet and shower room was closest to the entrance – with a coal-burning stove in the centre of the hut that had been allowed to go out. Her dormitory was at the far end. The shutters were closed, the room in darkness, the air permeated by a strong smell of Vicks VapoRub. It seemed to be empty, but then the blankets on the bed in the furthest corner stirred and the shape of a head turned to look at her.
‘I thought you were in London for the weekend.’
Kay stepped over the threshold. It was too late to turn around. ‘Change of plan.’
‘Hold on.’ A shadow moved. A clatter as the shutters were opened. Shirley Locke, an economics graduate from University College, London, who seemed to have had the same streaming cold for the past two years, only in the summer she called it hay fever, secured the shutters and clambered back into bed. She was wearing a flannelette nightdress with a pattern of pink roses buttoned up to her sharp chin. She put on her glasses and raised her hand to her mouth. ‘My God, Kay, what have you done to your face?’
‘Car accident.’ It was the first lie that came into her mind. She had already decided not to mention the V2. The questions would have been endless.
‘Oh no, you poor thing! Whose car was it?’
‘Just a stupid taxi.’ She opened her cupboard and put away her case. ‘Had a blowout on the Embankment and hit a lamp post.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘This morning.’
‘But why are you back? Couldn’t your chap have looked after you?’
‘Who said anything about a chap?’ She made for the door. ‘Sorry – got to dash. See you later.’
Shirley called after her, ‘You do know you’ll have to tell us about him one day, don’t you? Your mystery man?’ And then, when Kay was halfway down the corridor, the nasal voice came again: ‘You should get that cut looked at!’
Danesfield House had lost its gracious character. Renamed RAF Medmenham after the nearest village, it had acquired instead a stuffy bureaucratic smell, a compound of dust and pencil shavings, cardboard files and rubber bands, like the inside of a desk drawer rarely opened. The chandeliers had been taken down, the plasterwork boarded over, linoleum laid and printed signs put up everywhere. The ballroom, for example, had become ‘Z Section/Central Interpretation Unit’, and it was here that Kay headed that Saturday afternoon.
By this time it was after half past three. The winter light was fading. Beyond the terrace, a low sun glinted on the Thames. Inside the huge ballroom, twenty Phase Two interpreters, mostly female, seated at three rows of desks, had turned on their Anglepoise lamps and were bent over their work. The atmosphere was quiet, the air heavy with concentration, like an examination hall. From time to time someone crossed to the bookshelves and took down a box file or a manual, or stood in front of one of the charts that showed the enemy’s equipment from every conceivable angle: armoured cars and self-propelled howitzers, fighters and bombers, submarines, warships, tanks. On a long trestle table, wire baskets were piled with black-and-white photographs, marked by sector: ‘Ruhr’, ‘Saar’, ‘Baltic’. A WAAF sergeant sat behind it, filling out a record sheet.
Kay said, ‘Anything in from Holland?’
The sergeant pointed to an empty basket. ‘Weather’s bad, ma’am. No coverage for forty-eight hours.’
Kay went out to the hall and started to climb the stairs. Phase One was ‘current/operational’ and was responsible for debriefing the pilots at RAF Benson as soon as they landed from their sorties. Phase Two, in the ballroom, analysed all the photographs taken over the past twenty-four hours that might be of immediate use on the battlefield. Everything longer-term was passed upstairs to Phase Three. This was where she worked, in what had once been the main bedroom suites and bathrooms. She walked along the corridor to the registry and asked for the past week’s coverage of the Dutch coastal sector, from the Hook of Holland to Leiden. ‘Actually, make that two weeks.’