But Jonathan wanted to give him something—a flat packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. “Am I supposed to give this to Tensing?” Ernest shouted, using his real name, since there was no way anyone could possibly overhear them in this gale.
Jonathan shook his head, raindrops flying from his wet hair. “It’s for my mother,” he shouted. “It’s in case we don’t make it back. So she’ll know what happened.”
“For after the invasion?” Ernest yelled.
“No!” he shouted back. “For after the war. All these secrets won’t matter then.”
No, Ernest thought. They won’t.
“I’ll send it,” he promised, and stuck it inside his shirt, thinking, as he watched Jonathan run back along the dock, Maybe I could give one to Cess to send.
But what could it say? “Dear Eileen, I wasn’t really killed that night in Houndsditch. I waited till after Bank Station was bombed and then went to find an incident that the Civil Defence hadn’t arrived at yet and left my papers and scarf for them to find, just like a murderer in one of your Agatha Christie mysteries. I’m sorry to have burned the coat, after all the trouble you went to to get it for me …”
You don’t have time for letter writing, he thought. You need to get to the train station.
He set off through the wind and rain to find it. He knew where it was from when he’d come to Dover that first September, trying to get to his drop, and he could walk/hobble a lot faster now than he could then, but he was so frozen by the time he got there that he had to blow on his numb hands before he had enough feeling in them to be able to get the coins in the telephone’s slot so the operator could put him through to British Army headquarters in Portsmouth.
He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest England, trying to locate Denys Atherton, and he was still only halfway through the list. And God help him if Atherton had had an L-and-A implant and was here as an American GI because there were more than 800,000 American soldiers in England right now.
The operator put him through to Southampton, and he spent what was left of the afternoon and evening being transferred from office to office, officer to officer, to find out there was no Denys Atherton stationed in Southampton or Exeter or Plymouth, and to worm the telephone number of the paymaster at Weymouth out of a reluctant Wren by using his old-standby American accent. His implant had long since worn off, but he’d done it so long, it was permanently a part of him.
By the time he got off the phone with the Wren, he was coughing. He couldn’t spend the night in the station. It was too cold, and the ticket agent was beginning to eye him suspiciously. He couldn’t hope to catch a ride in this weather either, and at night, and he couldn’t go to an inn anywhere near the docks and risk running into the Commander and Jonathan in the pub room. And he was going to need something hot—and alcoholic—to ward off the chills he was already having.
You can’t get sick, he told himself. You only have a month and a half to find Atherton. And you still haven’t done your invasion-propaganda spreading, to which end he limped out to the edge of town to a pub which catered to the locals, ordered a hot toddy, and prepared to tell all comers that he’d overheard two officers saying the big show was starting on July eighteenth and it was definitely going to be Calais.
But there were no comers, in spite of the pub actually having ale and whiskey—a rarity at this point in the war. The weather was apparently too much even for hardy seafarers. Ernest spent the evening drinking one hot toddy after another and composing imaginary letters:
“Dear Eileen, I know I said we shouldn’t split up, but Denys Atherton didn’t come through till after Polly’s deadline, and it was the only way I could think of to get a message through to him. Remember my telling you about how Shackleton had to leave his crew behind and go off to get help because if he didn’t, no one would have had any way of knowing where they were and they’d all have died? And how he made it to the island and found help and came back to rescue them? Well, I didn’t tell you the whole story. When Shackleton got to the island, he was on the wrong side and had to walk over the mountains to get where he needed to be, and the same thing happened to me …”
And after two more drinks:
“Dear Polly, I lied to you when I came back from Manchester. The person who came to Saltram-on-Sea asking about me wasn’t Fordham. It was Tensing. He’d been tracking me down since Bletchley Park, but you were wrong. He didn’t want to hire me for Ultra. He wanted to recruit me for a Special Means unit, and I thought it would mean I’d be able to get to Denys Atherton, but as it turned out …”
But he couldn’t write Polly because her deadline had passed, and she was already dead. She’d been dead since December.
He’d got drunk that night, too, and tried to call her in Dulwich to warn her, and then remembered she wasn’t there until after D-Day and hung up. And when Cess had asked him what he was doing, he’d said, “She’s not here yet. She’s dead.”
And if he had any more toddies tonight, he might blurt out the whole story to the barman, or worse, write it all down, and there was no point. A letter wouldn’t reach Polly in Dulwich because it hadn’t reached her. And if Eileen was here to send it to, then his plan hadn’t worked—he hadn’t found Atherton or got a message through, and Polly had died—and if that was the case, then Eileen was better off not knowing that he was alive, that he’d gone off and left them for nothing. It wasn’t like Jonathan, whose mother would at least have the comfort that he and his great-grandfather had died heroes.
He stood up unsteadily, set down his mug, which was much cleaner than the one the Commander had given him, and prepared to stagger off to bed, but before he made it to the stairs, a pig farmer came in, shaking water everywhere, announced it was “a fit night out for nowt”—a sentiment Ernest agreed with wholeheartedly—
and demanded a pint.
“And make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got to take a load of shoats all t’way down to Hawkhurst.”
Ernest promptly begged a ride, crawled into his truck, and was rewarded by the farmer’s asking where he thought the invasion would be and then, without waiting for an answer, saying, “Mark my words, it’s going to be Calais,” and regaling him for the remainder of the trip with how he’d come to that conclusion.
Ernest didn’t have to say a word, which was just as well because the minute he got back to Cardew Castle, Chasuble said, “Oh, excellent, you’re here—good Lord, what’s that smell?”
“Pigs.”
“I thought you were going to sea. Well, never mind. You need to shave and bathe, particularly bathe, and get into this.” He tossed a dinner jacket and Bracknell’s too-small shoes at him, told him he had ten minutes, and hauled him and Cess off to another reception, this one for General Montgomery.
“Only it won’t be Monty,” he said after they were in the staff car.
“What do you mean, it won’t be Monty?” Ernest asked, attempting to tie his tie in the rear-vision mirror.
“It’s a double,” Cess said. “An actor.”
Oh, God, out of the frying pan into the fire. “It’s not Sir Godfrey Kingsman, is it?”
“It can’t be,” Cess said. “He’s dead. He was shot down.”
“No, that’s Leslie Howard you’re thinking of,” Chasuble said.
“It is not. He was on his way to entertain the troops—”