He grinned. 'Well, in a way.'
I looked at the rings on her left hand.
'So then,' I continued morosely, 'I suppose you got married?'
Stella smiled. 'Well, no, not exactly. You see, we always were — 1938, to be precise!'
My nervous system couldn't take much more. I'd just about used up all my reactions. I just sat there half-stunned, conscious that my face was turning a bright and glowing crimson.
'Sorry, Mac.' Nicky was apologetic. 'Couldn't even tell you. Had anyone known — our side, their side — our usefulness would have been at an end. We would have been a menace to our own people. I told you, Mac, often. You can't give hostages to fortune.'
Slowly, it all came back to me. I could see it all now and cursed myself for my blindness.
Their overdone casualness and offhandedness towards each other. The constant bickering, yet the unswerving loyalty and belief in each other — how familylike, I thought with chagrin. Nicky's strange behaviour when I suggested I might fall for her (I squirmed at that thought). His anger when I expressed distaste for her spying. The secret holding of hands. His increasingly haggard and worried appearance — God, I thought, how would I have felt if MY wife had been in that position. Finally, his desperate eagerness to rescue her — strictly in defiance of all Special Service orders and, as far as he had known at the time, in the face of certain capture or death.
Without a word I pushed my chair away from the table and rose carefully to my feet. Slowly my leg came back and deliberately, and with great accuracy, I kicked myself.
The gallery, first-nighters to a man and obviously trained to a hair, applauded with great fervour. And as I sat down, I realized that the unbridled enthusiasm of the audience wasn't entirely on my behalf.
Laughter and tears and love walk always hand in hand. Stella and Nicky were kissing each other with a most unEnglish lack of restraint. They looked for all the world like a pair of newly-weds.
Which for me, of course, was exactly what they were.
THE JERVIS BAY
The second year of the war, as dark and sombre a year as Britain had ever known, was drawing steadily to its dark and sombre close. November, 1940, and behind lay the long agonizing months of hardship and suffering and crushing defeat, abandonment by our last allies in Europe, the wanton destruction of our cities and towns and thousands upon thousands of civilians, of the never-ending and always imminent threat of invasion by a ruthless and implacable enemy who would be content with nothing short of the annihilation of our country as an entity and a nation.
True, the crushing defeat was a thing of the past, albeit of the recent past: Hitler's all-conquering Panzer divisions had swept us out of Europe and only a miracle had spared the survivors who had found their way to the desolate beaches of Dunkirk. The collapse of France, also, was long an accomplished fact, and we had at least and at last the satisfaction of knowing precisely where we stood — alone.
But the Battle of Britain was still with us. Night after night, through the lengthening hours of darkness of October and November, the Luftwaffe's heavy bombers, seldom less than two hundred at a time, droned over our ports and cities and unloaded their cargoes indiscriminately over docks, factories and homes — but principally over homes. And the threat of invasion, the launching of the long-awaited operation 'Sealion' against our shores, was a looming peril that might at any hour of the night or day explode into devastating reality.
Britain, in that dark hour, was exactly in the position of a beleaguered garrison the remnants of whose army, all but destroyed in the field, have taken refuge behind the walls and barred the gates. But beleaguered garrisons can fall, and invariably do fall, if fear and despair destroy the will to survive or if constant attrition weakens the defenders to the point where continued defence and defiance becomes a physical impossibility, but most surely of all, they can be inexorably starved into surrender.
There was nothing to fear on the first score. Defiance burned like a flame, and with pikes, clubs and home-made petrol bombs the people of Britain were prepared to follow Churchill's injunction to fight for every beach and street and village in the country. But starvation and attrition was another matter altogether.
We had to have food or die. We had to have minerals and metals and chemicals for the manufacture of tanks and weapons for our weaponless armies, we had to have oil for the naval ships that guarded the shores, for the factories and the power stations, for the manufacture of petrol enough to keep in the air the handful of Hurricanes and Spitfires that alone stood between us and the savagery of the Luftwaffe.
The food, the oil and many of the most essential raw materials had to be imported into this beleaguered garrison; and there was only one way by which these could come — the sea. A garrison without any hope of relief, we were utterly dependent on the merchant ships that sailed upon this sea as our only remaining lifeline to the world that lay beyond. But lifelines can be cut. The Germans knew this as well as anyone.
They spared no effort to cut these lifelines, once and for all. Sabotage in foreign ports, bomber attacks above the sea, E-boats on the sea, U-boats under the sea — they threw in every weapon they possessed. But, at that time, their most deadly and devastating weapon of all was the raider — heavy cruisers and pocket battleships, big fast and powerful vessels that could be stopped by nothing less than a battleship of the line. An armed raider let loose among a convoy was prelude to a merciless and inevitable slaughter — the HIPPER, for instance, had once fallen upon a defenceless convoy and sent eleven merchant ships to the bottom in less than an hour.
And now, with the collapse of France and the fall of Norway offering the enemy a thousand miles of Atlantic seaboard as operating base, and with the advent of winter storms and long winter nights affording almost unlimited opportunity to break out into the Atlantic, the menace had reached critical proportions. The raiders, with almost complete freedom of operation, sailed where they liked, struck where they chose and sank with impunity.
This impunity could have been removed, risks halved and effective counter-measures doubled if we had had bases nearer the scene of action: the country at large, no less than the Admiralty, was convinced of this. The use of certain ports in Southern Ireland, would have moved our outposts far west into the Atlantic, and the advantages gained, the scores of ships and thousands of lives saved, could have made all the difference between life and death. But Southern Ireland wasn't interested in the life or death of its neighbour (officially, that is — it would be most unfair to forget that thousands of its citizens volunteered for and served with distinction in our armed forces during the war) and categorically denied us the use of any port in Ireland. Far from offering us help in these, our darkest days, they were prepared to stand aside while the German raiders cut our lifeline to the outer world and brought us to defeat.
In Britain, in the latter half of 1940, the feeling against Ireland was intense: so it was particularly fitting that it should be an Irishman, Captain Edward Fogarty Fegen, who was to light the beacon of hope in the darkness, who was to show that we could live in spite of the lack of bases, that a convoy could survive even the savagery of a full-scale assault by a pocket battleship… Provided, of course, that there was always a Fegen to stand between the convoy and the enemy.
It was the evening of 5 November, 1940, and Convoy HX 84, in latitude 52°45′ North, longitude 32°13′ West — the very heart of the Atlantic — was steaming steadily, peacefully home to England. The sky was a cloudless blue: visibility was exceptionaclass="underline" light airs blew gently out of the south-east and the setting sun glittered across the burnished gold of a sea calm and quiet and smooth as the Atlantic almost never is.