Pantheon

Chapter Eight

He was halfway to the station before he realized he would have to make a detour back home to pick up some essentials, starting with money. Adrenalin pumped through his system. He passed the old stone buildings, with their gothic arches and medieval chapels, in a blur, his brain moving faster even than his body. There could be only one possible reason why Florence had gone to Liverpool: in order to leave it. It was no place to hide from the bombs; on the contrary, she had placed herself more directly in harm’s way by going there. Which meant she would be there for the shortest time possible before heading somewhere else. The obvious, closest destination was Dublin. Was Florence thinking it would be safer in neutral Ireland than in occupied Britain? Was this, then, her great fear — not bombs, but life under Nazi occupation?

The postcard had been sent last night. It was conceivable that she and Harry were still there, that with a bit of luck on the trains, he might just make it in time, catching them before they left. He would have a chance to persuade her to stay. The fact that he had chased her all the way to Liverpool would surely demonstrate how much he cared: what, after all, was the purpose of that postcard, except as a summons, urging him to follow her if he truly loved her? Of course she could have simply telephoned and told him where they could meet. But James preferred to see the card like a challenge set for a medieval knight, imagining that Florence had chosen to test him, to make him prove his devotion. He pictured their reunion: they would meet at the docks, Harry would hug him tight and she would instantly realize the folly of separating a boy from his father. Everything would be all right. Just so long as he could catch a train.

At the station, all was chaos and noise. Ever since they had removed the signs from the railways, the staff had to march up and down the platform barking, ‘Oxford, this is Oxford! Oxford, this is Oxford!’ (Was it really likely that German pilots would be able to read station signs from the air, especially in the dark?) The platform was crowded, with piles of baggage everywhere, doubtless belonging to soldiers on the move. Everyone seemed confused, especially by the special troop trains, which looked like the others and ran on the same lines but which were barred to the civilian population.

Eventually James found a clerk who told him that he needed to cross the bridge and wait for the next LMS train to Bletchley, due in twenty-five minutes. From there, the man — elderly, probably brought out of retirement so that the permanent holder of the position could do his bit for the war, a thought which triggered in James the usual spasm of shame — explained that he could catch the main line to Crewe, which should take two-and-a-half hours, and then change for Liverpool Lime Street. It would be a long, circuitous journey but James could see no alternative. He had considered asking to borrow the Greys’ car, but petrol was so scarce and the trek northward might not be any faster. To say nothing of all the explanations and gushing thanks he would have to produce.

Once on board, standing wedged between two young conscripts and their kitbags, the man apparently heading back to war after a spell of leave, he turned over the riddle of the postcard — addressed to one place, his home, and delivered to another, his college. Did that explain the sudden movement he had glimpsed this morning? Had someone intercepted his post, collaring the postman just as he was about to put the card through the door? But he was sure he had not seen two people, and there had been no sign of a postman when he had looked outside, let alone any lurking stranger.

But now he wondered. Perhaps there had been a stack of mail lodged in the letterbox and someone had taken it. Maybe that was the faint rattling noise he had heard, not the sound of letters being posted through the slot, but being pulled out. But who would do such a thing? It had achieved nothing except a delay, given that he had seen the postcard from his wife little more than an hour or two later. If someone had wanted to steal his post, then why not simply steal it: why go to the trouble of delivering it to an alternative address that very morning? Whoever had done it had clearly known plenty about him, including his college affiliation.

Or was this exactly what Rosemary Hyde — that was it, Hyde — had in mind when she accused him of going off the rails yesterday? Was he imagining things, constructing a menace that wasn’t there out of a simple mix-up with the morning post? He remembered the book: Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger. Was this an example of the very hyper-vigilance he had read about, little more than mindless paranoia?

The train had stopped, halted in a screech of metal and a cloud of steam for no reason he could discern. An argument was getting louder in the next carriage, an inspector telling a gang of servicemen to get out of the first class compartment. James felt himself tense. He couldn’t afford even the slightest delay. A minute lost here could be the difference between winning Florence back and seeing her go. He craned to look out of the window, where he could see the train’s fireman had jumped off the plate and was inspecting one of the engine’s wheels. James’s hands were beginning to tremble: come on, come on. And then, mercifully, there was a blast of the whistle and they were back on their way.

Partly to keep his mind occupied, he constructed a list, refined and refined again, of people who might benefit from the switch of the postcard. As the train chugged through the Oxfordshire countryside, he went through them all, starting with the obvious category: those who were infatuated with, or covetous of, his wife, a category that would include most of the red-blooded men in Oxford and probably a fair smattering of Rosemary’s glorified Brownie pack, including the Brown Owl herself. He worked through each of them, paying particular attention to the myopic Magnus Hook, promoted up the suspects’ rankings for having seen James dishevelled and out of sorts the previous day: that would only have had to prompt a few questions in the right places for Hook to have discovered Florence’s absence. And then there was Virginia Grey, in the picture from the very start. Round and round he went, working through the carousel of friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Albert Wills, Professor of Natural Sciences and Florence’s head of department, had taken an instant shine to her: who knew what he, what they, might have been plotting in the labs? There was the slick-haired Leonard Musgrove, Chairman of the local Fabian Society and undeniably handsome. Damn. James had meant to check when the Fabians met, wondering if, by any chance, it was early on Thursday evenings. And what about Edgar Connolly, eminent biologist and vegetarian fanatic who had come to see Florence as something of a protegee? He was her father’s age, but that meant nothing; Oxford morality was not the same as the provincial variety he had grown up with. It could be any one of them.

He tried to be disciplined, even — when he got off at Bletchley and found a seat on a platform bench — pulling out a notebook and pen, writing out his thoughts methodically. But constantly his mind would wander back to the more important enigma. If his wife had left him because he had become impossible, why tell him she loved him, not once but twice? And if she did love him, why run away from him? The Crewe train arrived on time and he got on board. As it headed north past Rugby, he tortured himself that Florence and Harry had been kidnapped, taken hostage by some maniac. Had she smuggled out these postcards or perhaps written them under duress, the abnormal brevity of the message a kind of code for her situation? If so, how obtuse he had been not to have seen it earlier. Perhaps he was meant to realize that his wife would never sign off with a mere three-word farewell and that he had been a fool not to have read the signal.

But then he remembered the suitcase taken from under the bed, the clothes removed from the cupboard, even Snowy missing from under Harry’s covers. Also, when he had gone to look for cash, he had seen that some had been taken already. If all the money had been gone, that might have been further evidence of a kidnap, one compounded by theft. Taking just some, leaving the rest for him, suggested a degree of deliberation, surely impossible with a kidnapper’s knife at her throat. He shuddered at the thought, as if the movement might physically shake the image loose from his head. Instead he saw something worse: a blade pressing against little Harry’s skin. He coughed and opened his eyes wide, hoping the view of the busy platform opposite would expel the thought he had just conjured.

Harry. He had meant the name as a tribute to his dead friend, one of the most vital men he had ever known. It was not supposed to be a morbid gesture, quite the opposite. It was a way of keeping Harry Knox alive and in the present, rather than sentencing him to an eternity in some non-existent next world. He would be in the here and now, not the hereafter. James was not a religious man — he had emphatically rejected his parents’ creed by taking up arms in Spain — and if anyone had put the idea to him out loud he would have laughed it off as superstitious nonsense; but privately he had also hoped that his old comrade’s strength and energy might somehow be passed onto his son, via their shared name.

Yet now James was gripped by the fear that he might have placed on his son’s infant shoulders a curse, that it had been arrogant to name a little boy after a man who had died such a violent death — that he had offered the fates too great a temptation.

He trod over this same ground, forward and back, as he travelled north through Staffordshire and as he waited for a desperately frustrating two hours under leaden skies at Crewe, midday turning to afternoon and then evening. And throughout, even when he was trying to sift through the possibilities with all the logical power a first class degree in philosophy had given him, a larger subject lurked, like a vast, grey whale shifting through the water. It had been there all this time, only occasionally breaking the surface. When it showed itself, it was as a question: had Rosemary Hyde, describing a violent, dangerous man possessed by demons, spoken the truth?

His brain had been scrambled just as surely as those poor boys back from Ypres and the Somme mentioned in the journal article Florence had been reading in the Bodleian. He had spent only a short time in the trenches on Madrid’s north-western outskirts, but he had seen his best friend’s head explode like a watermelon smashed by cricket bat.

He had always believed he had coped admirably. He had never blubbed for Harry; he had followed the doctors’ instructions for the rehabilitation of his shattered shoulder. He had been a faithful husband and, barely two months after he was shot, a devoted father. Yes, he had usually been furious when he woke up and furious when he went to bed, raging against an injury that had prevented him avenging Harry’s murder. It had thwarted him first by forcing him out of the Spanish Civil War, sending him back to England the instant he was discharged from hospital. And it had thwarted him a second time when he was branded unfit to join the battle against Hitler and the Axis powers. What man would not be boiling with rage? But he had kept it to himself and got on with his work, hadn’t he? Why had that not been good enough?

And finally, in the fading summer light, the train crept into Liverpool, wheezing its last gasps as it stuttered to a halt. James edged his way through the soldiers on board, some looking weary from war, others nervous at returning to it. He ignored the tut-tutting at a civilian failing to defer to men in uniform. But there was not a moment to waste. The instant his feet touched the platform, every step he took thereafter would take him closer to Florence and Harry. And he had so little time.