Neither of us had felt very talkative that hurried morning, the miles from the Council House passing quickly, each occupied with their own thoughts and fears; but that evening, awake again after sleeping the afternoon, we had the maps out and were splitting Army rations.
‘Eat up,’ said Wareing, seeing mine half-untouched.
‘It’s okay, I ate a lot at the London base.’
‘But that was two days ago – you’re not a camel, you can’t live off your hump.’
The truth was that I felt guilty taking as large a ration as him, when I had eaten all I could at the commune canteen with Mill; but I didn’t want it known that I had been up and about for hours before him or had had any special treatment. I felt bad enough as it was, almost unable to accept his looking out for my welfare now.
He seemed better after eating though, and poring over the maps always relaxed him. The panic over, Zak and his threats of what he’d do if he saw us again safely behind us, from that night on we walked, hour after hour, our route a mystery, our target obscure. But as we trudged on through those endless hours in darkness, the questions would come; for just as the realisation of what I’d missed with Mill was dawning on me, so Wareing was beginning to form the (quite correct) impression that something had been going on that night while he was unconscious,
‘But why show you the basement rooms?’ He would start, the two of us alone on a farm track or country road.
‘I told you,’ I would answer. ‘I just woke up first, I was there and back before you got up.’
‘And how did they know that that was what we were after? They thought we were travelling game hunters!’
‘But they found the bag didn’t they, found the papers.’
‘But why drug us at all, just to go through our stuff?’
‘They wanted to be sure, they must have had trouble with itinerants and strangers disappearing with food or whatever.’
‘No, I don’t buy it, this whole thing stinks,’ he’d end up concluding, I not able to look him in the eye for fear of seeing what suspicion might lurk there. Why was I lying, or at least omitting enough detail of that night to leave my version a lie? I suppose because some instinct told me that the more he knew of what I had been up to without him, and the fact that they had trusted me while being so harsh with him, would drive a wedge between us; and stuck together as we were, I wanted us to get along as best we could.
And so we marched: he wincing with each step and with one arm permanently inside his coat; I better but still holding my side with my good hand. The convoy seemed to have taken us further north from London than I’d realised; we were now somewhere in the vicinity of the idyll of Lincolnshire, which from childhood holidays I remembered as a patchwork of fields leading all the way to the East Coast. This was sparse country but vital, Wareing related on the rare occasions he spoke of anything else but our recent encounters: as there was so much coastline and open farmland around there for anyone wanting to access our nearby sensitive locations. Yet we hadn’t stopped for a target for days now, and I found it hard to imagine a foreign spy finding reason to land a dinghy nearby and traipse these paths. The immediate effect though of this empty landscape was to offer no distraction to our night-adjusted eyes, to do nothing to break our current mood.
Wareing had guessed as much as I knew about Captain Linkater, but which I hadn’t confirmed for fear of word of his contravention of orders getting back to the Major; but Wareing, I recalled, had had his suspicions even before we’d reached the Council House. Now he hissed,
‘And you wonder how they knew that we were coming, which direction we’d arrive from?’ By now the penny had firmly dropped that the Captain had left us miles back to have time to warn the town of our arrival.
‘He’d had the folder after I’d been brought to the London motorway base. He must have seen their town’s name in there, seen my bag of munitions. He must have guessed that his friends might not come out of it too well. All that talk in the Land Rover, of how communes are “how we’ll rebuild this country.”’ (Wareing had been so quiet on the journey, I had forgotten he would have been listening.) ‘He told them of our coming, and maybe something of what we were up to, and that gave them time to stuff us like turkeys. And while we’re at it, where would a bunch of farmers have got knock-out drops from?’ From this point on his suspicion of Captain Linkater knew no bounds, and most of it was true.
‘He put their need ahead of ours; when what business had it been of his? He was our driver, nothing more. The Major gave his orders. And outside that Council House there were sacks of seed, new machines being rolled out. I don’t remember if they were there when we got there, and I was pretty out of it when we left, but I’d bet you a penny to a pound that those sacks had the same Army aid logo on as those we’d been dropping off.’
I wondered how guilty I looked at that moment.
‘This was a mistake,’ he concluded, ‘a stupid, hopeless mistake.’
What part? I wanted to ask – things had hardly been going well.
Wareing shook his head, ‘An Army Captain, I ask you?’
I could have defended the Captain, suggested he had good intentions; but I let Wareing’s suspicions of him hang in the air to deflect any he may have had of me; and it felt like ratting the Captain out. But what was this big secret of mine I was so keen to keep? That they had been nice to me at the commune, had trusted me where they hadn’t him? However hellish these monologues of Wareing’s became, as long as we had suffered together at Zak’s hands then we were still a unit. Had Wareing learnt that Linkater had betrayed him alone, had told Mill that she could trust only me, then that would have been the end of us.
The truth was that, however he had betrayed us, I liked the Captain’s view, I liked the commune, I wanted them to succeed. What a shame we couldn’t all have gotten together and discovered that we all wanted the same thing! I was glad Wareing’s plan was interrupted, that judicious destruction was not employed; not that I wasn’t convinced that the madness of his desire had been caused at least in part by those vile little pills. How ironic that the fact that the building was attended and secured (and therefore no risk at all, not even worth being on our list) was the reason he thought of blowing it out at the foundations just to be sure; it was the derelict sites, the utterly insecure, that we could get into and decide if safe.
Yet as long as Wareing knew that something else had been going on at the Council House, then that atmosphere lingered. I looked at that broken figure – ill, awkward and confused – and caught a sight of myself. What had I become, what game was I playing, deciding what to reveal or hold back from the man who was still, however unofficially, acknowledged as my superior officer? Over time however, any ill will towards me, imagined or otherwise, gave way to a general malaise, a mood in Wareing of everyone and everything they did being cause for suspicion. It was this fortitude, this us-against-everyone belief, that kept him going, binding him up tighter than any injury bar death could undo.
Our easy conversation of the early days had evaporated, and I hardly dared ask where we were going or what lay ahead. I knew though that the East Coast was out there somewhere; recalled that Wareing had said something earlier about us not being needed ‘much past the Wash’; and felt it generally understood that it wouldn’t be too much longer before we were done. No mention was made, for instance, of longer-term care for our injuries, or of the need to hunt for food or to purify water beyond the next few days.
It would be a relief.
Chapter 22 – The Seaside Town