‘We’d better go back,’ she said. ‘If we go on we’ll have too far to walk. I don’t have a repair kit.’
‘O faithless one,’ Queenie said, pointing to the entrance to a farm lane about twenty yards further on. ‘This is my plan to scrounge a meal before I meet my contact.’ She sniffed knowingly, nose raised into the wind. ‘A provincial farmhouse lies less than a hundred yards away, and I smell meat stew and fruit pie –’ She took her wounded bicycle by the handlebars and set off up the lane at a determined pace. Land Army girls were hoeing among the cabbages in the adjoining field – no time off for them in the rain either. They had sacks tied round their legs with string and ground sheets with holes in the middle for rain capes. Maddie and the disguised Nazi spy were well-equipped by comparison in their RAF men’s overcoats.
A chorus of vicious dogs began to bark as they approached. Maddie looked round anxiously.
‘Don’t worry, that’s just noise. They’ll be tied up or they’d bother the Land Girls. Is the sign up?’
‘What sign?’
‘A jar of rowan berries in the window – if there’s no rowan in the window I won’t be welcome.’
Maddie burst out laughing.
‘You are daft!’
‘Is there?’
Maddie was taller than her companion. She stood on tiptoe to see over the barnyard wall, and her mouth dropped open.
‘There is,’ she said, and turned to gape at Queenie. ‘How –?’
Queenie leaned her bicycle against the wall, looking very smug. ‘You can see the trees over the garden wall. They’ve just been trimmed. It’s all very tidy and pretty in a wifely way, but she’ll have dug up her geraniums to plant tatties for the War Effort. So if she has something nice to decorate her kitchen with, like fresh-cut rowan berries, she’s likely to do it, and –’
Queenie settled her hair into shape beneath the plastic rain bonnet. ‘And she’s the sort of person who will feed us.’
She let herself in boldly at the kitchen door of the strange farm.
‘Ah’ve nae wish tae disturb ye, Missus –’ Her well-bred, educated accent suddenly developed an irresistible Scottish burr. ‘We’ve come frae RAF Maidsend and Ah’ve had this wee spot o’ bother wi’ me bike. Ah wondered –’
‘Oh, no trouble at all, love!’ the farmer’s wife said. ‘I’ve a couple of Land Girls boarding with me, and I’m sure we’ve got a puncture repair kit among us. Mavis and Grace’ll be in the fields just now, but if you wait a moment I’ll check the shed – Oh, and for goodness sake come in and warm yourselves first!’
Queenie produced, as if by magic, a tin of 25 Player’s from deep in the pockets of her greatcoat. Maddie realised suddenly that this infinite supply of cigarettes was carefully hoarded – realised that she’d scarcely ever seen Queenie smoking, but that she used cigarettes as gifts or as payment in kind in place of cash – for tips and poker chips and, now, bicycle patches and lunch.
Only once, Maddie remembered now, had she seen Queenie smoking a cigarette she hadn’t lit for someone else – only once, when she’d been waiting to interview the German pilot.
Queenie held out the cigarettes.
‘Oh, goodness no, that’s far too much!’
‘Aye, take them, let your lassies share ’em out. A gift o’ thanks. But would ye no gie us a loan o’ your hob to heat our wee tin o’ beans before we go?’
The farmer’s wife laughed merrily. ‘They making WAAF officers take to the roads like gypsies, are they, buying a boil of your tea can in exchange for a smoke? There’s shepherd’s pie and apple crumble left over from our own dinner, you can help yourselves to that! Just a minute while I find you a patch for your tube –’
They were soon tucking into a steaming hot meal considerably better than any they’d eaten at Maidsend for the past three months, including new cream to pour over the home baking. The only inconvenience was that they had to eat it standing up as there was so much traffic through the kitchen – the chairs had been removed so as not to clutter up the passage of farmhands and Land Army girls and dogs (no children; they’d been evacuated, away from the front line of the Battle of Britain).
‘You owe me four more fears,’ Queenie said.
Maddie thought. She thought about most of the fears that Queenie had confessed to – ghosts, dark, getting smacked for naughtiness, the college porter. They were almost childish fears, easily bottled. You could knock them on the head or laugh at them or ignore them.
‘Dogs,’ she said abruptly, remembering the slavering hounds on the way in. ‘And Not Getting the Uniform Right – my hair’s always too long, you’re not allowed to alter the coat so it’s always too big, things like that. And: Southerners laughing at my accent.’
‘Och aye,’ Queenie agreed. It could not be a problem she ever encountered, with her educated, upper-crust vowels, but being a Scot she sympathised with any distrust of the soft Southern English. ‘You’ve only one more fear to go – make it good.’
Maddie dug deep. She came up honestly, hesitating a little at the simplicity and nakedness of the confession, then admitted: ‘Letting people down.’
Her friend did not roll her eyes or laugh. She listened, nodding, stirring the warm cream into the baked apples. She didn’t look at Maddie.
‘Not doing my job properly,’ Maddie expanded. ‘Failing to live up to expectations.’
‘A bit like my fear of killing someone,’ Queenie said, ‘but less specific.’
‘It could include killing someone,’ said Maddie.
‘It could.’ Queenie was sober now. ‘Unless you were doing them a favour by killing them. Then you’d let them down if you didn’t. If you couldn’t make yourself. My great-uncle had horrible cancers in his throat and he’d been to America twice to have the tumours taken out and they kept coming back, and finally he asked his wife to kill him, and she did. She wasn’t charged with anything – it was recorded as a shooting accident, believe it or not, but she was my grandmother’s sister and we all know the truth.’
‘How horrible,’ Maddie said with feeling. ‘How terrible for her! But – yes. You’d have to live with that selfishness, afterwards, if you couldn’t make yourself do it. Yes, I’m dead afraid of that.’
The farmer’s wife came in again then, with a patch and a bucket to fill with water so they could find the puncture, and Maddie quickly pulled down the blackout curtains over her bright and vulnerable soul and went off to sort out the tyre. Queenie stayed in the kitchen, thoughtfully lapping up the last drops of warm cream with a tin spoon.
Half an hour later, as they walked the bicycles back down the muddy farm lane and out to the road, Queenie commented, ‘God help us if the invading Germans turn up with Scottish accents. I got her to draw me a map. I think I can find the pub now.’
‘Here’s your hairpin back,’ Maddie said. She held out the thin sliver of steel. ‘You’ll want to get rid of the evidence next time you sabotage someone else’s tyres.’
Queenie let out a peal of her giddy, infectious laughter. ‘Caught! I stuck it in too far and couldn’t have got it back without you noticing. Don’t be cross! It’s a game.’
‘You’re too good,’ Maddie said sharply.
‘You got a hot meal out of it, didn’t you? Come on, pub’ll be open again by the time we get there, and we won’t be able to stay long – I’m back on duty at eleven and I want a nap. But you deserve a whisky first. My treat.’
‘I’m sure that’s not what Nazi spies drink.’
‘This one does.’
It was still raining as they coasted along the steep lane that wound down the cliffside to St Catherine’s Bay. The road was slick and they went cautiously, standing on their brakes. There were a couple of miserable, wet soldiers manning the gun emplacements there, who waved and shouted as the girls on their bicycles came barrelling past, brakes screeching with the steepness of the descent. The Green Man was open. Sitting in its bow window were RAF Maidsend’s gaunt and weary squadron leader and a myopic, well-turned-out civilian in a tweed suit. Everyone else was clustered round the bar.
Queenie walked purposefully to the cheerful coal fire and knelt, rubbing her hands together.
Squadron Leader Creighton rapped out a greeting that couldn’t be ignored. ‘What chance! Come and join us, ladies.’ He stood up and gave a little ceremonious bow, offering chairs. Queenie, comfortable with and indeed accustomed to such attention from superior officers, stood up and let her coat be taken. Maddie hung back.
‘This rather small and sodden young person,’ said the squadron leader to the civilian, ‘is the heroine I was telling you about – the German speaker. This other is Assistant Section Officer Brodatt, who took the call and guided the aircraft in. Join us, ladies, join us!’
‘Assistant Section Officer Brodatt is a pilot,’ Queenie said.
‘A pilot!’
‘Not at the moment,’ said Maddie, blushing and writhing with embarrassment. ‘I’d like to join the ATA, the Air Transport Auxiliary, when they let more women in. I have a civilian licence. My instructor joined in January this year.’
‘How extraordinary!’ said the short-sighted gentleman. He peered at Maddie through lenses half an inch thick. He was older than the squadron leader, old enough that he might’ve been refused if he’d tried to join up. Queenie shook hands with him and said gravely, ‘You must be my contact.’
His eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. ‘Must I?’
Maddie said furiously, ‘Pay no attention to her, she’s loopy. She’s been playing daft games all morning –’
They all sat down.
‘Her suggestion,’ said Queenie. ‘The daft games.’
‘It was my suggestion, but only because she’s so utterly rubbish at finding her way anywhere. I told her to pretend to be a –’
‘“Careless talk costs lives,”’ Queenie interrupted.
‘– spy.’ Maddie omitted any damning adjectives. ‘She was supposed to have been dropped by parachute and had to find her way to this pub.’
‘Not just any game,’ exclaimed the gentleman in the tweed suit and thick spectacles. ‘Not just any game, but the Great Game! Have you read Kim? Are you fond of Kipling?’
‘I don’t know, you naughty man, I’ve never kippled,’ Queenie responded tartly. The civilian let out a chortle of delight. Queenie said demurely, ‘Of course Kipling, of course Kim, when I was little. I prefer Orwell now.’
‘Been to university?’
They established that Queenie and the gentleman’s wife had been at the same college, albeit nearly 20 years apart, and traded literary quotations in German. They were obviously cut from the same well-read, well-bred, lunatic cloth.
