‘You look like heU,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘And you smell of fried fish. Douglas Archer, where have you been? I’ve been eating my heart out.’ It was just her way of joking, of course, but it was what he wanted to hear.
They embraced tightly and then she put a hand against his cheek while she looked at him. ‘Can I have a drink?’ he asked.
‘My darling, of course.’ His wife had never called him darling, and he found it a strange form of address, one confined, or so he’d thought, to movie stars. And the idea of Douglas asking for a drink as soon as he stepped through the door was one that wotild have surprised most people who knew him.
She went into the kitchen, prised ice cubes from the tray and dropped them into two tumblers. Douglas told her about Harry Woods at the cattle market but he gave no speaking role to Sylvia.
‘Only the Nazi press handouts are going out on the wire service,’ smd Barbara as she passed him his whisky. ‘Fve got a great story, and lots of photos, but there is a blackout. Htmdreds of people have been arrested, you just have to take a cab up-town to see what’s happening. Back home a dozen papers would have broken this story by now.’
‘You’re not back home,’ Douglas reminded her. ‘And the arrests number thousands, not hundreds.’ A sudden ray of sunlight lit up the white walls of the kitchen but it didn’t last long.
‘Colonel Mayhew phoned. He wants to see you. He’s coming here about eight.’
‘I have an arrest warrant for him. Huth wants to frighten him into doing a deal.’
‘What kind of deal?’
‘Mayhew gets the King and takes him to America. Huth gets a lot of atomic physics research. The Germans are tr5ong to make an atomic explosion.’
She showed no surprise. ‘So I’d heard. Can I freshen that drink?’ .
Douglas put his hand over the glass. ‘They’re both crazy,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because once the King gets to the USA, Mayhew will be left aside and forgotten. And as soon as Huth gets the research material, he will become superfluous. He is a lawyer; he has no scientific training. He had a lot of stuff extracted from German scientific papers
And encyclopedias as background, and two special reports by Professor Springer. I read it all; now I know nearly as much as Huth does.’
‘Perhaps Mayhew and Huth are motivated by something other than ambition?’
‘You can’t be serious, Barbara.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’ve never met two men so alike in their ruthless ambition.’ She saw then the great strength within him, not the athletic superiority that men so often used to intimidate others, but a strength that was kind and im-assuming.
They went into the loimge and sat down on the ugly little sofa. Its loose cover, decorated with large green leaves, made it look like some carnivorous plant.
‘Do you miss your wife?’ she said. She touched the ice in her drink with her finger-tip, and watched herself doing it.
‘Sometimes. We were children together.’
‘That’s really tough.’
T have the boy.’ She sat down with him and he put an arm roxmd her.
Barbara drank a little of her drink. ‘And you have me too,’ she said.
‘Do I?’ He looked at her but she had turned away from him. He touched her back. She shivered. ‘Do I?’ he said again.
‘You know you do,’ she whispered to the ice cubes.
‘I love you, Barbara.’
‘I love you too, Doug. I didn’t want to, God knows.’ The cloud moved across the sun, and the golden light dwindled and died until the room was almost dark. She leaned over and switched on the table lamp. ‘I hate this damned sofa,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,’ said Douglas. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘I was going to have it dyed, but the people who rent me the place probably think it’s valuable.’ She fingered the chintz cover thoughtfully.
Douglas said, ‘My year’s salary is no more than you earn for a good story.’
‘Let’s marry soon, very soon.’
‘There’s my son, remember.’
‘I remember.’ "
‘Don’t cry, Beirbara.’
With mock severity she said, ‘Without your son, no deal,’ but the words caught in her throat, and she cried as he put both arms round her and kissed her. -
World History
