The Long Midnight by Alan White

Author:Alan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

‘Why don’t you ever smile?’ people always said to me. I’d reply, ‘My face is solemn in repose,’ and they’d say, ‘Miserable bastard,’ or if they didn’t say it, I knew they were thinking it. I had always been tall and gaunt. No matter how much I ate, I never put any weight on. I was strong enough all my life, but thin, painfully thin, to hear my mother talk. I cannot remember a time when my mother wasn’t looking at me with anxious eyes and urging me to have another spoonful of something or other. ‘Go on, Donald, get it down. It’ll put some flesh on your bones.’

But it didn’t, and her face remained wistful and pleading and anxious right up to the day of her death in 1939. She’d had me late in life and never forgave herself; wrongly she supposed that by carrying me at an ‘advanced’ age she had denied me the full complement of flesh on my bones. She died blaming herself, as neatly and with as little trouble as she had always lived, of a blood clot that killed her within an hour.

I was of an age to tell myself I could get along without her. The war came and I put her to the back of my mind and joined up immediately. I thought about her when my marriage to Betty went wrong – I knew she would have given me some careful but forthright advice, against which I would have rebelled, and somewhere in the middle I would have known what to do. I missed her, perhaps not so strangely, when my body was cold, hunched in that inadequate overcoat.

I’d been wearing a British Army warm when the brigadier called me into his office in Ebury Street. He had a fire going in the grate and he was standing there, warming his backside. I took off my overcoat, and he moved along to make room for me. ‘Nippy outside, Captain,’ he said. It felt wrong, standing at a blazing fire next to the brigadier, warming my arse, but it was his way of putting me at my ease. When we sat down at his desk, the seat of my pants scorched me behind the legs.

‘This is a rotten job,’ he said, looking as if he regretted sending me.

I nodded. It was always a rotten job. They never realised, when they formed Special Services, how many rotten jobs there would be. It was all supposed to be black faces, and woollen helmets pulled down tight, and crawling across the beaches. It was all supposed to be derring-do and ‘Up the Team’, with brilliant men to lead you through the dangers of wartime Europe as if you were at play.

But gradually the jobs got to be more rotten. Very often the only way to bring a situation to an end was to kill somebody in circumstances that made it murder, no matter which convention you were playing. The Special Operations Executive had been

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