A Matter of Time by Alex Capus

Author:Alex Capus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shipbuilding, East, Africa, World War I (1914-1918), Literary, Fiction, World War
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2013-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Cutlasses Will Be Worn

weeks and months went by, and the first winter of the war came. Geoffrey Spicer-Simson and his wife continued to live at their small hotel near Russell Square. Now that he was no longer in command of a flotilla his pay had been cut by twenty per cent, so Amy had to look for work to make ends meet. She got a job at a munitions factory. From now on she left the hotel two hours earlier than her husband and returned home one hour later. To save coal they often spent their evenings and weekends at the cinema. When the programme ended they would sometimes sit tight and watch it two or even three times over. Geoffrey liked French historical dramas with Sarah Bernhardt, Amy preferred American cowboy films with landscapes that reminded her of her childhood in British Columbia. The newsreels showed the Battle of the Marne, the winter fighting in Champagne and the bombardment of Ypres. The tally of the young men who had lost their lives in this mechanized massacre mounted steadily: eighty, two hundred, three hundred thousand. In London, sugar and shoe leather ran short and the price of beef and chicken went through the roof. The Spicer-Simsons consumed a great deal of cabbage soup. Christmas they celebrated alone in their room, New Year’s Eve with the Hanschells in Piccadilly Circus.

But then came 23 April 1915, which would prove to be the decisive and long-awaited turning point in Geoffrey Spicer-Simsons career. Fie had no premonition of this as he made his way to Whitehall just before nine a.m. that day, following his usual route along pavements wet with rain, nor did he have any inkling of it as he put a match to the office fire and Major Thompson turned up for duty just as Big Ben struck the hour. Shortly

after nine-thirty, however, som’ething happened that had never happened before in the whole of his five months’ drudgery: the door opened and in came one of the Admiralty’s bigwigs.

Spicer-Simson was on the qui vive in an instant. He knew who the bigwig was: an admiral by the name of Sir David Gamble, whose only superiors were God, the king and Sir Henry Jackson, First Sea Lord and supreme head of the Royal Navy. Spicer-Simson and Major Thompson sprang to their feet. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said the admiral. Carefully shutting the door behind him, he sauntered over to the fireplace with a folder in his left hand. As tensely vigilant as a predator on the prowl, Spicer-Simson watched the admiral prop one elbow on the mantlepiece and vouchsafe a few amiable remarks about the weather, the coming of spring and next weekend’s rugby match. Spicer-Simson sucked in his cheeks and raised his eyebrows to lend his face an air of interest and competence. However, since the admiral addressed himself exclusively to Thompson, never to him, he soon suspected that the major was the admiral’s sole concern. This suspicion crystallized into certainty when Gamble

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