Текст книги "Eye of the Needle"
Автор книги: Ken Follett
Соавторы: Ken Follett
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)
2
HENRY II WAS A REMARKABLE KING. IN AN AGE WHEN the term “flying visit” had not yet been coined, he flitted between England and France with such rapidity that he was credited with magical powers; a rumor that, understandably, he did nothing to suppress. In 1173—either the June or the September, depending upon which secondary source one favors—he arrived in England and left for France again so quickly that no contemporary writer ever found out about it. Later historians discovered the record of his expenditure in the Pipe Rolls. At the time his kingdom was under attack by his sons at its northern and southern extremes—the Scottish border and the South of France. But what, precisely, was the purpose of his visit? Whom did he see? Why was it secret, when the myth of his magical speed was worth an army? What did he accomplish?
This was the problem that taxed Percival Godliman in the summer of 1940, when Hitler’s armies swept across the French cornfields like a scythe and the British poured out of the Dunkirk bottleneck in bloody disarray.
Professor Godliman knew more about the Middle Ages than any man alive. His book on the Black Death had upended every convention of medievalism; it had also been a best-seller and published as a Penguin Book. With that behind him he had turned to a slightly earlier and even more intractable period.
At 12:30 on a splendid June day in London, a secretary found Godliman hunched over an illuminated manuscript, laboriously translating its medieval Latin, making notes in his own even less legible handwriting. The secretary, who was planning to eat her lunch in the garden of Gordon Square, did not like the manuscript room because it smelled dead. You needed so many keys to get in there, it might as well have been a tomb.
Godliman stood at a lectern, perched on one leg like a bird, his face lit bleakly by a spotlight above—he might have been the ghost of the monk who wrote the book, standing a cold vigil over his precious chronicle. The girl cleared her throat and waited for him to notice her. She saw a short man in his fifties, with round shoulders and weak eyesight, wearing a tweed suit. She knew he could be perfectly sensible once you dragged him out of the Middle Ages. She coughed again and said, “Professor Godliman?”
He looked up, and when he saw her he smiled, and then he did not look like a ghost, more like someone’s dotty father. “Hello!” he said, in an astonished tone, as if he had just met his next-door neighbor in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
“You asked me to remind you that you have lunch at the Savoy with Colonel Terry.”
“Oh, yes.” He took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and peered at it. “If I’m going to walk it, I’d better leave now.”
She nodded. “I brought your gas mask.”
“You are thoughtful!” He smiled again, and she decided he looked quite nice. He took the mask from her and said, “Do I need my coat?”
“You didn’t wear one this morning. It’s quite warm. Shall I lock up after you?”
“Thank you, thank you.” He jammed his notebook into his jacket pocket and went out.
The secretary looked around, shivered, and followed him.
COLONEL ANDREW TERRY was a red-faced Scot, pauper-thin from a lifetime of heavy smoking, with sparse dark-blond hair thickly brilliantined. Godliman found him at a corner table in the Savoy Grill, wearing civilian clothes. There were three cigarette stubs in the ashtray. He stood up to shake hands.
Godliman said, “Morning, Uncle Andrew.” Terry was his mother’s baby brother.
“How are you, Percy?”
“I’m writing a book about the Plantagenets.” Godliman sat down.
“Are your manuscripts still in London? I’m surprised.”
“Why?”
Terry lit another cigarette. “Move them to the country in case of bombing.”
“Should I?”
“Half the National Gallery has been shoved into a bloody big hole in the ground somewhere up in Wales. Young Kenneth Clark is quicker off the mark than you. Might be sensible to take yourself off out of it too, while you’re about it. I don’t suppose you’ve many students left.”
“That’s true.” Godliman took a menu from a waiter and said, “I don’t want a drink.”
Terry did not look at his menu. “Seriously, Percy, why are you still in town?”
Godliman’s eyes seemed to clear, like the image on a screen when the projector is focused, as if he had to think for the first time since he walked in. “It’s all right for children to leave, and national institutions like Bertrand Russell. But for me—well, it’s a bit like running away and letting other people fight for you. I realize that’s not a strictly logical argument. It’s a matter of sentiment, not logic.”
Terry smiled the smile of one whose expectations have been fulfilled. But he dropped the subject and looked at the menu. After a moment he said, “Good God. Le Lord Woolton Pie.”
Godliman grinned. “I’m sure it’s still just potatoes and vegetables.”
When they had ordered, Terry said, “What do you think of our new Prime Minister?”
“The man’s an ass. But then, Hitler’s a fool, and look how well he’s doing. You?”
“We can live with Winston. At least he’s bellicose.”
Godliman raised his eyebrows. “‘We’? Are you back in the game?”
“I never really left it, you know.”
“But you said—”
“Percy. Can’t you think of a department whose staff all say they don’t work for the Army?”
“Well, I’m damned. All this time…”
Their first course came, and they started a bottle of white Bordeaux. Godliman ate potted salmon and looked pensive.
Eventually Terry said, “Thinking about the last lot?”
Godliman nodded. “Young days, you know. Terrible time.” But his tone was almost wistful.
“This war isn’t the same at all. My chaps don’t go behind enemy lines and count bivouacs like you did. Well, they do, but that side of things is much less important this time. Nowadays we just listen to the wireless.”
“Don’t they broadcast in code?”
Terry shrugged. “Codes can be broken. Candidly, we get to know just about everything we need these days.”
Godliman glanced around, but there was no one within earshot, and it was hardly for him to tell Terry that careless talk costs lives.
Terry went on, “In fact my job is to make sure they don’t have the information they need about us.”
They both had chicken pie to follow. There was no beef on the menu. Godliman fell silent, but Terry talked on.
“Canaris is a funny chap, you know. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. I met him before this lot started. Likes England. My guess is he’s none too fond of Hitler. Anyway, we know he’s been told to mount a major intelligence operation against us, in preparation for the invasion—but he’s not doing much. We arrested their best man in England the day after war broke out. He’s in Wandsworth prison now. Useless people, Canaris’s spies. Old ladies in boarding-houses, mad Fascists, petty criminals—”
Godliman said, “Look, here, old boy, this is too much.” He trembled slightly with a mixture of anger and incomprehension. “All this stuff is secret. I don’t want to know!”
Terry was unperturbed. “Would you like something else?” he offered. “I’m having chocolate ice cream.”
Godliman stood up. “I don’t think so. I’m going to go back to my work, if you don’t mind.”
Terry looked up at him coolly. “The world can wait for your reappraisal of the Plantagenets, Percy. There’s a war on, dear boy. I want you to work for me.”
Godliman stared down at him for a long moment. “What on earth would I do?”
Terry smiled wolfishly. “Catch spies.”
Walking back to the college, Godliman felt depressed despite the weather. He would accept Colonel Terry’s offer, no doubt about that. His country was at war; it was a just war; and if he was too old to fight, he was still young enough to help.
But the thought of leaving his work—and for how many years?—depressed him. He loved history and he had been totally absorbed in medieval England since the death of his wife ten years ago. He liked the unraveling of mysteries, the discovery of faint clues, the resolution of contradictions, the unmasking of lies and propaganda and myth. His new book would be the best on its subject written in the last hundred years, and there would not be one to equal it for another century. It had ruled his life for so long that the thought of abandoning it was almost unreal, as difficult to digest as the discovery that one is an orphan and no relation at all to the people one has always called Mother and Father.
An air raid warning stridently interrupted his thoughts. He contemplated ignoring it—so many people did now, and he was only ten minutes’ walk from the college. But he had no real reason to return to his study—he knew he would do no more work today. So he hurried into a tube station and joined the solid mass of Londoners crowding down the staircases and on to the grimy platform. He stood close to the wall, staring at a Bovril poster, and thought, But it’s not just the things I’m leaving behind.
Going back into the game depressed him, too. There were some things he liked about it: the importance of little things, the value of simply being clever, the meticulousness, the guesswork. But he hated the blackmail, the deceit, the desperation, and the way one always stabbed the enemy in the back.
The platform was becoming more crowded. Godliman sat down while there was still room, and found himself leaning against a man in a bus driver’s uniform. The man smiled and said, “Oh to be in England, now that summer’s here. Know who said that?”
“Now that April’s there,” Godliman corrected him. “It was Browning.”
“I heard it was Adolf Hitler,” the driver said. A woman next to him squealed with laughter and he turned his attention to her. “Did you hear what the evacuee said to the farmer’s wife?”
Godliman tuned out and remembered an April when he had longed for England, crouching on a high branch of a plane tree, peering through a cold mist across a French valley behind the German lines. He could see nothing but vague dark shapes, even through his telescope, and he was about to slide down and walk a mile or so farther when three German soldiers came from nowhere to sit around the base of the tree and smoke. After a while they took out cards and began to play, and young Percival Godliman realized they had found a way of stealing off and were here for the day. He stayed in the tree, hardly moving, until he began to shiver and his muscles knotted with cramp and his bladder felt as if it would burst. Then he took out his revolver and shot the three of them, one after the another, through the tops of their close-cropped heads. And three people, laughing and cursing and gambling their pay, had simply ceased to exist. It was the first time he killed, and all he could think was, Just because I had to pee.
Godliman shifted on the cold concrete of the station platform and let the memory fade away. There was a warm wind from the tunnel and a train came in. The people who got off found spaces and settled to wait. Godliman listened to the voices.
“Did you hear Churchill on the wireless? We was listening-in at the Duke of Wellington. Old Jack Thornton cried. Silly old bugger…”
“Haven’t had fillet steak on the menu for so long I’ve forgotten the bally taste…wine committee saw the war coming and brought in twenty thousand dozen, thank God…”
“Yes, a quiet wedding, but what’s the point in waiting when you don’t know what the next day’s going to bring?”
“No, Peter never came back from Dunkirk…”
The bus driver offered him a cigarette. Godliman refused, and took out his pipe. Someone started to sing.
A blackout warden passing yelled,
“Ma, pull down that blind—
Just look at what you’re showing,” and we
Shouted, “Never mind.” Oh!
Knees up Mother Brown…
The song spread through the crowd until everyone was singing. Godliman joined in, knowing that this was a nation losing a war and singing to hide to its fear, as a man will whistle past the graveyard at night; knowing that the sudden affection he felt for London and Londoners was an ephemeral sentiment, akin to mob hysteria; mistrusting the voice inside him that said “This, this is what the war is about, this is what makes it worth fighting”; knowing but not caring, because for the first time in so many years he was feeling the sheer physical thrill of comradeship and he liked it.
When the all-clear sounded they went up the staircase and into the street, and Godliman found a phone box and called Colonel Terry to ask how soon he could start.
3
FABER…GODLIMAN…TWO-THIRDS OF A TRIANGLE that one day would be crucially completed by the principals, David and Lucy, of a ceremony proceeding at this moment in a small country church. It was old and very beautiful. A dry-stone wall enclosed a graveyard where wildflowers grew. The church itself had been there—well, bits of it had—the last time Britain was invaded, almost a millennium ago. The north wall of the nave, several feet thick and pierced with only two tiny windows, could remember that last invasion; it had been built when churches were places of physical as well as spiritual sanctuary, and the little round-headed windows were better for shooting arrows out of than for letting the Lord’s sunshine in. Indeed, the Local Defense Volunteers had detailed plans for using the church if and when the current bunch of European thugs crossed the Channel.
But no jackboots sounded in the tiled choir in this August of 1940; not yet. The sun glowed through stained glass windows that had survived Cromwell’s iconoclasts and Henry VIII’s greed, and the roof resounded to the notes of an organ that had yet to yield to woodworm and dry rot.
It was a lovely wedding. Lucy wore white, of course, and her five sisters were bridesmaids in apricot dresses. David wore the Mess Uniform of a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, all crisp and new for it was the first time he had put it on. They sang Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd, to the tune Crimond.
Lucy’s father looked proud, as a man will on the day his eldest and most beautiful daughter marries a fine boy in a uniform. He was a farmer, but it was a long time since he had sat on a tractor; he rented out his arable land and used the rest to raise race-horses, although this winter of course his pasture would go under the plough and potatoes would be planted. Although he was really more gentleman than farmer, he nevertheless had the open-air skin, the deep chest, and the big stubby hands of agricultural people. Most of the men on that side of the church bore him a resemblance: barrel-chested men, with weathered red faces, those not in tail coats favoring tweed suits and stout shoes.
The bridesmaids had something of that look, too; they were country girls. But the bride was like her mother. Her hair was a dark, dark red, long and thick and shining and glorious, and she had wide-apart amber eyes and an oval face; and when she looked at the vicar with that clear, direct gaze and said, “I will” in that firm, clear voice, the vicar was startled and thought “By God she means it!” which was an odd thought for a vicar to have in the middle of a wedding.
The family on the other side of the nave had a certain look about them, too. David’s father was a lawyer—his permanent frown was a professional affectation and concealed a sunny nature. (He had been a Major in the Army in the last war, and thought all this business about the RAF and war in the air was a fad that would soon pass.) But nobody looked like him, not even his son who stood now at the altar promising to love his wife until death, which might not be far away, God forbid. No, they all looked like David’s mother, who sat beside her husband now, with almost-black hair and dark skin and long, slender limbs.
David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man—his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark, ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, which he was, and sensitive.
The whole thing was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid, comfortably off, backbone-of-England-type families getting married in a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.
When they were pronounced man and wife both the mothers were dry-eyed, and both the fathers cried.
KISSING THE BRIDE was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought, as yet another middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages, when every man in the tribe was allowed to—well, anyway, it was time we got properly civilized and dropped the whole business.
She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well…But it could have been worse. If it had been peacetime Father would have hired the Albert Hall.
So far nine people had said, “May all your troubles be little ones,” and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, “I want to see more than a fence running around your garden.” Lucy had shaken countless hands and pretended not to hear remarks like “I wouldn’t mind being in David’s pajamas tonight.” David had made a speech in which he thanked Lucy’s parents for giving him their daughter, and Lucy’s father actually said that he was not losing a daughter but gaining a son. It was all hopelessly gaga, but one did it for one’s parents.
A distant uncle loomed up from the direction of the bar, swaying slightly, and Lucy repressed a shudder. She introduced him to her husband. “David, this is Uncle Norman.”
Uncle Norman pumped David’s bony hand. “Well, m’boy, when do you take up your commission?”
“Tomorrow, sir.”
“What, no honeymoon?”
“Just twenty-four hours.”
“But you’ve only just finished your training, so I gather.”
“Yes, but I could fly before, you know. I learned at Cambridge. Besides, with all this going on they can’t spare pilots. I expect I shall be in the air tomorrow.”
Lucy said quietly, “David, don’t,” but Uncle Norman persevered.
“What’ll you fly?” Uncle Norman asked with schoolboy enthusiasm.
“Spitfire. I saw her yesterday. She’s a lovely kite.” David had already fallen into the RAF slang—kites and crates and the drink and bandits at two o’clock. “She’s got eight guns, she does three hundred and fifty knots, and she’ll turn around in a shoebox.”
“Marvelous, marvelous. You boys are certainly knocking the stuffing out of the Luftwaffe, what?”
“We got sixty yesterday for eleven of our own,” David said, as proudly as if he had shot them all down himself. “The day before, when they had a go at Yorkshire, we sent the lot back to Norway with their tails between their legs—and we didn’t lose a single kite!”
Uncle Norman gripped David’s shoulder with tipsy fervor. “Never,” he quoted pompously, “was so much owed by so many to so few. Churchill said that the other day.”
David tried a modest grin. “He must have been talking about the mess bills.”
Lucy hated the way they trivialized bloodshed and destruction. She said: “David, we should go and change now.”
They went in separate cars to Lucy’s home. Her mother helped her out of the wedding dress and said: “Now, my dear, I don’t quite know what you’re expecting tonight, but you ought to know—”
“Oh, mother, this is 1940, you know!”
Her mother colored slightly. “Very well, dear,” she said mildly. “But if there is anything you want to talk about, later on…”
It occurred to Lucy that to say things like this cost her mother considerable effort, and she regretted her sharp reply. “Thank you,” she said. She touched her mother’s hand. “I will.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then. Call me if you want anything.” She kissed Lucy’s cheek and went out.
Lucy sat at the dressing table in her slip and began to brush her hair. She knew exactly what to expect tonight. She felt a faint glow of pleasure as she remembered.
It happened in June, a year after they had met at the Glad Rag Ball. They were seeing each other every week by this time, and David had spent part of the Easter vacation with Lucy’s people. Mother and Father approved of him—he was handsome, clever and gentlemanly, and he came from precisely the same stratum of society as they did. Father thought he was a shade too opinionated, but Mother said the landed gentry had been saying that about undergraduates for six hundred years, and she thought David would be kind to his wife, which was the most important thing in the long run. So in June Lucy went to David’s family home for a weekend.
The place was a Victorian copy of an eighteenth-century grange, a square-shaped house with nine bedrooms and a terrace with a vista. What impressed Lucy about it was the realization that the people who planted the garden must have known they would be long dead before it reached maturity. The atmosphere was very easy, and the two of them drank beer on the terrace in the afternoon sunshine. That was when David told her that he had been accepted for officer training in the RAF, along with four pals from the university flying club. He wanted to be a fighter pilot.
“I can fly all right,” he said, “and they’ll need people once this war gets going—they say it’ll be won and lost in the air, this time.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” she said quietly.
“Not a bit,” he said. Then he looked at her and said, “Yes, I am.”
She thought he was very brave, and held his hand.
A little later they put on swimming suits and went down to the lake. The water was clear and cool, but the sun was still strong and the air was warm as they splashed about gleefully.
“Are you a good swimmer?” he asked her.
“Better than you!”
“All right. Race you to the island.”
She shaded her eyes to look into the sun. She held the pose for a minute, pretending she did not know how desirable she was in her wet swimsuit with her arms raised and her shoulders back. The island was a small patch of bushes and trees about three hundred yards away, in the center of the lake.
She dropped her hands, shouted, “Go!” and struck out in a fast crawl.
David won, of course, with his enormously long arms and legs. Lucy found herself in difficulty when she was still fifty yards from the island. She switched to breaststroke, but she was too exhausted even for that, and she had to roll over on to her back and float. David, who was already sitting on the bank blowing like a walrus, slipped back into the water and swam to meet her. He got behind her, held her beneath the arms in the correct lifesaving position, and pulled her slowly to shore. His hands were just below her breasts.
“I’m enjoying this,” he said, and she giggled despite her breathlessness.
A few moments later he said, “I suppose I might as well tell you.”
“What?” she panted.
“The lake is only four feet deep.”
“You…!” She wriggled out of his arms, spluttering and laughing, and found her footing.
He took her hand and led her out of the water and through the trees. He pointed to an old wooden rowboat rotting upside-down beneath a hawthorn. “When I was a boy I used to row out here in that, with one of Papa’s pipes, a box of matches and a pinch of St. Bruno in a twist of paper. This is where I used to smoke it.”
They were in a clearing, completely surrounded by bushes. The turf underfoot was clean and springy. Lucy flopped on the ground.
“We’ll swim back slowly,” David said.
“Let’s not even talk about it just yet,” she replied.
He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backwards until she was lying down. He stroked her hip and kissed her throat, and soon she stopped shivering. When he laid his hand gently, nervously, on the soft mound between her legs, she arched upwards, willing him to press harder. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him open-mouthed and wetly. His hands went to the straps of her swimsuit, and he pulled them down over her shoulders. She said, “No.”
He buried his face between her breasts. “Lucy, please.”
“No.”
He looked at her. “It might be my last chance.”
She rolled away from him and stood up. Then, because of the war, and because of the pleading look on his flushed young face, and because of the glow inside her which would not go away, she took off her costume with one swift movement and removed her bathing cap so that her dark-red hair shook out over her shoulders. She knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands and guiding his lips to her breast.
She lost her virginity painlessly, enthusiastically, and only a little too quickly.
THE SPICE OF GUILT made the memory more pleasant, not less. Even if it had been a well-planned seduction then she had been a willing, not to say eager, victim, especially at the end.
She began to dress in her going-away outfit. She had startled him a couple of times that afternoon on the island: once when she wanted him to kiss her breasts, and again when she had guided him inside her with her hands. Apparently such things did not happen in the books he read. Like most of her friends, Lucy read D. H. Lawrence for information about sex. She believed in his choreography and mistrusted the sound effects—the things his people did to one another sounded nice, but not that nice; she was not expecting trumpets and thunderstorms and the clash of cymbals at her sexual awakening.
David was a little more ignorant than she, but he was gentle, and he took pleasure in her pleasure, and she was sure that was the important thing.
They had done it only once since the first time. Exactly a week before their wedding they had made love again, and it caused their first row.
This time it was at her parents’ house, in the morning after everyone else had left. He came to her room in his robe and got into bed with her. She almost changed her mind about Lawrence’s trumpets and cymbals. David got out of bed immediately afterward.
“Don’t go,” she said.
“Somebody might come in.”
“I’ll chance it. Come back to bed.” She was warm and drowsy and comfortable, and she wanted him beside her.
He put on his robe. “It makes me nervous.”
“You weren’t nervous five minutes ago.” She reached for him. “Lie with me. I want to get to know your body.”
Her directness obviously embarrassed him, and he turned away.
She flounced out of bed, her lovely breasts heaving. “You’re making me feel cheap!” She sat on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.
David put his arms around her and said: “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. You’re the first for me, too, and I don’t know what to expect, and I feel confused…I mean, nobody tells you anything about this, do they?”
She snuffled and shook her head in agreement, and it occurred to her that what was really unnerving him was the knowledge that in eight days’ time he had to take off in a flimsy aircraft and fight for his life above the clouds; so she forgave him, and he dried her tears, and they got back into bed. He was very sweet after that….
She was just about ready. She examined herself in a full-length mirror. Her suit was faintly military, with square shoulders and epaulettes, but the blouse beneath it was feminine, for balance. Her hair fell in sausage curls beneath a natty pill-box hat. It would not have been right to go away gorgeously dressed, not this year; but she felt she had achieved the kind of briskly practical, yet attractive, look that was rapidly becoming fashionable.
David was waiting for her in the hall. He kissed her and said, “You look wonderful, Mrs. Rose.”
They were driven back to the reception to say good-bye to everyone. They were going to spend the night in London, at Claridge’s, then David would drive on to Biggin Hill and Lucy would come home again. She was going to live with her parents—she had the use of a cottage for when David was on leave.
There was another half-hour of handshakes and kisses, then they went out to the car. Some of David’s cousins had got at his open-top MG. There were tin cans and an old boot tied to the bumpers with string, the running-boards were awash with confetti, and “Just Married” was scrawled all over the paintwork in bright red lipstick.
They drove away, smiling and waving, the guests filling the street behind them. A mile down the road they stopped and cleaned up the car.
It was dusk when they got going again. David’s headlights were fitted with blackout masks, but he drove very fast just the same. Lucy felt very happy.
David said, “There’s a bottle of bubbly in the glove compartment.”
Lucy opened the compartment and found the champagne and two glasses carefully wrapped in tissue paper. It was still quite cold. The cork came out with a loud pop and shot off into the night. David lit a cigarette while Lucy poured the wine.
“We’re going to be late for supper,” he said.
“Who cares?” She handed him a glass.
She was too tired to drink, really. She became sleepy. The car seemed to be going terribly fast. She let David have most of the champagne. He began to whistle St. Louis Blues.
Driving through England in the blackout was a weird experience. One missed lights that one hadn’t realized were there before the war: lights in cottage porches and farmhouse windows, lights on cathedral spires and inn signs, and—most of all—the luminous glow, low in the distant sky, of the thousand lights of a nearby town. Even if one had been able to see, there were no signposts to look at; they had been removed to confuse the German parachutists who were expected any day. (Just a few days ago in the Midlands, farmers had found parachutes, radios and maps, but since there were no footprints leading away from the objects, it had been concluded that no men had landed, and the whole thing was a feeble Nazi attempt to panic the population.) Anyway, David knew the way to London.
They climbed a long hill. The little sports car took it nimbly. Lucy gazed through half-closed eyes at the blackness ahead. The downside of the hill was steep and winding. Lucy heard the distant roar of an approaching truck.
The MG’s tires squealed as David raced around the bends. “I think you’re going too fast,” Lucy said mildly.
