The Captain and the Enemy Read Online Free PDF

I knew him first he had a very classy name – Colonel Claridge, but he changed that one pretty quick. He said he couldn’t live up to it.’
    ‘What’s his name now?’
    ‘You are an inquisitive one, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter asking
me
questions, but don’t go on like that with the Captain. Questions get him worried. He said to me once, “Liza, I seem to have been asked questions all my life long. Give me a rest, won’t you,” so now I give him a rest, and you must too.’
    ‘But what shall I call him?’
    ‘Call him the Captain like I do. That’s a name I hope he’ll always keep.’ Suddenly her eyes lighted up, as though she had been brought into a room with a great gleaming Christmas tree hung with baubles and mystery packets. She said, ‘There – do you hear it? It’s his step on the basement stairs. I’d know it from a thousand, yet he always says I must wait to open up till he rings the third time – a long and two shorts. As though I wouldn’t know that it’s him before he rings once.’
    She was at the door before she finished speaking and sure enough there were three rings – the long ring and the two shorts. Then the door came open and she was greeting him with a mixture of relief and complaint as though he had been away for a year. I watched with curiosity – I suppose I was seeing the complexity of human love for the first time in my life, but what struck me even then was how quickly the expression of it was over. What remained afterwards was shyness in both of them and a kind of fear. She said, ‘The boy,’ and detached herself.
    ‘Yes, the boy,’ he said.
    ‘Will you take an egg?’
    ‘If it’s not too much bother. I only came in just to see …’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘To see that it was all right with you and the boy.’
    I think that he stayed then and had a bit of breakfast with us, but I don’t really remember anything else or whether he was still there when the night came.
    (3)
    It was about a week after that evening – or was it two or three or even four (time, unlike at school, flowed by uncounted) – before we saw the Captain again, and the circumstances were a little odd. I had learnt a lot during his absence which I had never learnt at school – how to cook sausages and the way you had to spike them before putting them in the pan, and how to break an egg over the pan to make eggs and bacon. I had also become well acquainted with the baker and the butcher, for my adopted mother would often send me out to do the shopping – she had a strange reluctance to leave the house, though every morning she brought herself to go just as far as the corner to buy a newspaper and then she would come scampering back like a mouse to her hole. I didn’t know why she bought the paper for she couldn’t, in the time which she spent on each one, have read more than the headlines. It is only now I realize that she was expecting every day to read, in large letters, some such headline as Mystery of Missing Schoolboy or Child’s Strange Disappearance, and yet when she had finished with a paper she would hide it deep in the waste-paper basket. Once she explained to me, ‘The Captain is a very tidy man. He doesn’t like old papers littering the place,’ but I feel sure that she was really hiding her fears from him because they would have shown a lack of confidence in his wisdom and that doubt of hers might have hurt his pride.
    For in his own way he was a very proud man and she had become an essential part of his pride – and a part of his timidity too. Love and fear – fear and love – I know now how inextricably they are linked, but they were both beyond my understanding at the age I was then, and how can I be sure that I really understand them even now?
    I was coming out of the baker’s with a loaf of bread at the end of that week – if it was only a week – when I found the Captain waiting for me outside. He put his hand in his pocket and stared at a florin and a shilling piece.