When afterwards she asked him what he had been thinking about, he said simply: ‘Von Papen. Hindenburg has made a great mistake appointing him. He’s as bad as Hitler. Worse, because he’s weak. Not that I expect Hitler to prevail in the long term. Big forces are against him.’
Cynthia had laughed in the darkness. ‘I think I preferred it when you whispered a bit of Hölderlin to me. I hoped you were thinking about love.’
Von F drew in his feet from the open window and showed her the blackened marks where flying smuts from the engine had landed. ‘It felt like a form of firewalking. As to love, I was thinking about it. First we had England pendant. Then Germany subdued. Delicious symmetry, my darling, on a train bound for Southampton.’
Cynthia looked down at the long lean line of him and said with mock severity: ‘Really! You know, Ralphie Treehouse has a point about you. You are incorrigibly German!’
In the early dawn on Southampton dock when Max unexpectedly joined them to wave goodbye, von F was still trying to explain to her that, yes, he was indeed incorrigibly German, but not in the nationalist sense. Simply in the ordinary committed sense that she was hopelessly English. ‘Make her understand.’ Max recalled him saying. ‘I’m simply a patriot who must go home and fight for his country. What would Fowler say to that?’
‘He’d say that you use a soft A in your pronunciation. Fowler reserved that for the adjective “patriotic”. But he doesn’t really mind. Patriot whichever way you look at it is what you are. Whether hard A, or soft A.’
Yes, Max remembered it well. He saw the ship pulling out and he saw Cynthia on the dock. She was waving. And he remembered something about the way that Cynthia had looked at him as if she had a question for him. He knew what the question was but he could not now remember if he had been asked for an answer on that rainy August morning, with the mournful gulls and the ship’s bells. What was he doing there? Max looked back down the narrowing tunnel of time to those tiny figures on the dock in Southampton and tried desperately to remember. Why had he been there?
Now, lying in the darkness of Serenity House, and hearing Major Bobbno leading an attack over the top against the German lines, he could not answer the question. But he remembered Fowler on Patriot/Patriotism. ‘The false quantity’, says Fowler in his magisterial, liberal fashion, ‘is of no importance.’ Of no importance, certainly, to young von F who had been dead now many a year.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Innocenta to the Rescue
Once again Max came home on the arm of Sergeant Pearce. A little discussion of the problems of the fused particle. And about the love-life of William IV.
‘Is it true he had a whole bunch of kids on the wrong side of the blanket?’ Sergeant Pearce piloted Max Montfalcon into St Margaret Drive and the boys leaving school stared at the policeman and the tall thin old man with the blood red tie, the revolving arms and broken shoes, even though the sergeant and his companion were a familiar sight to the boys across the road who never tired of whispering to each other, ‘It’s a fair cop, guv!’ They relished the sight as much as they did the appearance of Beryl the Beard at an upstairs window of Serenity House. They called Sergeant Pearce and his companion ‘the cop and the skeleton’.
‘King William had two by his legal wife, only two, unfortunately,’ Max explained. ‘She was German.’
‘Now who would have thought it! You amaze me, sir. Pukka German?’
‘Through and through,’ Max assured him. ‘Both royal children died in infancy. But he went on to have ten more by his mistress, a comedy actress called Dorothy Jordan.’
‘Bastards, sir.’
‘True. But good English bastards, Sergeant.’
Mr Fox met them at the door of Serenity House. ‘I’ll take delivery of the prisoner, Sergeant. Thank you for your help, as always. What are we going to do about our wanderings, Mr Montfalcon? We really can’t have you disappearing into the blue yonder like this. I have a very awkward time with enquiries from your family.’
‘It’s a free country,’ said Max.
‘They don’t seem to see it that way, Mr Montfalcon. I think I’m going to have to offer you a paging facility. Clip a little box to your belt, and bleep you when family come to call. Then wherever you were you could pop into a phone box and have a word. It’s becoming rather difficult with your son-in-law. He doesn’t seem to think you should be out walking on your own.’
‘In these islands, Mr Fox,’ Max said proudly, ‘we have learnt to fight for our freedom.’
‘In Serenity House’, Mr Fox countered smoothly, ‘we have our freedom without fighting for it. Now, let’s go upstairs. We have a visitor.’
She sat at Max’s table wearing an apricot robe and a purple headdress beaded with small pieces of coloured glass that gave her the look of an Egyptian Pharaoh except that she carried a bulky black plastic handbag.
‘Hello, Grandpa.’
‘Innocenta, go home.’
‘Not until you tell me what’s been going on. Not to put too fine a point on it, you’ve stirred up a great big black cloud, Grandpa. Mummy and Daddy keep talking about Germany. It’s Germany, Germany, Germany! When I think of Germany all I’ve ever thought of up till now is that they’re good at tennis and everybody’s frightened of their money. Are you German, Grandpa? As far as Daddy is concerned you’re about as bad a German as you can get. Second only to Adolf Eichmann. Where do you come from?’
‘Harwich,’ said Max.
‘Yes, I’ve heard about the Harwich claims. Thing is, Grandpa, between you and me, I don’t think Harwich is going to cover it any longer. Did you know that there’s talk of police going to trample round Poland looking for clues to your past?’
‘Poland was a racial haystack. One had to sift through the straw to identify the different ethnic splinters.’
‘Yes. Mummy says you must have been in Poland. She says that when you stayed with her she heard you speaking Polish.’
‘Lizzie’s wrong. I’ve never been in Poland. That was young von F. He did a tour of duty in Poland. He was a young German I knew years ago. Before the war. He served in one of their establishments. I don’t need to go into detail. Suffice to say he never supported their programmes. He resisted the trends.’
‘He was a good German?’ Innocenta asked.
Max hesitated. ‘He was not a bad German.’
‘Let’s have a drink, Grandpa.’
‘Go home, Innocenta. And stay away from me. This is a fight to the death.’
‘Look, I’m really the one who owes you a lot. Without you I might have ended up marrying Nigel. A fate several million times worse than death. You don’t seem to have any glasses. Never mind, we’ll use teacups.’
Lovely, lissome Innocenta, pulling a bottle of whisky from her black bag; lifting her chalk white face anxiously to Max, showing the dark red rouge on her cheekbones, and masses of purple eyeshadow. What a sight for sore eyes. How well she filled the screen, thought Jack in the observation room, down the corridor. Even on the small screen Innocenta dazzled – flaming hair, green eyes. Curved yet taut, Innocenta seemed to the watching Jack to be something he wished to touch. The way Max stroked her shoulder, and Innocenta’s silver lips parted when she spoke: no, there was something in those parted lips which told him she did not so much speak – as sing!
‘If what Daddy says about them coming to get you is true, Grandpa – ’ she stroked his hand as it lay on her shoulder, – ‘you may have to get on your bike. And for that you’ll need some help.’
‘I was a fast mover’, said her grandfather, ‘in my prime.’
As a boy he had been a fine sprinter over the hundred-yard dash. No one at Churtseigh held a candle to him. Even the Bishop of London told him that. He’d approached the Bishop on Palm Sunday and asked a question which had been troubling him: ‘Your Grace, as this is an Anglican school and I am a Lutheran, is it permitted for me to receive Holy Communion?’ ‘What’s the difference?’ The Bishop had asked in his cheery way. ‘Of course yo
u may. The boys say you don’t play rugby.’
‘I think you have to have been born to use the oval ball, Your Grace.’
‘Nonsense. See me after lunch on the rugger pitch.’
And on the rugby field after lunch, tucking his skirt into his belts, the Bishop took the rugby ball and punted it high into the sky.
‘Well done, Your Grace!’ he had cried and the Bishop had wiped his forehead on a large white handkerchief before replying.
‘If I can do it, anyone can do it. Keep up the sprinting. The boys tell me you are very fleet of foot.’
Max should have listened to the Bishop of London and kept it up. It was definitely the sprint at which he had excelled. Not the spurt. Although Fowler allowed that nowadays the two terms were almost interchangable, pointing out that the word ‘sprint’ in modern usage increasingly applies to a race run at high speed. While ‘spurt’ is increasingly confined to a spasm of mental or bodily effort.
He forced his mind to move now in mental spurts. He gave up his mind to getting ahead of the game.
‘There is something you might do, perhaps, Innocenta.’
‘Tell me.’
‘First, a story. About a poor boy who went to market.’
‘Let me guess – to sell his mother’s cow?’
‘Not quite. But close. He didn’t sell his mother’s cow. He traded it for something he thought better.’
‘Jack and the Beanstalk! That’s what it is, isn’t it, Grandpa?’ Innocenta refilled their cups. ‘Tell me the story.’
The point about all such stories, said Max, is that the boy gets the better of the giant. Steals his gold, robs him blind, kills his friends, slaughters the goose that lays the golden eggs, deceives his wife and disrupts his nights. And ends up murdering him. The point about all such stories is that the boy gets away with it. The point about the story, Max told Innocenta, was that, this time, it would be different. Max pointed to the sleek black snouts of the eavesdropping cameras. ‘Who watches the watcher? The thief in the night?’ He stroked her cheek from time to time and said: ‘Thing is to stay close to him, my dear.’ And when Innocenta asked ‘How close?’ Max smiled, ‘As close as you can get.’
And Innocenta saw it as a matter of life and death. Of salvation. Could Max be saved? Her parents, the queen and her reckless consort, had expelled the old man from his home. And she, Innocenta was not going to allow it. ‘Over my dead body,’ muttered Innocenta, and her grandfather said: ‘I don’t think we’ll have to go that far.’
Did he mean it? Did he not think that she would be the bait to his trap? Max asked himself the question coldly. He had watched the way the watcher watched Innocenta. Max loved Innocenta. But he told himself that this was war. ‘You’ll be,’ said Max, ‘my cuckoo in the nest. My eyes and ears.’
And Innocenta thought, yes, after all, she’d been many things, from a vegan to a follower of Sri Chinmoy and taken part in a peace run from Glasgow to Dover. She had been a Raelian and waited night after night on draughty Clapham Common for the arrival of ‘our fathers from space’, and worn the six-pointed star with the swastika in the centre. She had been a friend of the whale. She’d never knowingly abused the ozone. Now, she was a somewhat discontented member of the International Church of Meditation, and she felt further than ever from salvation. Max needed to be saved and she, Innocenta, was jolly well going to do it.
But what would it take to save him? When Max told her she swallowed her surprise and said firmly, ‘If eating Chinese will do it, then eating Chinese it will be, Grandpa.’
Innocenta sighed and stood up.
‘We’re not allowed to drink in here,’ said Max.
‘In that case, I’ll leave you the rest. Here’s something else.’ From her black bag she pulled out a small dark green bottle. ‘This is a protection potion I made for you. It’s got things like salt and myrrh and a pinch of wolfs hair and a speck or two of graveyard dust, some spring water and a sprinkling of iron shavings. Whenever you feel threatened dab some on your wrists and on your forehead. Just use a dab now and then. A little goes a long way.’ She placed it on the table beside the whisky bottle. ‘I’ll be back, Grandpa. Leave it to me.’
For about half an hour after she had left Max sat at the table with his head in his hands. Then he groaned and stretched and got to his feet. He walked to his cupboard and unlocked it. The picture on Jack’s screen was clear, the old man’s gestures slow but decisive. From the cupboard he took a box, it looked like an old cigar box tied in red ribbon. The camera looked down through the skylight, looked down on the top of Max’s grey head. It could swivel, Jack knew that. But swivel he preferred not to do just in case the old man should look up, in case he wised up. But zoom he could and zoom he did, dropping like an eagle on to Max’s wrist, checking over the cigar box, coming in close and clear. Max poured himself another slug of whisky, sat down at his table and very slowly undid the ribbons around the box. What he took from the box the boy at first thought were buttons, or dice, or some kind of candy. But they were heavy, he could see that, he could see it from the way the old man rolled them in his hand, rolled them in the way you did dice, weighted dice, rolled them on the table beneath his forefinger.
Why, tonight, Jack boy, what you see in your camera is a box of very heavy teeth. And what is heavy enough to make teeth roll like that, like dice? Why, only one thing, Jack boy, one thing. Gold! The old man was counting his teeth. He counted them once, he counted them twice. He must have counted them a dozen times, rolling them across the table into neat piles. There were around thirty or perhaps forty, Jack guessed. Little and large, all of them heavy. Though on each count the level of the whisky bottle dropped another inch and Max’s head got lower and lower and his whole body took on the lines of his grief, the agony was in the angle of the head, the way the right hand was thrown across the table, the fingers touching the box, the left arm, like a human dyke, held within its wall showing the red ribbon like a warning – go back! advance no further! – a pile of white and golden trinkets.
As Max had predicted, Jack was in the observation room, glued to the bank of monitors. He was quite unaware of Innocenta’s presence until she said, close by his ear, ‘You must be Jack. My grandfather told me to look out for you.’
And boy, did he jump! He’d seen her leaving Max, and here she was. Magic! She moved quietly as a silent movie, a TV with sound down. All he said was, ‘Yes, ma’am’, and studied her out of the corner of his eye. Red hair, weird robes and funny headgear.
To stay cool he flicked through an assortment of elders. Lady Divina, corners of her sheets knotted in her anxious fingers, watching behind closed lids the inexorable drowning of the Maldive Islands. Major Bobbno reaching for his gas mask as incoming gas shells burst about the trenches. Max asleep, his trinkets cradled in his arms. Just to show her he did this all the time. ‘Serenity House night service,’ said Jack. ‘Lights-out countdown. Sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite. Hey, love your hat.’
Innocenta savoured the compliment. ‘It focuses the rays of the universe.’
‘No shit?’ Jack blinked admiringly.
‘I belong to the International Church of Meditation.’
‘Me,’ said Jack, ‘to the Aardvark Video Club.’
From there it was an easy step to the Green Dragon, Highgate Village, two evenings later, Jack’s night off. Bird’s nest soup followed by lemon chicken, carp with chestnuts. Beef in black bean sauce, plenty of tea, prawn crackers with everything. Toffee apples to finish. Jack in his new white carer’s drill uniform. Innocenta in jet black.
‘Two squares looking for a chessboard,’ said Innocenta and, boy, did Jack laugh. She rather liked his laugh. She stared in fascination at his mismatched eyes. His head reminded her of one of those cheesy rubber erasers. She hoped it was OK to like his laugh. All Max had said when she told him she was eating Chinese was: ‘Play his kind of music, my dear. Stay close.’
He told her about Josh his friend who had hanged himself with the mail
-order gallows.
She told him about Shree Trevor.
Jack said Shree Trevor was ‘a big fake’.
Innocenta said fakes were sometimes better than boring originals. She helped him to read the menu, watching in fascination at the effort the boy made to read the items, his tongue between his teeth, finger stumbling from syllable to syllable.
‘Trevor’s a fake, sure as hell,’ said Jack again. ‘If Trevor isn’t a fake I’ll lick his arse in downtown Orlando on a Sunday.’
‘I don’t think he’s likely to be visiting Orlando,’ said Innocenta sweetly, ‘on Sunday or any other day of the week.’
‘Everybody should visit Orlando.’ Jack turned sullen. ‘I got a place in Orlando. ’Cross the road from Fat Mansy’s “Guns ’n’ Gold”.’
He was a real patriot, Innocenta realised. When they reached the toffee apple stage she asked if he would be going home.
Sure he would. Just as soon as he’d finished his business in London. Back home to his place in Tranquil Pines. He’d draw her a map. On a paper napkin. ‘If you’re ever down that way, be sure and stop by, you hear?’
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