Traitor's Blood

by Reginald Hill

  ‘You know why,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I know about the cancer and all that, but it still surprises me. You’re a hard man, Swift, it’s in your file. But here you are doing something which is a bit soft-centred, sentimental almost.’

  ‘That’s how you view patricide, is it?’

  Again the fingers paused, but only for a second this time.

  Then she said, ‘You’re not really going to kill your father, are you, Swift? This whole bloody thing’s been a waste of time, I’ve thought so from the start. How can a man even contemplate such a thing?’

  ‘You’ve read the files,’ I said sleepily. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘No,’ she said, increasing the length and the pressure of her stroke. ‘You tell me. The files are paper and words, dry and dusty, dead. This is flesh and blood, muscle and tissue, I have beneath me here. I want to hear what it has to say. I like to draw my pictures from life.’

  ‘Is that what you like?’ I said, my face buried deep in the pillow which held the warmth of her head and the scent of her hair. As she slid her hands in their soothing rhythm up and down my spine, I was dimly aware of the movement of her thighs against my haunches. Eventually there would be a time to do something about it, but for the moment nothing seemed better than to lie here.

  Dimly, distantly, almost to myself, I began to talk.

  ‘When I was a boy, I used to think the sun shone out of Pa’s arsehole. Certainly if anyone could have fixed it there, it would have been William, 5th Viscount Bessacarr, “the last of the Renaissance men”, as the popular press liked to call him before they found other less flattering and more contemporary terms. You name it and Billy Bessacarr could do it well. People used to say he needed a dozen lives to achieve his full potential. The truth was, he got his dozen lives, and more. The trouble was, they belonged to other people.

  ‘In the war, for instance, he soon grew tired of being a brilliant backroom boy while amiable nobodies like his old school fag, Percy Nostrand, were commissioned officers on active service. Learning that Percy was concerned with the setting up under the auspices of S.O.E. of an operation behind enemy lines in Jugoslavia, he did not rest till he got in on the act, supposedly as a “scientific observer”—of what, God alone knew. The operation was a total balls-up, and Pa spent the next couple of years running around with the partisans. But if the British have one strength, it’s being able to judge things in terms of individual behaviour rather than by strict tactical standards. Pa emerged from all this as a hero, was awarded a medal and was the universal acclaim of the Press. This huge fiasco became Billy Bessacarr’s triumph instead of S.O.E.’s cock-up. Poor Press! They were never lucky in the long term with their Bessacarr heroes!

  ‘While Pa was in Jugoslavia, I was emerging from my mother’s womb. Mama was Angelica Mercedes Emilia da Madariaga, only child of a wealthy Venezuelan diplomat. It was Uncle Percy who introduced her to Pa and within a fortnight, fast work even for those hectic times, they were married. In those early years with Pa busy saving the world for democracy, Mama had to be the centre of my universe. And the centre of many other people’s too. Everyone adored her. Young, beautiful, rich, she put her shoulder to the British war-wheel with all the energy of the proselyte, but never neglecting me. I don’t suppose I can have many real memories of those years, but I seem to have and they’re all good.

  ‘I didn’t really begin to know Pa till after the war. And even then I knew him not so much as a person as an elemental force, a power, whose absence meant peace and calm but whose presence brought a sometimes rather frightening excitement. We met in bursts. He would come down to Bessacarr House and pull the telephone out of the wall, announcing he wanted an uninterrupted fortnight. He took me camping in Snowdonia and sailing on the Solent and, once the post-war restrictions were lifted, we started spending several weeks each year abroad, particularly in Italy. The Bessacarr men always had a penchant for Latin women and my grandfather had married an Italian girl. They were both now dead, but my great-grandmama, the Contessa Dianti, was still living and spent the summer months at her Campanian villa near Amalfi to which we had an open invitation. She had another grandson besides my father, his cousin, Giulio, but he showed no sign of producing children, so this blond-haired, oliveskinned Bessacarr boy was the last of her family bambini and she would have had me there all year if she could.

  ‘Sometimes I felt as if I wouldn’t have minded. It was there at the Villa Colonna that I was most under my father’s spell. There was an old sailing dinghy moored in the rocky cove at the foot of the cliffs on which the villa was built. It was in essence I think a 15 ft 6 ins Snipe, though what it had been used for in the war years, God alone knows. Pa set about refurbishing it, and though I doubt if the result would have altogether satisfied the I.Y.R.U., it seemed like the most beautiful boat in the world to me. We named it Ariel and I was never so happy as when we were planing across the Bay of Salerno under full sail in a stiff wind.

  ‘I learned my sailing the hard way. In fact with Pa you learned everything the hard way. His technique was to answer questions with questions, to force me to work things out for myself. I think he’d have stopped short of letting me kill myself, but, by Christ, he let me take many a hard knock in the interests of education!

  ‘Back in England, for the most part Mama took over again. I was her boy. She was the one who visited me at school, she the one whom I loved to impress with my developing athletic prowess. Her delight when I won a race or scored a try was complete and undiluted. Pa’s (on the rare occasions he was there) was always accompanied by some question about technique or tactics.

  ‘Pa’s scientific work began to run into trouble in the late ‘forties and the ‘fifties. Basically an ideas man rather than a hard-grafting researcher, his interests ranged wide across the whole physical-chemical gamut. But suddenly he started finding that the old easy access he had enjoyed to people and places in the world of science was being denied him. The trouble was not far to seek. Since the war, more particularly since his time in Jugoslavia and since Hiroshima, he had moved significantly to the left. Not in any specific party sense, not yet. Men like Pa don’t easily belong to parties. Rather, they expect parties to belong to them.

  ‘No, his frequently expressed creed was that shared science benefited all mankind, secret science was merely alchemy and therefore diabolical. Naturally in those neurotic cold war years this meant he rapidly degenerated from being the government’s golden boy to having the kind of security clearance they’d give to Krushchev’s cousin.

  ‘Not that this bothered him for the moment. In the mid-’fifties all his energies were directed into the foundation of the Bessacarr Trust, later to be called Vita 3, the Third World Self-Help Action Group. The aim of science should be to eradicate poverty and privation for the many, not to provide affluence for the few. Vita 3 was registered as a charity, but its aims weren’t charitable, he claimed. The Third World had to find out how to help itself. The Bessacarr Trust would merely provide the tools and the stimulus. It was Pa’s old ‘hard way’ theory of education on a national scale.

  ‘He threw himself into the Trust, heart and soul. This was to be his monument. The name Bessacarr would be a term of honour throughout the world for evermore. Mama and I saw less and less of him. Not that we were lonely. Mama, who grew more beautiful as the years passed, was at the centre of the European social scene. And in case the companionship of my friends at school was not enough, Pa kept on depositing a steady stream of orphaned children at Bessacarr House, picked up from anywhere in the world which happened to have a refugee problem. Two of them became permanent fixtures. One was a Korean girl of about my age whose name we anglicized to Kim; the other was Joe, a Kenyan boy a little younger who had been badly injured in the anti-Mau Mau fighting which killed his parents. Their status in the house was slightly ambiguous, but Kim, who picked up everything very quickly, became a kind of general secretary to my father, while Joe, who was not so sharp but was tremendou
sly strong, helped out in the garden and became rural Hampshire’s first black Teddy Boy.

  ‘In 1960 I went to do my National Service, one of the last conscripts before the system was halted. I was commissioned in the Royal Marines and two years later I emerged a tougher, harder, and more lethal man, but not a very much wiser one.

  ‘But I was wise enough to see that there was now a disturbingly wide rift between my parents created mainly (so it seemed to me) by my father’s obsession with Vita 3.

  ‘Next step for me was three years at Cambridge. Well, that was the theory. I didn’t spend much time working at my books. Sport was the only area in which I could come close to Pa and though that wasn’t my only motivation, I suppose it helped. I got my rugger blue in my first term without difficulty. Fourteen stones of Marine commando was a useful adjunct to any pack. Rowing I couldn’t be bothered with, I wanted my boats to have sails. But I was a pretty fair swimmer. Pa had seen to that after I’d gone overboard once in the Gulf of Salerno and nearly drowned. I was fast and I could keep going for a long time. But it’s a sport you need to work at constantly at the highest competition levels and the training soon became a drag, especially when I realized that, though good, I was never going to be better than in the top ten at my distance. Still I was good enough to be called on at short notice, mainly because I was the only possibility handy, when the English first string went down with ‘flu just before a student international in London. On recorded times, I was due to come in last by a long though not disgraceful distance. But as I was introduced to the crowd before the event, a localized burst of enthusiasm amid the polite but hopeful applause drew my attention.

  ‘Mama was there. God knows how she’d found out and God knows what a hole she’d carved in her busy social life, but there she was, gorgeous as a film star, but with none of a film star’s vanity to be worried about admitting that this hulking twenty-year-old was her son.

  ‘Just what that did to me was hard to say. I’d been feeling pretty much down that summer for all kinds of reasons. I’d failed Part One of my Tripos and didn’t know if I wanted to go back or not (Pa was typically unhelpful). I was planning to spend some time that vacation in the States but there was some hold-up on my visa. Pa’s political profile had clearly been fed into some State Department computer and all his connections were being washed faintly pink. And it hadn’t helped when some organ of the Yellow Press had started dropping hints that he was under investigation by Special Branch. And of course it was a pretty sour summer generally, with the Great British Public pruriently agog for every detail of the Profumo scandal and the whole nasty mess culminating in Stephen Ward’s suicide at the end of July.

  ‘But now Mama simply by her unexpected presence wiped all that away. I amazed myself, the opposition and the selectors by taking an early lead and knocking a vast chunk off my previous best time. When the others realized that I wasn’t coming back to them as expected they came flailing after me, but I kept going, exhausted in everything but spirit, I kept going and won by a fingertip. I heard Mama’s loving applause above all the rest and when I climbed out of the pool, she was there to embrace me, ignoring all official efforts to keep her in her seat. It was a perfect moment. Since then, when I’ve been curious to remember what happiness was, my mind takes me back to that moment. It was a moment of pure joy. And it was the last. But of course no one ever tells you that.

  ‘I went back to Cambridge that autumn determined to give it another try, but I soon began to feel the uselessness of it all once again. I could make no decision, however, but in the end a decision was made for me. Or perhaps I forced it to be made.

  ‘Playing rugger in South Wales one muddy November Saturday, I got tired of having my balls twisted in every scrum and tireder of the ref’s indifference to my protests. Finally I thumped the twister and we left the field together, he broken-jawed, me dismissed for foul play. In Cambridge terms this was a considerable disgrace, but the Welsh bore no grudge, reckoning I’d only done what any one of them would have done but a lot earlier. The night went well. I won a bet that I couldn’t run through the wall of the old wooden pavilion and the team coach left me full of splinters and ale to the Celtic ministrations of my hosts. At four o’clock in the morning we parted with much mutual expression of esteem and affection. Muddy, bloody, and still drunk, I re-entered my college at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, and like a good lapsed Catholic I felt that my first task should be to offer thanksgiving, which I did, sorely testing the Christian charity of the congregation in the college chapel.

  ‘They waited till I was sober before summoning me and sending me down, so it was Monday evening that I climbed aboard the London train for what was probably the last time.

  ‘I felt little regret. In fact, I felt rather pleased that the decision had been irrevocably made. Now I could look at the future squarely. The Army seemed a very real possibility. Alternatively, I knew it would please Pa if I offered to help with the administration of Vita 3. It occurred to me suddenly that what I was really considering as I sat on this train was a choice between going abroad to (probably) help the poor natives or going abroad to (possibly) shoot the buggers. When you’re twenty-one such a choice can be at the same time real and amusing!

  ‘From Liverpool Street I made my way by tube to Oxford Circus and then on foot to our London house in a quiet terrace off Wigmore Street. I had no idea who, if anyone, I would find there and indeed the place seemed deserted as I let myself in. There were signs of habitation downstairs however, and I thought I heard a noise from the next floor. I was about to shout to make my presence known but I didn’t. It was only five o’clock in the afternoon, but at the back end of November already dark. A good time for an ingenious burglar, I thought. To catch such a one in the act would be a bit of a sweetener to the sour draught of my academic disgrace.

  ‘I tiptoed up the stairs. The noise was coming from the master bedroom. The door was narrowly ajar letting out a thin line of dim light. I approached and peered through the crack.

  ‘The noises had told me what to expect. A quick confirmatory glance was all I intended—no lingering voyeurism. I recognized my father’s silvered patrician head at once and for a second expectation overcame actuality and I saw the limbs wrapped round as Mama’s. But almost simultaneously I realized my mistake. Even in the muffled light of the single lamp which illuminated the room I could see the sallow yellowness of that skin, the bluey-blackness of that hair.

  ‘It was Kim who grunted and groaned and rolled and wrestled about the bed with him.

  ‘Another instant reaction, so fleeting I hardly registered it—relief. Yes, for a thin sliver of time I was relieved not to be seeing Mama like this.

  ‘Then the wave of horror and indignation came rolling over me. It carried me down stairs and out of the house. There was no way I could have interrupted them, made my presence known. I wanted to be away, to be out of their reach. I wanted to be with my mother, to offer her comfort for wrongs I prayed to God she did not know she had suffered.

  ‘Christ, what a revolting thing it is to be young!

  ‘I kept on running and did not slow down till I hit the slow-moving sludge of homeward-bound workers in Oxford Street. I drifted with them for a while, finally turning into a pub near the Tottenham Court Road. I don’t know how long I stood at the crowded bar nor how much I drank, but finally the need to talk to Mama became irresistible and I pushed my way to the telephone in the entrance and rang Bessacarr House where I knew she’d had some friends staying for the weekend.

  ‘The news I was given alarmed me. Mama was no longer there. The guests had departed during the course of the day and late that afternoon the last of them, my godfather, Percy Nostrand, had driven her up to town where she expected to be staying a few days.

  ‘Immediately I rang Uncle Percy. He told me that he’d given Mama tea in his apartment but that she had left a little while ago with the intention, so he understood, of going straight to our town house. My agitated manner had a
lerted him to trouble and he started to ask me what was the matter, but I had no time to talk.

  ‘The thought of Mama stumbling upon the sight that I had seen horrified me. Once more I set off at a run, but my limbs felt dull and lifeless as though weighed down with the certainty of impending disaster.

  ‘I wasn’t wrong.

  ‘There were cars outside the house. And an ambulance. A policeman stood at the door but it would have taken more than him and a whole pack of Welshmen besides to bar my entrance.

  ‘My mother lay in the hallway at the foot of the stairs. There were men all around, with cameras, notebooks, fingerprinting equipment. But all I could see was Mama. Her hand gripped the telephone which she had pulled to the ground as she fell. I could see her left profile. The eye stared, the lips were slightly parted, but her expression was her customary one of mild, unmalicious amusement. It did not go with the huge and bloody damage to the side of her skull where fragments of bone gleamed white through the clotted blood and matted tangles of her lustrous black hair.

  ‘The rest is public history. Nothing emerged to contradict the police theory which the newspapers soon felt able to print as proven fact. My mother had caught my father in bed with Kim. Enraged, she had threatened to expose the full extent of his links with the Soviets to Special Branch or the Press, it doesn’t matter. He had pursued her downstairs and in his fury struck her with an eighteenth-century brass crucifix which hung in the hallway. It was found by the body covered with her blood and his fingerprints. He may not have intended to kill her but so violent had been the one blow that it had easily sufficed. Then he and Kim had fled in panic. Ironically, said the papers, Mama’s threat and its consequences had in fact saved my father. The yellow press had got it right. Special Branch officers who had been amassing a file on him for some time were on their way to interview him that very evening. They arrived an hour later armed with powers to enter and search which, when there was no reply, they used.