by Jessica Mann
“It didn’t sound like a ship,” one of the Windows men said. “Still and all, might just be worth—”
Some of the other men were on their way to the lifeboat slip, when Godfrey called, “It isn’t a shipwreck. Look.”
In the distance, towards the Trinder’s end of the island, the sky was smoky and inflamed against the scudding clouds.
“That’s never The Castle on fire.”
John Windows had brought out a tractor, and we climbed onto the trailer, some men clinging to the tractor itself, and chugged off from The Town.
It was not The Castle; it was only the Coastguard Station, disused since the early eighties—“all services must take their share of cuts in the economy”; there had been talk of turning it into a centre for birdwatchers.
The two young men who had been camping nearby were standing wringing their hands in incongruously tidy striped pyjamas. “We only had our billycans,” one said. They were, it seemed, on an initiative testing trip.
The Coastguard Station was an inferno.
“That was quick,” John Yetts said.
“Like when Pedro Barnes died,” Godfrey muttered.
“Like a bloody inferno,” John Windows said.
“Like an explosion,” his brother Fred said. It was John Yetts who found the signature. It had been set on the ground far enough away not to catch a light, a largish plank of driftwood on which was written, in letters made uneven by protruding nails and gobs of oil, the words “Forway Liberation Front.”
Chapter 15
Tamara had been having dinner that evening with Selwyn Paull and Freya Barnes. She listened to their talk of independence, wondering about their motives. Selwyn said the timetable was all going according to plan so far.
Freya nodded. The arrangements with private hospitals were all completed; charter arrangements had been made for freight and passengers. An extremely complicated operation was being carried out, Tamara thought, like a well-organized military manoeuvre.
Selwyn mentioned two more schools with which retainers had been arranged, and he went through a list that he had written in a small leather notebook: cargo ships; suppliers of all soft and hard ware; services and the prices at which they would be available.
“All contingencies provided for,” Freya commented. “Are you impressed, Tamara?”
“If they really are, yes. But what about emergencies?”
“Nothing we can’t manage. It’s not as though we have ever been very dependent on outside help here. Pedro was always convinced this could work.”
“I have seen independence through in too many other places not to know the form,” Selwyn said. “This is just another little blob on the map. No different from the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, Belize, Antigua … easier really. We haven’t any neighbours waiting to grab.”
“Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” Freya quoted. “Pedro always used to say that. ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, first they make mad.’ The British government’s treatment of Forway over the years has been quite mad. Years of neglect …”
“Save that for the press boys, my dear,” Selwyn said.
“Are you planning a press conference?” Tamara asked.
“They will be here, you see, for The Visit. A better story than they ever hoped for. By the way, Freya, did I tell you, we have lined up that Aragon girl in New York; she’s all set to deal with the U.N. It seems she’s quite high up on the New York Times these days.”
“Pedro always said she would go far. But what about other governments? We have always agreed that the announcement has to be everywhere simultaneously. The thing is, Tamara,” Freya explained, “the British government won’t care or dare to use force on us peaceful islanders if the eyes of the world are upon us. So we have to get everyone watching before they have time to pre-empt us.”
“You talk about it so freely though,” Tamara said. “Is this all meant to be a secret from London?”
“I doubt if anyone has heard anything, but they wouldn’t take it seriously if they have,” Selwyn told her.
“They will think it’s more of the same nationalistic talk. They have never taken much notice in Wales, after all, or Scotland, or even Northern Ireland. But nobody mentions it. Those journalists who were here yesterday, Hawker and his friend, they left empty-handed. I know, because he was up here pumping me, full of questions about my past, and my experience, and where I had served, and what I’m up to now, but he hadn’t an inkling. And I didn’t give anything away, I can tell you, I’m too downy an old bird for that.”
“What was he asking you?”
“Oh, you know the kind of thing. A bit about the Council of Forway, a bit about foreign ships putting in, a bit about my own life—had I ever met Blunt and Philby at Cambridge …”
Back in London, Tamara had asked Mr. Black what crime the Forway men could be accused of so long as their independence was only in words and on paper. “They aren’t likely to raise an army or anything,” she had said. But he had reminded her of sedition, and harbouring the queen’s enemies, and conspiring to breach the peace. She tried to imagine Freya in the dock at the Old Bailey and failed. It was all like a game, she thought.
But the noise that shattered the peaceful night was unlike any game. Tamara was under the table before her thoughts had caught up with her body. For a moment she was back in London, and Mike and Rory were dying all over again.
Freya was still sitting in her high-backed chair, though she trembled and was pale. Tamara emerged from her cover, ashamed to have protected herself before the old people. Selwyn had opened the door, and he and Tamara went out into the wind together.
“I thought your independence movement was non-violent?” she said.
“And so it is,” he snapped. “This is nothing to do with us.”
“A bit of private enterprise. But with what end?”
Chapter 16
I arrived back at my father’s house in order to catch the first of the telephone calls. I did not know what the callers’ drift was until the third. Then I ripped the cord from the wall. Some people had had an advance sight of what the Watchman was to publish the next day. Only too soon it would be all over the air waves.
Carl Hawker, the spy catcher, the mole hunter. The liar.
Those who had met him on Forway may not have known what he was famous for. They soon would. He could reel off names of men whose juvenile allegiances or adult treachery he had uncovered and displayed, as though they were his battle honours.
Carl Hawker—the damages payer—too late to save his victim’s reputation. Hawker was no Chapman Pincher. He may have intended to follow in Pincher’s footsteps, but they were creatures of different species. Hawker must have been sued for defamation more often than most journalists, and the reasons I had heard given for his keeping his job were too scurrilous to quote. But he is a pretty young man.
Carl Hawker’s revelations tended to follow a well-mapped course. He would Name Names. Rival organs of the communications media would repeat what he had said, taking care to include quotation marks for self-protection. His victim would go into hiding, brazen it out with denials, or, less often, admit, apologize, and be destroyed. Members of Parliament would ask questions in The House. His victim’s friends would write dignified complaints about witch-hunts to the posh papers. One of Hawker’s stooges would rush into print with an eighty-thousand-word book. The victim’s name would, in most cases, be rapidly forgotten, but his life would be ruined—or his family’s lives: Hawker’s victims were often safely dead.
That was Carl Hawker’s circus. That’s show business.
I had been able to regard Hawker’s activities with light and cynical amusement, superior to human gullibility, until this moment. When the victim was my father, it seemed less funny.
For it seemed that in the next edition of the Watchman, Hawker would publish the suggestion that Selwyn Paull, K.B.E., was under suspicion of having been a member of that Cambridge circle of traitors so many of
whose members Hawker had exposed, making Pincher’s half-dozen into double figures; less reliably, of course.
Cambridge-educated, Cambridge-corrupted, one followed from the other. Guilt by association. My father had been at Trinity College, Cambridge. That much was true. He had never been in the Secret Services, nor in the Foreign Office, and Hawker did not suggest it. Instead, he listed the harm that could have been done to British interests overseas by a disloyal member of its colonial service. He described how someone in Selwyn Paull’s position could have spent his career creating conditions in which the baneful influence of China or Russia would be welcomed by the natives from whom British protection had been withdrawn. The history of Third World politics in the last twenty years made it seem only too plausible. What secrets a man in that position would have been privy to; how useful to our enemies the alienating of those who had been our friends.
I gathered that the piece then asked where this man was now, and having located him on Forway, pinpointed that obscure island’s position on world-shipping routes, in the world oil network, in the general defences of the western world.
Chapter 17
Freya had heard some gossip in The Town. “Do you know what they are saying?” she asked Selwyn Paull.
He said he had no time to listen to idle chit-chat. “You have no idea how many details there are to finalize.”
Tamara had returned to the house to pick up her camera. She waited behind the kitchen door, listening, and loathing herself for doing so. Briefly she wondered whether any civilization was worth defending by uncivilized actions.
“That reporter, Selwyn. Hawkins. Harker. Hawker. You know who I mean.”
“Foolish fellow. He went off empty-handed, I’m glad to say.”
“It’s the things he was saying about you, Selwyn. They aren’t true, are they?”
“Wait a moment, my dear, let me just finish this list. Now then, what isn’t true? What are you talking about?”
Freya’s voice was weak, quavering. Tamara felt sharply indignant that her tranquillity should have been disturbed, ill-founded though it may have been. “Selwyn, they say that Mr. Hawker told them you had been … that you had … I don’t know how to say it …”
“Come on, woman, come along.”
“That you were a traitor. While you were in the colonial service. That you had been in the pay of the enemy.”
“What enemy? I was a marine during the war.”
“Not the Germans. Like Burgess and Maclean … the Russians.” Her voice was very low, as though she could hardly bring herself to express the accusation, but Selwyn Paull’s reply was at full pitch.
“The Russians? In the pay of the Russians? What are you talking about?”
“It’s what they are saying. That you were working for them all the time you were—”
Selwyn Paull believed in the good old-fashioned virtues of self-control, obedience, and discipline. But temper, normally suppressed by will power, was natural to him, and now he gave way to it, so that Tamara wondered whether he would, literally, have an apoplectic fit. She could see Freya’s speckled hand trembling on the arm of the chair. When her voice could be heard through his, she was saying, “I shouldn’t want to carry on if I thought … well, I mean, our independence wasn’t going to be … it wasn’t going to do any harm to England.”
“Freya—”
“It all seemed such a wonderful idea. You persuaded me. You convinced me. But I don’t want to give the Russians a foothold in the Atlantic. Perhaps I have been wrong all along.”
“Freya.” Selwyn drew a chair close to hers and sat down, taking her hand, summoning all his powers of soothing persuasion. “All these years we have been friends, Pedro and you and I. So much we have come through together. All we have experienced together. Are you really going to believe a malicious rumour spread by a tuppenny ha’penny scandalmonger from a Fleet Street rag? Haven’t I deserved something more than that?”
He may never have been in the diplomatic service, but he had winning ways. Tamara found herself able to understand how he had persuaded Freya and the other islanders to be enthusiastic about his schemes; how he had converted them, until Godfrey and Freya at least became more royalist than the king. He managed to calm Freya down. The fact is, as Tamara realized, she was the sort of woman who was lost without a man to lead her, even though she seemed to be, in Mr. Black’s definition, the “front woman.” A leader, presumably Selwyn Paull; and a visionary, Godfrey Lisle; Tamara had identified them all. She was concealed behind the house as the leader and the front woman tottered towards the meeting of their congregation, and in her mind she translated Mr. Black’s list to the blind, the deaf, and the lame.
Chapter 18
The island meeting took place in The Church. I’d been watching out for Tamara. When she slipped in at the back, Godfrey Lisle was on his feet. Godfrey always repeated himself and was hammering home his point that terrorism was in nobody’s interest, when the assembly was transformed by Tamara’s addition to it.
“It isn’t any good to us, it isn’t any good to anyone. It won’t bring us independence, it will destroy our chance of it. It’s unforgivable. It’s monstrous.” He looked disorganized, slightly scatty, unlike the Island Captain, velvet-robed or not, who planned to rival Winston Churchill or the first Elizabeth in his speech-making. “The very last thing we need now, the very last, is violence. It’s the one way to make absolutely certain that we shall never get what we want. Whoever on this island has been trying to help our cause in this lunatic way—”
“Are you sure that the aim was to help our cause?” Thetis Lisle put in.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe there is someone on the island who does not want us to save it.”
“But we all agreed. Everyone on Forway—”
My father interrupted with the authority of experience, and my heart bled for the old man, although all his islanders turned to listen attentively to him. As two members of a family alone, we could be mutually irritated by each other, but I would have given anything to protect him from what I feared was to come. He said, “Let us consider this logically and calmly. Luckily there is no great harm done. Nobody was hurt. The property was abandoned and had no value.”
“It was an ancient monument,” Thetis Lisle said.
“There is that, of course.” My father glanced apologetically towards the back of the room, where Tamara Hoyland was sitting.
“A piece of old Forway,” one of the Windows women said sentimentally.
“There won’t be much of old Forway left if we don’t get our independence,” Godfrey groaned.
“Look.” My father held up his hand for silence again. “As it happens, Sergeant Hicks is away from the island.”
“Bloody funny that is too, while you’re about it,” one of the Windows said. “Just like he’d been poisoned. Groaning and vomiting he was …”
“Anyway,” my father persevered, “there is no proper authority to investigate at present. I don’t think it matters. We can manage without that Coastguard Station.”
“What we can’t do without is the coastguards,” John Yetts muttered.
“When we are independent, we can restore the coastguards,” my father said impatiently. “I can understand that someone thought it was a good place to make a gesture. It’s just that it was such a damn silly gesture. Somebody’s been watching too much television. This isn’t Ireland. The British government would like nothing better than an excuse to send in a peacekeeping force. It’s only so long as we do nothing, absolutely nothing, that they could claim was breaking the law or endangering people or property that their hands are tied. We have to keep the situation so that they lose all international support if they try to suppress us. Blowing things up is just playing into their hands.”
My father already looked as though something in his world had collapsed. So did Freya Barnes.
I marvelled that Forway’s future could matter so much to these two old people. I rem
embered a dictum of George Orwell’s, that it could not be altogether an accident that nationalists of the more extreme and romantic kind tend not to belong to the nation they idealize; like Napoleon, for example, a Corsican, or Hitler, an Austrian. The two major enthusiasts in this room were neither of them natives of Forway. My father had lived all over the world and been involved in affairs of state. And Freya? She too knew more of the world than just Forway. When Pedro Barnes was a professor at Oxford, she had been hostess to scientists and statesmen.
Perhaps this was my father’s, and Freya’s, final fling, their last chance to make a mark on the world. Yet it was the native islanders, the Yettses, Aragons, Windowses, Foggos, and Lisles, who were gambling their homes and capital and livelihood on a cause I thought lost before it had begun. Looking round their self-reliant faces, and remembering pictures of the islanders of St. Kilda when they had to evacuate their lonely home, I almost wished that Forway could win.
“Is the plan still a secret?” John Windows asked. “Has anyone been talking?”
“Not outside the island, surely,” my father said. People were shaking their heads, looking round for betrayers. “All our contacts with suppliers have been in the name of the Forway Trust. There have been no mentions at all of political changes. And there’s nothing on paper. The press releases are under lock and key. Aren’t they, Rik?”
“Nobody has seen them,” Rik Gerson said firmly. “I would know if they’d been disturbed.”
I held up my hand, and my father, who seemed to have taken control of the meeting from the Island Captain, said, “Yes, Magnus?”
“I should have thought word of your U.D.I. plans could easily have got out. You aren’t very cautious about discussing it. I only arrived here this week, and it was no secret from me.”
“We are careful about outside ears. And there are few outsiders to hear this year. Haven’t you noticed that there are no holiday-makers yet? We have refused bookings.”