Some confused perception of the finality of his contempt – for Primo, for me, for everyone; maybe even for himself? – gave me the courage of anger.
‘If I get out of here—’ Why had I said that? I would get out of there. They weren’t going to kill me. ‘When I get out of here, I’ll talk. Even if you take me back to the police, I’ll tell them.’
Somebody would listen.
‘Tell them what?’ Brond asked. He watched me expectantly, and that puzzling anticipation chilled my anger.
‘About Muldoon,’ I said hesitantly. ‘You can’t do – what you did to him – not in this country.’
‘Nothing else?’ Brond wondered. ‘Isn’t there something else you want to tell them?’ I shook my head in denial. ‘Muldoon’s not really very interesting,’ he went on. ‘We knew about him, of course. His whole family is up to its unwashed neck in Irish Republicanism of one stripe or another. His father was interned during the war and has spent most of the last fifteen years enjoying Her Majesty’s same brand of hospitality. We suspected there might be a bigger fish, but never got near to thinking it was Kennedy. Michael Dart!’ He tasted the name appreciatively. ‘Oh, he was good. He knew that hiding wasn’t a matter of putting on a false moustache. You have to put on a false life. He lied to the world. If he was a sleeper, he was one of the best. There’s a price, though, for living in ambush behind your eyes. That little wife didn’t know who he was. But who is he? He’s her husband Kennedy night and day, and Michael Dart for an hour a month – perhaps not so much. Or he’s not Kennedy at all except as an actor – not even when he’s holding her in his arms. Michael Dart all the time and always pretending. I think that would be hard to do. In the end, who was he? . . . I find that interesting.’
Suddenly, as he finished, he came round the desk towards me. Despite his limp, he moved very rapidly and I shrank away from him in my seat. Bending above me, however, he slid open the file drawer and began to rummage inside. ‘That, yes, interesting,’ he said, as if to himself, groping at the back of the drawer. ‘Muldoon, no. Muldoon now is a dead letter. You’ll have to do better if you want to tell a tale. Isn’t there something else you want to tell?’
I saw a bridge in bright sunlight and a boy scrabbling to draw himself up to the parapet.
‘Eh?’ Brond said, touching me on the shoulder. ‘Something else?’
‘No!’ I cried too emphatically. ‘Just Muldoon. There wasn’t anything else.’
He had taken a box from the drawer and now, turning away from me with a look of disappointment, plucked out a fat white chocolate which he popped into his mouth. Muscles in his plump jowls writhed as he smacked upon it. ‘I almost forgot I’d left these on my last visit. Fresh cream, but it’s cold here and so they keep.’
If he had offered me one, I would have refused it. He didn’t offer. Instead, reaching with the hand that held the chocolate box, he caught up one of the papers scattered on the desk. As it dangled, held between his third and little finger, I saw that it was the newspaper clipping about the trial of the Republicans or radicals or revolutionaries – whatever they were, Scottish certainly.
‘What do you make of this then?’ he asked, flicking it at me. ‘You read it while you were waiting?’ I nodded warily. ‘Trust a student, of course. And?’
What country do you think you’re in? Primo had asked me.
‘Is he— is Primo one of them?’ I gestured at the clipping.
‘Primo,’ he savoured the name, amused again by it. ‘Yes . . . I don’t think he’d refuse that as a description. Modify it perhaps here and there. They always fall into factions, these people.’
How much contempt he had in him; and I remembered that Professor Gracemount had been a spy and that Brond was his friend; and I wondered if a spy always despised his victims. It was an insight I did not want, but the thoughts ran through my mind too fast for me to control. Because I was afraid he would read them in my face, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head: ‘But you said he was a soldier. You said he ran away to be a soldier.’
‘All the way to Malaya,’ Brond said seriously, ‘and did splendidly. Most white men couldn’t stay in the jungle for more than a few weeks, but he had a platoon of blacks – come from Africa to fight the Chinese. I expect they were keen on the Empire too, you see. With his platoon, he would stay in until he couldn’t get to sleep because his bones were sticking into the ground. Then they would include rum in the parachute drops – and he drank that until he could sleep. He really was a hero.’
‘He’s a funny kind of hero now,’ I said, glancing towards the door and thinking of what he had done to Muldoon.
‘A good soldier is an instrument,’ Brond said solemnly. ‘I imagine then he tortured some little yellow men in pyjamas – it’s the kind of thing good soldiers have to do. He is a good man, and he took no pleasure in what he had to do through there. I suppose it’s difficult for your generation to appreciate a sense of duty.’ He paused and I suddenly reheard his last sentence as if it had been some kind of impersonation. Something must have shown in my face for his voice changed. The words were still serious but his voice was different. ‘He is a dedicated man. To lose your only son and in a stupid, pointless accident. That’s cruel.’
He widened his eyes compassionately, but the voice kept that altered, inappropriate note.
‘Tragic,’ he said. ‘And so unnecessary – that’s what is hard. The child was playing on a bridge. And he fell.’
FIFTEEN
‘Yorkshire cock. 9 inches plus.’
I sat on the toilet seat reading the legend on the tiles. I could never remember what the sizes should be – and, of course, the average worrier about such things typically overlooked the phenomenon of foreshortening. Anyway, now we were in Europe was it not time our graffiti went metric?
Below the legend there was a drawing of something that looked like a length of limp hosepipe. Tucked under it were two pendulous moons that to me resembled women’s breasts. I congratulated myself on another proof of my heterosexuality – of such things as much evidence as possible is comforting.
On the hosepipe was printed, ‘Anybody want it?’ And there again – nine inches after all – while the answer might be yes, the practical problems would have to be faced: supposing I did manage to cut it off him, how would I manage to attach it to myself?
The ambience of the occasion engendered reflection in those areas – philosophy, linguistics, symbolic logic, that kind of thing. Why I was there was a different matter and a speculation I had suppressed along with so much else. From the moment Brond had come over the latest hill like the cavalry, I had surrendered myself into his hands. Now – despite flashes of terror like lights thrown into a darkened room – I floated with events as if he were my protector, my best wishes safe at his heart. It was inexplicable, but I rested in my darkened room rather than searching for doors to escape by or a window to see from – the survival instinct had ebbed low, or perhaps that was the way it served me.
We were at a party given to celebrate the last night of an Open University Summer School. The School was being held in a university near the city. After the mansion house and Muldoon’s ordeal, we had got back into the car and driven away. Behind us in the house we must have left Muldoon – conscious I hoped. I told myself it was stupid to be afraid that he might not be alive.
I was in favour because of the company I was keeping.
‘Professor Gracemount has been a good friend to the University,’ said a bald little man who had been introduced as a Professor of something. ‘He pulled strings for us in the early days when we were establishing ourselves, worrying about buildings – we have to be guests in so many places – and how our courses would be judged by the conventional institutions. It was our good fortune to have friends then. Now our units are purchased in colleges and universities in the United States,’ he gave what one of those units might have described as a self-deprecatory laugh, ‘Canada, Australia, New Zealand, several of the new Af
rican states as well as here at home in England . . . I suppose I should say,’ another laugh, ‘ “here in Britain.” ’
‘North Britain,’ Brond said, with a wink at me as if to share the joke.
‘People don’t,’ Professor Gracemount said, sniffing impatiently – was there a hint of evil-smelling cheese in the air? – ‘sensible people don’t fuss about that any more. If they ever did! I imagine sensible people must always have been concerned with substance rather than shadow. Problems of war and peace, economic problems, problems of social organisation. Good God! when Carlyle defined the Condition of England Question, he wasn’t interrupted by some fools piping up, “Britain please, Condition of Britain, if you please!” If he had been, I can imagine the short shrift they would have been given. Carlyle surpassed the parochial. I don’t think he would have tolerated his countrymen confining him as a Question to the Condition of Ecclefechan. And how much less that narrowness of vision is tolerable now, when we’re in the midst of the last of the wars of religion – Communism and Capitalism in conflict – and any smaller thought’s impossible.’
I was surprised by the energy he put into this, sounding at the end even poetic. I had thought he went in for languor rather than excitement, but then, apart from that one evening at his house, I had only encountered him before as a lecturer.
‘You divide the world so neatly,’ Brond said, ‘it sounds dull. Boredom may become the main motive for committing treason.’
‘Betrayal,’ the bald little Professor said in a North of England twang, ‘won’t wash for the old reasons that moved Quisling or Pétain or even von Stauffenberg. The only music we’ll pay attention to is that played by the “Rote Kapelle” – a tune that made us dance when it was Germans betraying Hitler – but that set our teeth on edge when Nunn May, Maclean, Burgess, Philby and the rest, came under the baton of the Great Heresiarch . . . Karl Marx, you see,’ he added in an aside for my benefit, who visibly hadn’t seen. ‘It’s possible to reject their actions without denying them idealism.’
‘We know where your sympathies lie,’ Brond said with a pale smile in the tone of someone indulging a child.
‘I am a Man of the Left,’ the little pedantic Professor said, turning his head towards a bray of horse-laughter from a group of students by the bar. ‘The Irish contigent,’ he explained, ‘they’re with us this week.’
‘The land of Sir Roger Casement,’ Brond said, ‘speaking of traitors.’
‘He sinned against the British Empire,’ the little Professor said, mouthing the phrase with distaste, ‘another religion, mighty and immoveable – but it passed like a dream between one night and the next morning’s awakening.’
‘Not entirely passed,’ Brond said cheerfully. ‘I had a friend who tortured little yellow men in Malaya for the Empire. And another who killed a child that had stumbled on some dangerous information – sense of duty, you see.’
‘That’s not duty as they understood it in the heyday of the British Empire,’ the little Professor said. ‘It’s trumpets and brass blaring over a secret longing for defeat. It’s wallowing in post-imperial vomit.’
I think he was trying to be rude, but he could not manage the effortless offensiveness better bred Britons brewed at preparatory school as a distillation of seven-year-old homesickness.
Distilled essences of Celtic sorrow, blended or malt, were equally hard to come by that evening – two litre bottles of Italian wine, beer, martini and unobtrusive sherries making up the booze scene. There seemed, however, to be a general resolution to shift as much of it as was humanly possible.
‘Ever heard,’ I asked, ‘about the old Italian peasant who was dying? “Gather round my sons.” So they gather round. “All-a my life, I make the wine. I teach you to make the wine. Now I am dying. We make a big-a fortune from the wine. Now I tell you my last-a secret. How to make-a the wine from grapes.” And all the boys fell back in astonishment from the bed, and then the oldest son says, “Poppa. You mean you can make it from that as well?” ’
‘I love the way you Scots talk,’ she said. ‘Say something else.’
We were sitting on the floor. She was a big girl with a strong face that had something in it to draw me across the room to her.
‘Don’t laugh at my funny accent,’ I said, ‘and I won’t laugh at yours. Where are you from?’
‘London. What do you mean “accent”?’
‘ “Maybe it’s because you’re a Londoner . . .” ’ I crooned to her.
‘But I don’t talk like a Cockney,’ she said. ‘I talk like ordinary people who sound as if they don’t come from anywhere. My mother has an accent, though – that’s why I wondered.’
‘Your mother?’
‘We came from Hungary. My mother and brother and me. I was only a baby. My brother was shot in the hand. He’s a lot older than me, and until then all he had wanted out of life was to be a violinist. After he was shot, he couldn’t bend his hand.’
‘That was the Russians?’
‘Yes. It was the second time my mother had left Hungary. She left before to get away from the Germans. This time it was the Russians. I don’t remember any of it. But my older brother can’t play the violin. If you could believe my mother, he was a child prodigy.’
‘That’s the thing about great disasters. Each one is a mosaic of personal tragedies.’
I was very solemn. I really liked her and her long strong face, her brown Jewish eyes and her long legs curled under the wide skirt that suddenly looked Hungarian. I could have wept for her brother. I had a desire to stroke her face and talk to her in some private place; something sparked between us and the feeling was not only mine. I really liked her.
A squat red-faced man half stood on me. Instead of apologising, he glared down, a tumbler in each hand.
‘You want to keep your legs in!’ he snarled in a thick brogue.
‘Talking of accents, a boy from the bogs,’ I said.
‘He’s a nasty bit of work,’ she said looking after him. ‘Rosemary – you know Rosemary – said that he walked her back after a lecture she’d given. He was carrying her books and he tried to touch her up. When she stopped him, he threw her books down. She told him to pick them up and he walked away. But next morning he came and apologised and said he hoped it wouldn’t prejudice her against his work. He’d been so smarmy to her before that I’d thought it was sickening – like a kid at school sucking up to the teacher.’
‘ “Servile when you must, insolent when you may.” ’
‘Who is?’
‘That’s what Liam O’Flaherty’s Liverpool landlady wrote to him – “You are like all your race, servile when you must, insolent when you may.” ’
‘Seems rather harsh.’
‘Understandable. He had preferred fleeing as a fugitive from the British army to staying in hiding with her and having to marry her daughter.’
‘They’re a funny crowd the Irish.’
‘Like the Hungarians. You’ve been too long among the English.’
‘Here! – I am English. So’s my husband.’
‘So was O’Flaherty’s landlady. It’s a small world.’
By that time, it didn’t matter too much what we were saying. I was sensitive to everything about her, her eyes and the way one arm took her weight as she leaned towards me. Discreetly, we fed off a shared excitement.
‘Why don’t we go somewhere private?’ I suggested. ‘Have a drink away from all this racket.’
The Irishman who had offended Rosemary was at the centre of a group just in front of us. The group was laughing at or with him.
‘I’d like that. Shall I bring this?’ She held up her glass of red wine.
‘No problem.’ I reached under the chair and eased out the bottle I’d hidden there earlier. ‘Best wine on the table. I liberated it just after I arrived.’
‘What would happen if everyone did that?’
‘I expect some of them have. Old Scots custom. Necessary foresight of a small nation kept poor by
a maniac imperialist next door.’
‘Sad,’ she said mockingly.
‘Don’t cry over my history and I won’t cry over yours.’
We climbed to our feet and stood swaying gently and smiling at one another.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Is your room in the main building?’
‘I don’t have one. I’m a visitor.’
‘Be my guest.’
At the door Primo materialised.
‘You have to stay here.’
She looked at me as if I had grown horns.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Nobody.’ I half turned from her and muttered desperately, ‘Look. We’re going outside . . . you know. We’ll be back. No funny ideas. Brond said it – where would I go?’
He looked at me impassively.
‘Back inside.’
‘What is this?’ She touched my arm. ‘Are you coming or not?’
I shrugged.
‘No – it doesn’t look as though I am.’
‘My God!’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve been stood up but . . . Oh, God!’
To my embarrassment, she looked hurt more than angry. As I shuffled, she gave a shiver and turned back inside. She stood looking at the bright room and then swung round and pushed past us. She vanished into the lengths of the corridor.
‘She thinks you’re my boy friend,’ I said to Primo.
He didn’t react. The idea was too silly to touch him.
‘No, not you,’ I said. ‘Not the Scottish soldier. Jesus! Has nobody told you? There’s no Empire any more and all the Chinks are colonising the restaurants.’
‘I don’t go for that Empire stuff. I’ve seen through all of that,’ he said. ‘But you don’t listen, do you?’
‘Here!’ I shoved the bottle of wine at him. Reflexively, his big hand closed round it. ‘A present. Stick it up your kilt!’
The Irishman was still being the life and soul of the party. Brond was on the edge of the group listening with a little smile.
Brond Page 17