‘Nor do shoes and dead mice.’
‘You’ve lost me, sir.’
‘You are not the only victim of Jack’s practical jokes. I fear he is what the Germans call an ‘elf king’ … a mischievous spirit. We’d call him ‘Puck’. Last week I found a dead mouse in one of my brogues. Bert was upset, rather thought he’d let the side down … hadn’t been doing his job properly. Do you like the lad?’
‘He has a way with him, sir … heaven help the women when he’s older.’
‘When he played one of his practical jokes on Phyllis … she laughed.’
‘I’m not calling you a liar, sir, but I find that difficult to believe … if you take my meaning, sir.’
‘I do, Tom, I do, but, you said yourself, ‘he has a way with him’. It has been my experience of public life, Tom, that if people like you, well, you can get away with murder. And boys will be boys, don’t you think? Now to answer your question, “Will it come to war?”.’ He pointed at the snails in his palm. ‘They’re like Hitler, don’t you think? Wherever they go they leave a trail of slime. Hitler’s trail is strewn with brutal murders … the snails with damaged melons. It’s no good telling them to stop eating melons and eat weeds, is it?’
‘Snails don’t have ears, or if they do they’re full of wax … that’s my experience of snails, sir.’
‘In that case my answer to your question is, yes, it will come to war.’
‘Let me do the honours, sir.’
Sir Charles dropped the snails into the gardener’s calloused palm.
‘It’s like cracking walnuts, sir, shell against shell, it’s easy.’
‘Now, let’s have some fun,’ said Sir Charles. ‘Where do you think young Jack might be hiding?’
‘I know exactly where the little blighter is … behind the rhododendron bush over there. He thinks he knows all the hiding places but so do I.’
‘Do you think we should water the rhododendron?’
‘I’ll get the hosepipe.’
Jack knew he’d been rumbled. There was nothing to water in the direction that Egg Head (Sir Charles had a bald head) and Tom were heading. He had to be the target. Also, they were both whistling as if they’d not a care in the world. They had a lot to learn. On the streets of Berlin they would be dead ducks.
When spray battered the rhododendron’s leaves he was in Phyllis’s kitchen tucking into a bowl of strawberries and cream.
2
Harry, Sir Charles and Lady Elizabeth’s nephew, flew the Puss Moth he owned to an aerodrome some fifteen miles from The Hall. The three-seater de Havilland monoplane had a good turn of speed. His ownership of it made him the envy of all but the richest of his fellow undergraduates. It was his good luck that his father, one of Sir Charles’s younger brothers, had married an American heiress. The plane was a gift from an aunt on the other side of the pond. She thought his English accent the best thing since buttermilk came in tins. In any coming conflict he intended to be a fighter pilot. As a privileged young man he’d already logged ten hours on ‘Spits’, the abbreviation used by his clique when they talked about the Spitfire, the RAF’s most up to date fighter. He loved the sense of power it gave him. It never crossed his mind that in a real conflict he might get hurt.
Mike met him at the aerodrome. For as long as Harry could remember the big gamekeeper had been as much a part of his uncle’s estate as its lakes and trees. In his youth he’d been won over by the man’s easy going ways. Now that he was older he found him too familiar. It rankled that he kept calling him ‘Young Harry’. Damn it, he was nineteen. The fellow’s ‘hale fellow well met’ pats on the back were blows. They made one bristle. More to the point they were out of place coming from a servant.
At Oxford there was talk about a new-fangled idea called the ‘Unconscious’. An altogether unsettling idea because it said a chap did things for reasons he knew nothing about. You married a brunette because your mother was a brunette, that sort of thing. ‘Impulses’ and ‘drives’ the psychoanalysts called them, laid down in early life. On the drive to The Hall in the Rolls he pondered the question … to what extent was his attitude towards Mike the product of the ‘Shooting Party’ incident?
At the age of thirteen he’d dropped his gun in the Hall’s lake. It never occurred to him that a servant wouldn’t get it out. Mike had told him, in no uncertain terms, ‘You dropped it in the water, you get it out.’ How stern Uncle Charles had looked, so changed from the kind Uncle Charles who’d given him piggy-back rides.
‘It’s for your own good,’ said Mike. Snow was falling. He was told to strip to his underpants. The water was brown. It came up to his waist. He located the gun with his feet. To get hold of it he had to go right under. It took him three tries. Afterwards he remembered how well he’d been looked after, each man in the party volunteering an item of clothing. He was ordered to swig from a hip flask. ‘Warm you better than a hot water bottle,’ said Mike. ‘And here’s my ulster.’ It was an hour’s walk back to The Hall.
Now that he was older he knew why they’d made him do it. And, while it was true that on subsequent shoots he’d never again dropped his gun, he thought making him responsible for correcting his carelessness had not made him more careful. He also thought a servant should have gone into the water. Further, and this was something he tried to push to the back of his mind, he did not like to think his uncle and Mike had seen his fear … all in all he did not care for the unconscious mind.
The journey to The Hall usually took forty minutes. They arrived in thirty.
‘There you are, Young Harry, didn’t I tell you I’d have you here before you could say, Jack Robinson … hop out and don’t forget your bag.’
‘You drive too fast.’
‘I thought you air force chaps were used to speed.’
‘A Rolls-Royce is not an aeroplane.’
‘I told Charlie I’d get you here in time for lunch and I have.’
‘I take it, by “Charlie” you mean my uncle, Sir Charles?’
‘You’re not in uniform, Harry and I’m not on parade. Hop out, there’s a good lad and don’t forget your bag.’
‘Lovely to see you, sir,’ said Bert, coming out of The Hall’s front door to bid him welcome the way a servant should. Harry liked Bert. Bert knew his place.
‘Thank you, Bert.’
‘Allow me.’ He took Harry’s bag. ‘The family are in the library, sir.’
Uncle Charles greeted him with a firm handshake, Aunt Elizabeth with kisses and a hug that made him aware of the pneumatic qualities of her ample bosom.
‘And you are in time for lunch,’ said Sir Charles. ‘Mike said he would get you here on time. A good man, Mike …one of the best.’
3
In the Tyne estuary the Nord stopped rocking; passengers who’d spent the voyage vomiting into sick bags began to feel that, maybe after all, they were not going to die.
The appearance on deck of these convalescents led Marigold to ponder the recuperative powers of the man who’d tried to steal Byker-Harrison’s note. Doyle? If the crossing had been a calm one would she now be dead? More than likely dumped over the side. Which of the Hitler Youth were the Irishman’s accomplices? She made a point of not standing too close to railings, to look around before she descended stairs, to be always with other passengers. She spent a lot of time looking at men’s ears.
They docked within sight of Newcastle’s iconic Tyne Bridge. Having been to Australia and seen the Sydney Harbour Bridge she thought this version a dinky toy replica. She was, however, much taken with the castle. Its position at the top of a steep bank made it appear to grow out of the roofs of properties built lower down, while those in turn appeared to grow out of the roofs of properties even lower down. In other words, a bricks and mortar version of the English class system. She’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if the properties at the bottom weren’t slums.
/> There were lots of bridges, all offering different engineering solutions to the problem of getting people, cars, and trains over a river flowing between high banks. Ships hooted, kittiwakes shrieked. The air tasted of smoke. A stink of rotten eggs. A paddlewheel tugboat, cumulus clouds of smoke belching from its stack, thrashed its way seawards. A place of rude energy. It reminded her of New York. She liked it.
In a surge of emotion, all defiance against a pervasive sense of threat, she gave in to the ‘feeling’ that the city was bidding her welcome, that here, no matter what, she’d be safe. Her great grandmother hailed from the area. Family stories related how, for hundreds of years, the Greys – her great-grandmother’s maiden name – had controlled, in the names of various English monarchs, a swath of east Northumberland. They were a reiver family, one of the ‘names’ living on the border between Scotland and England. She believed Sir Charles, whose guest she’d be in a few days’ time, to be a distant relative.
While she waited for a porter to collect her bags she crossed her fingers, hoping she might see Byker-Harrison. Her gut instinct was that she wouldn’t. She didn’t. OK, so the guy was feeding the fishes. The Germans had taken his arm off him, the Irish Republicans, his life, or so it would seem.
At the first opportunity she’d phone the American embassy in London and tell them his story. What they did with the information was up to them.
In the meantime, she did her best to rein in her understandable desire to look at men’s ears in too obvious a way. She wished she were wearing something summery. Newcastle was hot. She watched the Hitler Youth disembark.
Each young Nazi pushed a bicycle. Panniers behind the bicycles’ seats carried what looked like bedding wrapped in a waterproof sheet. They were singing. She liked the way they used their bicycle bells as percussion. Their master in Berlin would be proud of them.
‘Taxi, miss?’
‘That would be great.’
‘You sound American?’
‘That’s because I am.’
‘Around here they call me the Pied Piper … you’ll be wanting to know why? When I tell my customers, ‘follow me’, they always do, that’s why.’
A stocky, broad shouldered man, he carried her bags down the gangway as if they were baubles. She knew about the Tyneside accent from family fireside stories …how the natives said ‘hyem’ for ‘home’ and ‘ganin’ for ‘going’, how it had similarities with modern Norwegian, how all Geordies thought they were Vikings. From the porter’s few words she guessed he wasn’t local.
On the quayside a man was holding a piece of cardboard with her name on it. Durham University had sent her a taxi.
‘Here you are, Cinderella, this will take you to the Ball, ’said the Pied Piper.
‘My taxi is over there.’
‘No, Miss, this is your taxi. Let me tell you something, the Pied Piper is never wrong. Now, be a good colleen and sit your bum on that seat. You wouldn’t be wanting your blood on the cobbles, would you?’
The Irish accent, the hint that he had a gun in his pocket, the firm grip he’d taken of her arm, left her no alternative but to do as she was told. His intimacy was intolerable. The man in the driver’s seat had a funny ear. She began to struggle.
‘Let go of my arm.’
‘We’ve a fighting filly here, Mr Doyle.’
‘What about my bags? You can’t leave them on the quayside.’
‘Darling, you won’t be needing them where you’re going.’
The blarney from the ape gripping her arm left her unimpressed. There was a Boston Brahmin she knew who talked just like that. He’d tried to grope her. To hide the black eye she’d given him he’d worn dark glasses for six months.
Railway trucks, horse drawn wagons and warehouses spewing cargo made it impossible for her kidnappers to do, what in the movies is called ‘a quick get-away’. Now the Hitler Youth blocked their way.
Goddamit, she was the daughter of a millionaire. Back home a servant ran her bath, checked the water temperature before she stepped in, hot towels awaited her exit. She was an American citizen. She was a professor. She’d lectured at Yale and Harvard. She was a confidante of the President of the United States of America. Her sense of invulnerability took a lot of denting.
‘Do you men know who I am? And you, take your hands off me … goddam Irish ape.’
‘Shut her up,’ ordered Doyle.
The blow made her bite her lip so hard she tasted blood.
She was vaguely aware that Doyle was greeting the Hitler Youth, as if they were old friends.
‘Heil Hitler! It is you, Herr Doyle.’
They were speaking German but, though a fluent speaker of that language, panic left her incapable of eavesdropping.
Without conscious thought her hand flew to the hat pin she used as an ancillary fastening for her dollar shaped diamond brooch. She took hold of its pearl head as if it were a dagger, eased it free, and, with all her strength, plunged it, as if it WERE a dagger, into the Pied Piper’s crotch.
She left the car with the Irish thug looking between his spread legs as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. Nice girls weren’t supposed to do things like that.
Which way to run? A horse and cart blocked one route, the Hitler Youth another and then, of course, there was the river. She’d no wish to escape by jumping into that water. She took the only option available to her. She ran down the quayside towards the Tyne Bridge.
4
‘I give cook ten out of ten for the salmon and minted new potatoes,’ Sir Charles told his wife at the end of lunch. ‘Phyllis may be a dragon … you know how she cooks, Harry? She breathes fire … never uses the gas. Only one complaint, my dear, on a day like today we should have eaten outside on the terrace.’
‘Charles, Northumberland is not the south of France.’
‘It is today.’
‘There’s always a breeze. You know the flies bother me. Why they attack me and leave you alone I will never understand.’
‘India, my dear, turned my skin to leather. At least let’s have coffee on the terrace. What do you say, Harry? Or tea, I always have tea.’
‘Sounds spot on to me.’
‘In that case I’ll leave you gentlemen to talk. I know you have much to discuss. I’ve no doubt you’ll want to smoke. In the house, Harry, I sometimes think your uncle’s pipe should have its own chimney … a dirty masculine habit.’
In the garden Sir Charles sniffed a rose. ‘It’s all this talk about war, you know,’ he explained to his nephew, ‘it’s making your aunt, well, tetchy. She worries about what I’m getting up to.’
‘How much does she know?’
‘She is my confidante, but I don’t tell her everything. No point in worrying the dear thing unnecessarily.’
‘Does she know my visit here is more than social?’
‘Yes and I suspect that is another reason why she was complaining about my pipe. Your presence here has reminded her of the nasty things happening in Europe. If Elizabeth had her way she’d build the highest of high walls round the estate. She likes to think she can shut out Hitler with a few bricks. Of course she knows she can’t but, on a day like today, I do sympathise with her point of view.’
‘What do you make of Hitler, Uncle Charles? My view is that the man’s a thug … look what he did to Rohm and his followers.’
‘The Night of the Long Knives?’
‘Cold blooded murder. You can’t talk to a man like that. If he does that to his fellow Germans, what might he do to us?’
‘Make us wear lederhosen.’
‘It’s not funny, Uncle Charles. The situation is grave. How can you joke about it?’
‘In the Great War I used to say my tin hat protected my head, but my sense of humour kept me sane … take the advice of an old man.’
‘You’re not that old.’
‘As far as soldiering goes I am. If the worst happens and, God forbid, we are again at war with Germany, His Majesty’s Government will not be asking me to bear arms.’
‘You are still active in the TA.’
‘The Territorial Army is full of old officers like me. If war is declared we will have to be got rid of … at the very least put behind desks. Oh, yes, we mean well, our hearts are made of oak and all that silly nonsense, but we are weekend soldiers. We are amateurs. The German army is a professional army. The amateur is no match for the professional. Take my watercolours … they please me but they can never be hung on the same wall as Turner’s.’
‘They say Hitler paints?’
‘When I was in Berlin I saw some of his work … very mediocre.’
‘Are yours better?’
‘Much …not like me to blow my own trumpet so you can guess how bad I thought them.’
‘Have you met Hitler?’
‘Twice, first time was at an embassy party … didn’t take to him at all … sort of chap who uses his knife to shovel peas into his mouth. Second time was at a Reichstag party to celebrate his forty-sixth birthday. The champagne was excellent. He gave Anthony and Sir John a public lecture … more of a screaming rant, actually … on why the Versailles Treaty had humiliated Germany.’
‘Will it come to war?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s an unambiguous answer for a diplomat.’
‘My answer is unambiguous because I have seen at first hand the spell he has cast over the German people. They see him as a kind of Messiah.’
‘He’s certainly not the Jews’ messiah.’
‘His treatment of the Jews is appalling. Yet the German people treat him in ways one can imagine the Jews treating their messiah should he ever materialise. The fervour and passion he arouses is difficult for an Englishman to grasp. Of course, not every German is a fan. Those who are open in their criticism are sent to concentration camps or taken away in the middle of the night and shot. I’ve heard terrible stories. Tea? It’s Darjeeling … the prince of teas, don’t you know.’
Spies on Bikes Page 4