by Simon Raven
'Have you got one?'
'Oh yes. That typist woman of Daddy's used to stamp them for all of us. I suppose she still does.'
'But not for me?'
'Of course not, darling. Unless you gave her yours when we got married?'
'No. As you say, I don't think I've ever had one. No one's ever asked for it before.'
'They don't, unless you take a job.'
'But surely,' said Tom, getting rather worked-up, 'they ought to have sent me one when the whole business started. I mean. I'm a citizen. I'm entitled to a National Insurance Card.'
'Darling, darling Tom,' said Patricia, 'you have such funny ideas about the Welfare State. They don't send you anything. You have to go and apply for it.'
'Well, they must realise after all this time that I haven't got one.'
'Not,' said Patricia, 'if you're a writer who lives in passage. You've never given them a chance to catch up with you.'
'Come to think of it,' said Tom, 'when I was living at Tessie Buttock's, I did have an official letter one day, but I never even saw it. Tessie read it—she read all the letters— and then wrote "Not known at this address" on the envelope and popped it back in the box. She told me about it later. You don't want to be bothered with muck like that, she said.'
Tom. darling,' said Patricia cautiously, 'you do pay income tax?'
'Of course.' said Tom severely. 'It's my plain social duty. Gregory employs an accountant for me and they deduct it from my royalties as they fall due.'
'Well, that's a relief. I wouldn't want you to go to prison. But this other thing—what are you going to tell the BBC?' Tom thought for a moment.
'I'll tell them.' he said, 'that I gave my card to you to get it stamped for me and that Baby went and tore it up. Then they can go ahead and apply for a new one. There's always a simple answer to this sort of nonsense.'
Patricia giggled with sheer love.
'I can't help feeling,' she said, 'that someone will want to be told just a tiny bit more than that'
'Well, dearie,' Maisie said to Fielding, 'you have learnt a thing or two since you've been away. One of those dirty foreign girls, was it?'
'An old acquaintance, as it happens. Someone I met quite by accident.'
'She ought to be ashamed of herself, showing you things like that. Old acquaintance, indeed. You were more than acquainted by the time you got through that little lot.'
'It was rather revealing.'
'Well, I hope you didn't do any revealing,' Maisie said. 'Remember what I told you before. Don't let on what's going on in there.' She scratched the hairs on his chest. 'Not when you're dealing with that kind of person. You never know who'll hear about it next.'
'Not to worry,' Fielding told her. 'We only talked about things which happened a very long time ago.'
'Old acquaintances met again by accident.' Maisie said, 'can be the most dangerous people of all. You start thinking you're young again, like you were when you first knew them, and there's no end to the silliness that goes on.'
'Harmless silliness. And very delightful.'
'That's as may be. Start behaving as though you're young all over again, and the next thing you know you've gone and ruptured a blood vessel ... So you're off back there in a day or two?'
'That's right.'
'Well, you watch out for old acquaintances,' said Maisie; 'particularly if they start teaching you new tricks.'
Angela Tuck, though she had too much sense to mourn long for departed lovers, would often wonder curiously what had become of this one or that. About Fielding Gray, after their brief encounter on Hydra, she pondered the more as there were several unusual items to add spice. These included their somewhat lurid connection in the distant past, the much talked of incident which had taken place while Fielding was boarding the steamer for Athens, and the strong impression she had otherwise received that he and Detterling were up to something on the sly. It also occurred to her, although she was not a book-loving woman, that it might be interesting to read the novels which Fielding had written.
When, therefore, she was passing through Athens a few days later (en route with Max for Cyprus) she called in at the large bookshop off Constitution Square and was impressed to find that all three of Fielding's novels were in stock. (She would have been less impressed had she known that they were the only copies in Greece, having been ordered by an English resident who had since been hurriedly repatriated.) After she and Max had established themselves in Cyprus at the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia, she was faced with two days' solitude (while Max moved hither and thither seeking preliminary reactions to his proposals for a casino on the island) and so had the ideal opportunity for a good, long read. She therefore sought out her glasses, sat down on the English-style terrace overlooking the sea, ordered a bottle of sweet white wine, and then, having in some respects a very tidy nature, examined the three books to find out in what order they had been written and started in on page one of the first.
This she found of little interest. It was, she fancied, rather well written, but it also struck her as being frigid and superior in tone. Furthermore, it was concerned with the exclusively male world of the British Army on active service and came to a climax during an elaborate court martial, a form of proceeding which she regarded as pompous and absurd. As it happened, she had spent much of her own childhood and adolescence in military circles in India with a father who was later court-martialled for embezzlement. but this period of her life, which had ended abruptly with her father's dismissal, she considered as so irrelevant to her more recent destinies that she had scarcely given it a single thought in the last ten years. She was certainly not prepared to revive memories of it now in order to assist her appreciation of Fielding's novel—the scene of which, in any case, was set not in India but in East Africa.
The second book was rather more to her taste. It had to do with a native tribe, which was starving to death because the only food available was forbidden to it for religious reasons, and with the efforts of a young colonial officer, first to overcome the tribe's scruples, then to trick it into eating the prohibited meat. The problem was made real for her and the solution was ingenious; but once again the interest was largely professional, there wasn't a woman in sight, and the writing was so contemptuous of human folly and ignorance that she felt herself, along with all mankind, to have been viciously insulted. After this, she had almost decided not to bother with the third book at all—until a cursory inspection of the blurb made her open her eyes wider than she had opened them in some weeks and sent her back to work with a will.
Fielding Gray's third and most recent novel, published only a few months before, was called Love's Jest Book. As Angela had gathered from her glance at the blurb, the material was autobiographical and was drawn, what was more, from that period of Fielding's life when she herself had first known him: it embraced all the subjects and events which they had discussed on that memorable afternoon in Angela's bed on Hydra, and a great many more besides. Having opened with an account of how the hero (Fielding to the life) had fallen in love at his school with a fair and well-made boy called Alexis, the book went on to relate how Alexis was seduced and then deserted; how he sought consolation, was arrested by the police and was consigned to the care of a psychiatrist; and how finally, after a further and even more brutal exhibition of the Fielding-hero's treachery, he had blown his brains out with his father's revolver.
This was the central story. But there were also several passages about Angela herself, most notably those which described her liaison with the adolescent Somerset Lloyd-James (thinly disguised under the name of William Glyn-Davies) and the part later played by Somerset and herself in bringing about Fielding's exposure and disgrace. All of this Angela found fascinating. From noon until tea-time of the second day of Max's absence she sat on the hotel terrace absorbed in this violently romantic but (as she herself could vouch) substantially true tale of love and betrayal and death; and when she finally closed the book, she felt that Fielding's art
had done justice to his matter.
'Clever.' she mused to herself as she crossed the terrace to go indoors, 'very clever. But it's more than that. He's obsessed. Even now, all these years later, he's obsessed.'
'So,' said Leonard Percival: 'you know where to send to me if you've got any news?'
Percival was seeing Fielding off on the aeroplane from London to Athens.
'American Express, Rome,' said Fielding. 'And if I'm in trouble in Athens, I'm to go to 236a, Philhellene Street.'
'Right. Though for the reasons I've explained to you, I think that from now on any pressures on you will be oblique. Not to be avoided, that is, merely by going to ground in Philhellene Street. Next point You've got your story absolutely straight—the one you're going to use for getting an interview with Grivas?'
'Yes. Whatever be may have heard, I shall say, I've been misunderstood. Despite what happened to me personally during the Cyprus campaign. I'm not after making trouble. I admire his strategy and I want to make a sympathetic study of it ... not only for the BBC but for publication as a book. I shall write to him and say just that the moment I get to Athens.'
'Good. Although he'll have been firmly warned against you, it might just work. Grivas dislikes being bossed about, by Restarick or anyone else, and the idea of meeting a man who fought against him in the field will appeal to the romantic side in him. Old enemies discussing past battles over a drink—like a scene from John Buchan. Grivas is quite innocent enough, quite old-fashioned enough to go for the idea.'
'And if he doesn't?'
Then you'll have to consider ways and means of breaking in on him, and either charming him or forcing him into giving you a hearing.'
'If it comes to that, I'll need help.'
'If it comes to that, you shall have it.'
Fielding's flight was called on the loud-speaker.
Time to take wing,' said Percival: 'don't fly too near the sun.'
Earle Restarick, dressed in black silk pyjamas and a white silk scarf, was drinking coffee in the sitting-room of a villa above Bellapaix. The villa, which had once been a small monastery, could only be reached by a mule-track. From where Restarick sat, he looked straight along the track, which descended a gentle slope for about quarter of a mile and then dipped sharply out of sight down the hill-side. Restarick's eye, taking off from this point like a ski-jumper, hovered in the sky a moment and then dropped towards the Abbey of Bellapaix, hovered again, and then swept down through the foot-hills to the fort by Kyrenia harbour. He gave a long sigh of pleasure and turned unwillingly to the Greek Cypriot who was standing beside him.
'And then?' Restarick said.
'And then he told me to take him to Buffavento. At Buffavento he looked round and ate his lunch and told me to take him back again. Just another day's sight-seeing. The next morning I took him to Nicosia airport, where he caught the plane for Londino.'
'Had he told you before that he was leaving?'
'He never told me anything. Only where to drive him. Otherwise he hardly spoke.'
'But he was polite?' said Restarick.
'Yes.'
'And generous with his tips?'
'Yes'—reluctantly.
'Then you have nothing to complain of.'
'Except that he regarded me as just a part of the taxi. An important part, but otherwise no different from the rest of if.'
'The English,' said Restarick, 'like to pay their own way and keep their own council. They do not understand that those whom they are paying expect to be treated as equals.' 'But you Americans are different.' said the Cypriot in a flurry of sycophancy; 'you believe in human brotherhood.'
There is nevertheless a lot to be said.' remarked Restarick, 'for the English point of view. Here is your money.'
The Cypriot counted it carefully.
'But this morning,' he said. 'I have been away from my taxi. And now I must walk back down that accursed mule-track. All that time it takes, kyrios, all that time.'
'If you snivel like that,' said Restarick, 'even we Americans will find it hard to regard you as a brother.'
The man held out two hands towards him, but Restarick left his chair and walked out of the room without paying any further attention. He went down a passage and turned into a small study. At a desk by the window, which looked straight into the hill-side as it rose from the back of |he villa, a stocky man with close-cut hair was fiddling with the insides of a short-range radio transmitter. Behind him, against one wall, was a much bigger one, and fastened to the wall beside it a large-scale map of the island.
'I've just checked by telephone with Athens,' the stocky man said. 'Gray arrived by plane from London last night.'
'Thank you, Savidis. And I've been talking with that taxi-driver. He insists that Gray merely went sight-seeing here in Cyprus and then just left. If he drew a blank here, why should he be returning to Athens?'
Savidis shrugged.
'The BBC are paying him well. Perhaps he's persuaded them to let him have another try.'
'But why did he go back to London at all? The BBC didn't send for him.'
Savidis shrugged again.
'We must assume,' said Restarick, 'that he's on to something, something big enough to take him back to London for advice. Since he's been in touch with Leonard Percival, that's only too likely to be true. I've no idea how much Leonard knows, but he must know something, and the bastard's out to do us down. We've been squeezing the English service out of Europe and the Near East for years now, and even where they're still in the game nine times out of ten we've been first to find the honey-pot. But if they could get us publicly discredited over Cyprus, Washington might get nervous and call off some of our other Mediterranean activities, and then Percival and his buddies would have a fair chance to get back their old influence in their old stamping grounds.'
'Can England still afford that sort of influence?'
'I wouldn't know. What I do know is that the British Government doesn't want any revelations about Cyprus because it doesn't want anyone to realise that we've made a fool of it, and it's therefore instructed Percival's branch, very firmly, to forget the whole affair. But that won't stop Percival's bosses—with their greedy eyes on our territory— if they can see a way round. And what better way round than using this man Gray to do the dirty work and dish it all up on television? That way, Leonard and his crowd would get everything they wanted—and they could tell their Government in London that they'd obeyed their instructions and kept out of it themselves. Go and complain to the BBC, they could say; it's this BBC man who's come out with it all, no good blaming us.'
'All right,' said Savidis. 'It fits. So what do we do?
'We hope,' said Restarick, 'that the British authorities will keep a sharp eye on the BBC and stop Gray broadcasting anything which either they or we wouldn't like.'
'But we can't rely on this. We never could. Which is why it was decided to kill Gray at the very beginning—just in case, we said.'
'Only both attempts were unfortunately bungled by your fellow-countrymen.'
'I've been a naturalised American,' said Savidis, 'for twenty-five years. I agree in advance with anything you may care to say about the incompetence both of Greeks in general and of Cypriot Greeks in particular. Let us now revert to my point, which is simply this: if there was good enough reason to get rid of Gray “just in case'' before he even arrived here, there is far, far better reason now that he's apparently getting hot.'
'Granted,' said Restarick, removing his scarf as he spoke; 'the only trouble is that it's now too late.'
'Surely not.'
'From the moment he arrived in Cyprus it was too late. Once he was here, the connection would have been too obvious. We all agreed about that.'
'I know. But he's not in Cyprus now, he's in Athens.'
'Meanwhile he's been back to London.' Restarick said. He refolded his scarf and started to ease it back round his neck and under his pyjama collar. 'He's reported to the BBC on his progress, which means, very
probably, that he's had something to say about us. If we kill him now—whether in Athens or Timbuktu—his death will at once be imputed to us and his discoveries to date will get all the publicity Percival could ever have dreamed of.'
'If Gray had proper proof,' said Savidis, 'he wouldn't have needed to come back. Since he hasn't got proper proof, he cannot have told the BBC anything definite about us, and therefore nothing definite can come out after his death. Provided it occurs now.'
'Enough would come out to compel us to keep very quiet while the fuss was dying down. We're a long way from being finished here and we can't afford that kind of delay. No,' said Restarick, making a final adjustment to his scarf; 'Fielding Gray stays alive.'
'And dangerous.'
'Yes,' mused Restarick. 'Dangerous because intelligent. Dangerous because inquisitive. How does one stop a man being intelligent and inquisitive without actually killing him? Always an amusing problem.'
He examined the map on the wall and sang a little song to himself, a song that had been popular just after the war.
'Though its only a cardboard moon,' he sang,
'Sailing over a painted sea.
Though it's only make-believe ...
... Di-dee, di-dee, di-dee.'
'Forgotten the last line?' said Savidis.
'Yes. But the first three will suffice for our purpose. The Widow Tuck,' he said, swinging round on his companion. 'She's come here from Hydra with de Freville, we hear, and they're staying at the Dome Hotel down in Kyrenia?'
'Right But what's she got to do with it?'
'The sailor folk on Hydra report that while Gray was there she spent a very long afternoon in bed with him.'
'Ah. I see,' said Savidis sarcastically. 'We send the woman Tuck off to Athens, and tell her to go to bed with Major Gray and never let him get up? Until he dies of fornication, maybe?'
'For all your twenty-five years as an American citizen,' Restarick said, 'you still think like a Balkan peasant.'