Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  She nodded. ‘Blake’s likes to keep it in the family.’

  ‘Do you think it could have been something else? Have you considered that it might have been suicide? It seems very unlikely, I know.’

  ‘I can’t imagine the conditions in which he would give in to such an impulse,’ she said. ‘But then people are alone, aren’t they, in the end? Aren’t we? James was very fond of quoting Conrad: “We live, as we dream, alone.” I sometimes thought that it cheered him up to think so. He was a lonely man, I think, more so as time went on.’ She took another sip of her sherry. ‘Oh, I don’t know what I think,’ she said with quiet fierceness. ‘This is peacetime, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not at Blake’s, it isn’t.’

  She smiled and went on. ‘One of the ways you can spot people like our visitor Mr Hamer is that there’s a bit of suppressed melodrama about them. Something a bit obvious, once you’ve seen it.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I remember some of the security types from the war. He was one of their tribe. He was perfectly anonymous, as if he’d studied what he should be like. He behaved as if you’d been wasting his time before he’d ever met you.’

  ‘Was he by himself when he called?’

  ‘Apparently. He didn’t bring the Colonel. I sent him on his way. He wasn’t happy, but there wasn’t much he could do, so he mustered his manners and left.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘I could be wrong, but I think so. To be avoided.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that’s the end of it.’ I remembered Smales’s change of approach in the car park at the funeral.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Miss Ormond said. ‘I’d better burn the note, anyway.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was what James requested.’ So I sat and witnessed her burning the letter in the metal waste-bin, then poking the ashes to dust with a ruler. I didn’t mention that a library seemed an odd place to be setting things on fire. I put the envelope back in my briefcase.

  ‘Would you infer from our friend Hamer’s visit that some covert authority might also have an interest in the material?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And that therefore it would be wiser not to enquire into the subject.’ Miss Ormond nodded. ‘Perhaps even to let you put it back in your safe and forget all about it?’

  ‘That might be a sensible thing to do,’ she conceded.

  ‘And what would you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. The right thing, I hope.’

  ‘Which might mean placing friendship before other claims to loyalty.’

  ‘It might.’ After a time, she said, ‘You can hand me back the envelope if you wish. It can go back in the safe. No one need know.’

  ‘I would know it was there, and I’d be bound to wonder. I think it’s out of the box now. I’d better have a look at it. May I return it, if necessary?’

  She nodded.

  I rose to go. Miss Ormond put out a hand to detain me.

  ‘Would you like me to open it here?’ I asked.

  ‘Best not. But will you allow me to refer to another matter?’ Miss Ormond asked. ‘It is connected, in a sense, I think, though I’m not sure how.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She considered for a few moments. ‘I find it very difficult to say this, so I had better just spit it out. You should perhaps be careful of your acquaintanceships.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I found myself bristling. ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Forgive me, Stephen, but I can see you know what I’m referring to.’ She smiled, as though in sympathy.

  ‘And is this general knowledge?’

  ‘I think not; not at the moment. James was aware of it.’

  ‘I see. He didn’t mention it. And how are you involved?’ I asked, aware of a harsher note in my voice.

  ‘James thought highly of you. He was concerned. That is the extent of my interest. I am not trying to interfere, Stephen.’

  ‘I think you can leave it with me,’ I replied. ‘Discretion will be best for everyone.’

  She shook her head. ‘Mine is not in question, I hope.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Ormond. The situation is complicated and difficult. I would rather not say any more.’

  ‘Nor would I ask you to do so. You’re not the first person to be in such a position. And the point is that in this instance you can’t have the sister without the brother.’

  ‘They don’t seem to have much to do with each other,’ I said.

  ‘As far as you know.’

  ‘Do you know better? I don’t want to intrude, but I’m not sure what you’re hinting at.’

  ‘I sound like a gossip, Stephen. I hope I’m not. I hate gossip. I hope you feel that I’m speaking out of concern for you, as James would have wished. There is something I want to tell you, but if you would rather, I can stop.’

  ‘I think you’d better go on.’

  ‘I remember Charles Rackham from a long time ago. We were at university at the same time. In those days he was a historian, as was I. He seemed likely to be a star in his generation. But he had some rather foolish political involvements.’

  ‘One of Mosley’s lot?’

  ‘Rather worse than that, I would say. He was with Joyce for a time after Joyce broke with Mosley.’

  William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, hanged for treason in 1946. That was some heavyweight foolishness. ‘You seem to have followed Rackham with some attention,’ I said.

  ‘It was hard not to. He tended to occupy centre stage even when he invited ostracism. Of course, he wasn’t alone in his view of things. A great many apparently respectable people, some of them quite influential, rather approved of fascism back then. John Amery was hanged shortly after Joyce. His father was a cabinet minister. So was his brother. People tend to forget. Or they affect to do so when the times are unpropitious.’

  ‘And Rackham’s sister?’

  ‘Maggie, yes. A great beauty. Still is. You know she was an art student during the war? When the Slade had moved to Oxford. Pretty good, I think. But dangerous too, in her own way.’

  I bit my tongue.

  ‘Maggie decided she liked the look of my young man, so she took him, and then discarded him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, it was all a long time ago. Love and war and all that. I recovered, as you do. I’m simply offering an illustration of a tendency that seems to have continued. A free spirit, some would call her.’

  ‘I’m not under any illusions,’ I said.

  ‘I hope not. I can tell you know very little about her,’ said Miss Ormond.

  ‘She doesn’t invite personal questions. She’s impatient of all that.’ I am using ignorance as defence, I thought. I’m shallow, shallow as the lid of a biscuit tin.

  ‘Better for her to be a moving target, perhaps. And there’s the husband, of course. Poor man. Him I don’t know.’

  ‘He’s ill.’

  ‘Yes. I wonder why she chose him. Time passing, perhaps. We’re none of us getting any younger, of course.’ Miss Ormond gathered herself again. ‘Maggie tried farming for some years after the war, like a lot of the old BUF people.’

  ‘I don’t think Maggie’s political.’

  ‘Possibly, possibly not. Not in any normal sense. But anyway, she was growing turnips somewhere in the Midlands for a time. Staffordshire, if I remember correctly. In contact with the soil and so on. Or rather, her boyfriends were. She wouldn’t have actually dirtied her hands, not in that way. She was painting. She did have promise at that. And then she was out of sight for some time. I’d more or less forgotten her. Until she reappeared as Mrs Rowan, wife of the Headmaster.’

  ‘You seem to know a great deal.’

  ‘James kept an eye on her brother. He talked about him as a great talent gone to waste. Charles Rackham was one of James’s protégés before the war, of course.’

  ‘That’s news to me.’

  ‘Oh, you’d never have guessed. After the war they were simply co
lleagues, living on terms of professional civility.’ She smiled. ‘But as you know yourself, Blake’s can accommodate all sorts of things. That’s why people come back.’

  ‘The Captain never mentioned it.’

  ‘No need, I dare say. A long time ago, like all the rest of it. James encouraged Charles Rackham. Then it seems there was a parting of the ways, over politics. I didn’t ask for details. Blake’s and discretion, eh? We can be pretty discreet at St Clare’s too.’

  ‘Well, it’s food for thought, Miss Ormond.’

  ‘You need to do more than think, Stephen. You would be wiser to extricate yourself and leave Blake’s as soon as possible. Wherever that woman follows there will be trouble sooner rather than later.’

  ‘And what about the envelope you’ve given me?’

  ‘I said it would be wise for you to leave. I didn’t say it would be easy. I’m sorry not to be of more help.’

  SEVENTEEN

  A few moments later I looked out into the rainy evening street through the glass panel in the doors of the library. There was no one about. I considered returning the envelope to Miss Ormond and walking away, but I couldn’t see myself getting past the end of the street before I had to come back. I went into the phone booth in the foyer and rang Smallbone. When he answered I could hear the television in the background and his mother asking who was calling at this time.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he said.

  ‘Meet me in the Judge and Jury.’

  ‘I suppose I might.’ I heard him tell his mother he’d do the washing up later on. Then a door was closed at his end of the line.

  ‘Half an hour. Bring a bag.’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘You’ll like it, Bone. Wait and see.’

  I went to find Mr Jacks, the caretaker. He was seated in his smoke-filled storeroom under the stairs, reading the evening paper as if nothing had changed in half a century. I asked if he would mind letting me out by the rear entrance since my car was parked behind the building and the rain was worsening. Mr Jacks, whom I had known since prep school, observed affably that a bit of rain shouldn’t bother a big lad like me. I agreed that it was a pathetic performance, that I didn’t know I was born and that it was a disgrace that National Service had been abolished. In exchange for this age-old conversation I got what I wanted.

  There was little traffic on this side of the library and the rain came down steadily. I stood in the doorway for a minute, thinking my precautions absurd, but equally feeling disinclined to abandon them. I made my way through one of the city’s several areas of decayed gentility, through a small park and past the huge white elephant of the Theatre Royal, where a revival of The Ghost Train was being staged. I cut back southwards down the cobbled back lanes past the rear of the brewery and towards the smoke-encrusted law courts. As far as I could tell, no one followed.

  The Judge and Jury was an ancient pub somehow crammed in between solicitors’ offices. It was famous for not admitting women to the bar-room. Even on a wet weeknight it did a reasonable trade, with a mixture of lingering law clerks and beehived, miniskirted secretaries crammed into its many impossible dim brown spaces with their caricatures of dead lawyers and cases full of ancient papery-looking trout and pike. I’d just sat down in the smoke room when Smallbone arrived, shaking his umbrella and brandishing a shopping bag. He got himself a pint and came over.

  ‘So what is it, then? Wanderlust? The lure of the sinful city. We never come in here. Typists, eh? They have nimble fingers. They can do it without looking, so I’ve heard.’ As if by magic, two girls turned to scrutinize Smallbone. One whispered to the other.

  ‘Now, then, ladies. You’ll have to take turns,’ he said. They roared with laughter and turned away.

  ‘You’d be surprised how often it works,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, Bone. I’ve got something I want to give you.’

  ‘You’re being creepy, comrade. What is this, The Avengers?’

  ‘I just need you to hang on to it for me.’

  ‘Is it a mucky book? Did you obtain it postally? Am I implicated in your filthy escapade?’

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘I’m in a bit of an odd situation, I think.’

  ‘And now you want to drag me into it with you. Mr Dillon, my leg hurts. Is this to do with Carson? If it is, I don’t want to know. I told you to keep it simple.’

  ‘I’ll explain when I see you next. But now you’ve got to finish your pint and get back in your van and go home.’ I handed him the envelope. He looked at it doubtfully.

  ‘It’s not very impressive, is it? What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I’m stopping for another.’

  ‘This is barmy, Maxwell.’

  ‘You may be right, Bone, but please just do it. I’ll explain later.’

  He swallowed his pint in one, bowed deeply to the ladies and left, shaking his head, with the envelope in his bag.

  I waited a few minutes. Rather than retrace my steps, I used the other exit via a covered alleyway to bring me out near the marketplace. Cold was coming up the alleys off the river. I went and stood in the doorway of a fish shop. After a few minutes, a bus came. On the upper deck a drunk in a cowboy hat was singing Marty Robbins’s ‘Devil Woman’ to a female companion who refused to look at him. I got off on the far side of Victoria Park and walked along a disused railway line until it joined the tracks near the Narwhal. There was no one much about. The rain had eased and the dark pavement shone in the streetlights. Back on Fernbank I approached the house along the far side of the street, in the darkness under the dripping trees where people parked their cars. The whole place was in darkness. I was the only resident. The ground floor and the attic were both to let. I wondered idly about buying the place if I could raise the deposit, which Carson’s will seemed likely to enable me to do. You had to start somewhere. Would ownership mitigate the loneliness of occupation? But then all this might be academic. I might be gone at any moment into the wide blue yonder of the unemployable.

  I stood in the hallway, listening for a moment before going upstairs. My flat seemed perfectly undisturbed, but I sat for a while in the dark, looking down into the rainy street, which likewise maintained its habitual uneventfulness. The fact that nothing was happening seemed to indicate that something might, without warning or reason. I took out Smales’s card. He had warned me about Hamer and the Colonel. They were, he had implied, a worse kind of trouble than him. Perhaps, but that in itself hardly recommended him as a confidant, given his previous attitude. The only person who could advise me properly was dead. Loneliness overtook me again.

  I drew the curtains and went to bed. I lay reading until the small hours. It was like living during an enormous pause.

  PART THREE

  EIGHTEEN

  I had hoped, for the time being, to commit myself to a programme of intensive routine, so that boredom, celibacy and fear would be mitigated by the sense of a working life’s ordinary tasks being completed: admin, teaching, preparation, marking, the odd staff meeting, overseeing detentions, refereeing a house rugby match made almost unplayable by fog – much to the boys’ amusement. I contacted an estate agent and arranged for them to view Carson’s house. Samuel Feldberg agreed to come and look at the books. I made no contact with Maggie. But my hopes were not to be fulfilled.

  The atmosphere in the school had been marginally subdued by the funeral, but as we know boys are savage and in most cases resilient creatures. The interest of many of them was now absorbed by the prospect of the mock election. Usually this would have been Carson’s project, part of the civic education he tried to maintain. Characteristically, he had made thorough preparations well in advance, and had briefed me about the assistance he would require me to provide. When I spoke to Gammon about the subject now, he made it clear that I was free to continue, that it would be a shame if the tradition were not maintained, but that no else could be spared to help me. I was thus placed in what became a familiar institutional position, being at once oblige
d to do something while made to feel a both a nuisance and an anticipated failure for doing so.

  I called a meeting to identify prospective candidates. A notice was read out in assembly that interested parties were to gather in the History bookroom at lunchtime. When I arrived, a dozen or so sixth formers were waiting in the corridor outside, Feldberg among them. He was there to support the Labour candidate, an amiable classicist called Dent, whose communist father had beggared himself to get his son into Blake’s. In the Conservative cause, Culshaw the boy corporal turned up in his cadet uniform.

  ‘This isn’t a khaki election, Culshaw,’ I said. The others laughed but Culshaw did not understand the reference.

  ‘I just think we need to show where we stand, sir,’ he replied with dignity.

  ‘Fair enough. Who’s the Liberal?’ There was no Liberal. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘under electoral law I nominate Staveley. Seconded?’ Dent’s men sniggered and raised their hands.

  ‘But, sir, I’m a Conservative,’ said the outraged Staveley.

  ‘You’ll hardly notice the difference,’ I said.

  The door opened and Rackham came in, accompanied by a boy called Steerman, a linguist taking Oxbridge entrance, a Rackham protégé, and by Arnesen. Both boys wore cadet uniform.

  ‘Apologies for lateness, Mr Maxwell,’ said Rackham.

  ‘How can we help you, Mr Rackham?’ I asked.

  ‘I think we have another candidate wanting to enter the lists.’ Steerman, sallow and bespectacled, wore a faint smirk. ‘Cometh the hour and so on.’

  ‘I see. Well, Steerman? Arnesen? Who are you meant to be? We’ve got the main parties. If you’d come a minute earlier one of you could have been the Liberal.’

  ‘As far I’m concerned he’s welcome to it,’ said Staveley.