The Dust and the Heat

by Michael Gilbert

  Oliver was staring at the letter but he was thinking of something different.

  “A German,” he said to himself. “No, it must be a coincidence.”

  First Interlude

  Oliver at Home (Radlett)

  I didn’t hear all of this in the car on my way down to Radlett. I got the outline of it from Oliver then and in the course of that evening, and I filled in the details from Dumbo and Challen later on.

  The Nugents were living in a little house on the outskirts of Radlett. Architecturally it was just a box of bricks, and it needed painting. (“There’s plenty of paint to be had,” said Oliver, “but you can’t get anyone to put it on. They’re all busy making fortunes in the building trade.”)

  It was the first time I had met Chrissie, and I fell for her at once. She was no beauty, but she had one of those faces which spells out kindness and calmness and common sense. She spoke tolerable English, but you could never have mistaken her for an Anglo-Saxon.

  “When I first came here,” she said, “I was very much afraid. I had read in books of how people in the first war spat on German governesses and threw poor little dachshunds into ponds, but now people are so tolerant. When they find out that I am Austrian and my first husband fought in the German army, they say – ‘So what?’”

  “It’s Chrissie,” said Oliver, kissing her. “No one could be unkind to her.”

  “Except you,” said Chrissie.

  After dinner she went off to bed and left us a nearly full bottle of whisky and an injunction not to make too much noise when we came up to bed.

  “Partly it was luck,” said Oliver, “partly it was hard work, but mostly it was a matter of swimming with the current. When things are going your way, all you’ve got to do is to avoid making a b.f. of yourself.”

  “What next?” I said. “No, no more for me at the moment.”

  I had learned by hard experience that it was no use trying to keep up with Oliver when he was drinking. If I refused two out of every three I would have some chance of remaining sober.

  “We’ve laid the foundations.” Oliver poured himself a generous tot. “We’ve got decent premises far enough out of London not to cripple us with overheads but not so far out as to give us headaches about delivery. We’ve got enough capital for our immediate requirements – we shall need more if we’re going to expand, though – and we’ve got a first-class transport section.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You’ve got money to buy raw materials, you’ve got floor space to process them and you’ve got a fleet of vans to deliver the finished product. The only point I’m not yet absolutely clear on is what product?”

  “Protomycil,” said Oliver.

  “What the devil is protomycil?”

  “It’s an anaerobic spore.”

  “Come again.”

  “Basically it’s a fungus. Botanically it’s classed as a root because it grows underground.”

  I said, “I should think you’d have a terrific sale for it.”

  “We shall when we’ve done all that has to be done to it.” I wondered if he was going to say any more. He never talked much about his own business, but he was in an expansive mood that evening; or, since he wanted something from me, perhaps he was spreading a little ground bait.

  (What he wanted became apparent later. He wanted me to come in as accountant and secretary to his group. I was very much inclined to say yes. Then a job I had been angling for with a firm of New York investment brokers came up, and I was out of England for the best part of eight years. During that time I occasionally read about Oliver and his doings. As he became well known his photograph appeared from time to time in the financial press, and I used to stare at it with amazement and wonder how deeply the old Oliver was buried inside that increasingly impressive figure. It was a feeling schoolmasters must experience from time to time. One of the reasons I remember that night at Radlett so clearly is because it was the last time I caught a glimpse of the youthful Oliver before it became finally hidden under a carapace of thickening fat and dignity.)

  “Did you hear about that spot of bother we had at Wolfsberg?” he was saying.

  “I heard something about it. Prisoners trying to escape, wasn’t it?”

  “No one tried to escape. It was a rescue attempt. It damned nearly succeeded too. We were running the army cage at Wolfsberg. We weren’t really equipped to do the job, though. You have to have trained men to guard a prison camp properly, and proper equipment, searchlights and miles of barbed wire and all that caper. Fortunately most of our prisoners had no real incentive to get out. Why should they bother? There was nowhere for them to go. They were going to get home just as quickly if they sat tight and let us feed them. All the same, there was a handful of hard cases – SS men mostly. You could tell them. They had their blood group tattooed under their armpits. One of them had tried to slice it off with a razor, I remember, and gave himself blood poisoning in the process and damned nearly died. But, as I say, they were a minority.”

  “How did you keep them in if you hadn’t any barbed wire?”

  “We had just enough to put two strands round the perimeter. I put a Sherman tank on each corner with a spotlight and a machine-gun in the turret.”

  It seemed simple but reasonably effective. I said, “Who tried to rescue whom?”

  “The man they tried to rescue was an Austrian called Kurt Engelbach. He was a doctor, an officer in the German equivalent of the RAMC, a very decent citizen indeed. I was using him as an interpreter and got to know him quite well. He’d spent a year in London finishing off his medical training at St Mary’s. After he qualified he went to Switzerland, to the Rothenstein Clinic, and I gather he’d planned to settle there permanently with his wife, when Hitler ordered him home. That was in 1938 when qualified men were being corralled from all over the place and drafted into the forces. Kurt had to go. His father and mother were still alive, and the authorities would have taken it out of them if he’d said no. But he left his wife behind in Zurich. He seems to have had a pretty interesting sort of war. To start with he was attached to the Luftwaffe and did a lot of work on burned skin. Not skin-grafting. That’s a surgical job. The treatment of skin that was badly burned but still rescuable. After that he went to Russia and had a lot of frostbite cases to deal with. Apparently the treatment is basically the same in both sorts of case. It involves renewing the dead tissue and softening the hardened layers of skin underneath it and encouraging it to grow again. He became rather an expert in this line and was given a good deal of latitude for research. That was when he discovered about protomycil. It’s extracted from these fungi things – they’re like little white mushrooms and there are only about two places in the world where they’ve turned up so far; one’s in Russia and the other’s in the Pont du Gard district in the South of France, and they’re not at all easy to cultivate artificially either. They need just the right soil and irrigation and atmosphere or they shrivel up and die.”

  Oliver helped himself to another drink. I said “No’’ and “What does protomycil do to the skin that makes it so special?”

  “It doesn’t do anything to the skin itself. It activates the capillary terminals just under the skin and brings the blood up inside them. That encourages the skin to grow again. He told me that once, in the early days when they didn’t quite know what quantities to use, they gave a Sergeant in the Tank Corps a sort of permanent, and rather attractive, blush. His men nicknamed him Lilli Marlene. He wasn’t at all pleased about it. However, for a number of reasons which I couldn’t entirely follow, it was decided that it had too many drawbacks to be used medically, so it was shelved. But Kurt was a forward-looking sort of chap. He thought of all the hard-working Hausfraus after the war who’d jump at the chance of rubbing a little into their work-worn hands and restoring their lovely pink-and-white texture, and he worked out a formula for a hand cream with a protomycil base. He got the formula out to his wife in Zurich and she patented it for him in Switzerland.”

  �
��And are you going to tell me that the men who tried to rescue Kurt were pharmaceutical magnates who hoped to nobble his process?”

  “Certainly not. They were SS men. One of them, I’ve every reason to believe, was Kurt’s younger brother, Steyr Engelbach. Kurt told me about Steyr. A rough type, an Austrian Nazi from way back. One of Schusnigg’s boys. He’d spent his war in various Special Service units and was planning, no doubt, to carry on the good work in the Inner Fortress, if that particular scheme of Hitler’s had come to anything, which, of course, it didn’t. He’d decided to rescue Kurt from the cage and take him with him, an idea which didn’t really appeal to Kurt at all. Steyr had two friends with him and they staged the operation one night when I happened to be Orderly Officer and Challen was Orderly Sergeant. We were making a last tour of the Camp before turning in and we saw these four figures making for the wire and starting to climb through. Our sentries, in the tanks at either end of the line, seemed to have gone to sleep. They must have seen them and they weren’t taking a blind bit of notice. I said to Challen, ‘Wake the bastards up’. I jumped up into the turret of the nearest tank, and Challen sprinted for the other one. I had to tread on the sentry. He’d been garrotted. I got the spotlight on. By this time they were all through the wire and running for the wood. I got off a couple of bursts. Challen didn’t have time to fire at all.”

  Oliver refilled his own glass and waved the bottle in my direction. This time I didn’t say no.

  “What was the score?” I said.

  “Kurt and one of the men were dead. The third man was badly wounded. He died that night. He told us all about it before he died. The fourth man, Kurt’s brother Steyr, was hit in the leg, I think, but he got off and got away.”

  “He must have had plenty of guts,” I said.

  “According to Kurt, who talked a lot about his younger brother, Steyr was a remarkable person altogether. A sort of superman. Very tough but very intelligent too. If the truth be told, I think Kurt was afraid of him.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. As the night cooled off a breeze had got up and was rustling the top of the poplar trees at the end of the garden. I was thinking how quickly we had all forgotten the war. Not the facts of the war, but the feeling. The idea that you could cut down three or four men with a squeeze on the trigger and the whole thing would affect you no more than bumping your neighbour’s mudguard as you came out of your drive in the morning.

  “There’s one thing I don’t quite understand,” I said. “The protomycil ointment. The rights on it would go to Kurt’s widow on his death presumably?”

  “That’s right,” said Oliver. “That’s why I married her.”

  Part Two

  Tendresse v. Lucille

  In the spring of that year, the shipbuilding industry of the country was brought to a halt by a three-months dispute over the important question of whether the holes in a material containing alternate layers of wood and metal should be drilled by joiners or metal workers; there were strikes of compositors in London, meat porters in Smithfield and choirboys in Canterbury; the Guillebaud Committee reported and Archbishop Makarios was deported; consumption of wine went up and consumption of beer went down; whisky and gin remained pretty steady; Mr Harry Pollitt unveiled a memorial in Highgate Cemetery to Karl Marx, and Mr Malenkov, on a visit to this country, presented a stick of rock to a small boy in Blackpool. And Quinn & Nicholson Limited held its first Annual General Meeting as a public company.

  2

  “It is customary, I believe,” said Oliver, “for the Chairman’s speech, which has, of course, been circulated to all members, to be taken as read, and I expect that in future years we shall do that. I thought, however, that on the occasion of our first Annual General Meeting as a public company, it would be in order for me to say a few words.”

  He paused for a second to cast an eye over his audience. He was glad that he had chosen the smallest of the three available meeting places. An unexpectedly large number of people had turned up, but they would have been lost in either of the big halls, whereas this one was comfortably crowded.

  He recognized the representatives of the banks and insurance companies, who had come to see how the young Chairman would perform on his first public appearance. In future, and as long as all went well, they wouldn’t bother. A number of private shareholders had turned up too, including the inevitable old lady with a handbag big enough to hold three volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What on earth did she keep in it? Behind them were the reporters, mostly from the financial and city press, but at least one national daily he noticed; and the men in strategic positions near the door, who intended to collar him as soon as the meeting was over and sell him everything from advertising space to typewriter ribbons. Dumbo should deal with them.

  He said, “The year just passed has been a busy one for the Company. The main event was, of course, the public issue of shares last summer. That was the moment when, if I might employ a skiing metaphor, we left the nursery slopes and ventured out on to the hillside. I’ve no doubt that we shall find the going slippery, but I think we shall manage to keep our feet.” (Laughter.)

  The reporter from the city press made a shorthand note. He found Oliver a change from the normal run of Chairmen.

  “Our main selling line has, as in the past five years, been Handcharm. You will see the figures in the reports. It was widely predicted that sales would fall off, but in fact they have continued to expand. The export results have been particularly encouraging. We appear to have hit our European competitors so hard that they have been provoked, as you will have seen from my report, to counteraction. We have been notified of proceedings in the provincial court at Lyon on the grounds that our formula and process is a breach of patent rights held by the Société Anonyme de Pharmaciens de Lyon. Fair enough! When a trader has to fly to the law to help him, it is usually a sign that he has been hit where it hurts – in his purse. I can assure you that these proceedings will be defended, and I am confident that they will be successfully defended.”

  Fergus Campbell stirred uneasily in his chair at the far end of the directors’ table. As an experienced solicitor he distrusted prophecies about the outcome of litigation, even in England, and litigation in France was going to be a great deal worse. Oliver noted the involuntary movement and shot him an amused glance.

  “We do not, of course, rely entirely on one product. We are engaged in untiring research for new products in this fiercely competitive field. The sales of Quinn & Nicholson’s Old-Fashioned Toilet Water and of our new ‘Commando’ toothpaste, are already extremely encouraging. Whilst on the subject of trading, I will mention one point which does not, strictly speaking, concern the year under review. You may have seen in the papers that we have just concluded negotiations to purchase a controlling interest in Sandberg & Freyer. Sandbergs, as some of you will know, is a very old-established firm of colour-printers with works at Hendon. Our stake in this Company had a double object. First, we thought it was a sound way of investing some of the Company’s surplus assets. The other is that it gave us a reliable associate to attend to the packaging and advertising, which forms such an important part of our business. Finally, before I propose the approval of the accounts, I should like to mention that we have been glad to welcome a newcomer to our Board this year. Wilfred Harrap”. He turned to the dark, impassive Ulsterman seated next to Dumbo. “Speaking as an ex-cavalryman, I felt the need of support from the Sappers–” (Laughter) – “to clear away some of the mines which our evilly disposed competitors may have strewn in our path.” (Renewed laughter.) “Wilfred Harrap seemed to me to fill the bill admirably. Since the conclusion of hostilities, he has been working with his family firm in the City, and his experience is, I am sure, going to be of the greatest practical assistance to us in the financing of our various undertakings.” (Scattered applause.)

  Wilfred Harrap rose briefly to his feet, bowed, and sat down again.

  “I now beg to move,” said Oliver “that th
e Directors’ Report and Statement of Accounts for the year ended March 31st last be, and they are hereby approved and adopted, and I will ask my colleague, Mr Nicholson, to second the motion–”

  Brigadier Blackett and Wilfred Harrap shared a taxi on their way from the meeting to luncheon at the United Services Club. They were birds of a feather, soldiers of fortune, ready to carve out, with whatever weapon came most conveniently to hand, an agreeable niche for themselves in the world they lived in. Either of them might have stayed in the army after a successful war, aiming at a Lieutenant-Generalship, a knighthood and a respectable pension; but the peacetime army, as they had been quick to realize, offered no scope to their particular talents. It demanded people who were prepared to work as cogs in a complex machine, and a machine no longer operated from Whitehall but with one of its poles in Versailles and the other in Washington. It needed political soldiers, men adept in the handling of committees, people who could talk to scientists and congressmen and trades union leaders in their own language. The simple, fighting soldier was now as much a myth as the Minotaur. A man who craved excitement, ambuscade and deceit, envelopment and attrition, the risks of defeat and the fruits of victory, could find them more easily in the square mile of the City than in the modern army.

  “Remarkable chap, our Chairman,” said Harrap.