Mr Campion's War

by Mike Ripley

  ‘Wasn’t actually thinking about the war as such,’ said Guffy, his complexion reddening somewhat, ‘more about that fella de Gaulle. We gave him shelter and succour during the war and then the blighter vetoed us joining the Common Market, not once but twice.’

  ‘General de Gaulle is no longer in power,’ Joseph pointed out, ‘and I am sure it will not be long before Britain joins Europe.’

  ‘Might as well, after all the currency’s going foreign next year.’

  ‘My husband has a bee in his bonnet about the change to decimal currency,’ Mary Randall explained. ‘He’s dreading D-Day next February; regularly says a prayer for the soul of the half-crown and sheds a tear whenever he finds a crumpled ten-shilling note in a jacket pocket.’

  ‘Steady on, old girl, you’re making me sound like an old buffer.’

  ‘But you’re my old buffer, dear,’ Mary said sweetly.

  ‘And don’t worry, I’ll watch what I say about the French from now on.’ Guffy looked around the room. ‘After all, they seem well represented at this do. Who’s that very smart one over there, nattering to your sister?’

  ‘Guffy! It’s the same woman who had your eyes out on stalks during the pre-dinner drinks.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, dear, but who is she?’

  ‘That is Corinne Thibus,’ said Joseph Fleurey, interposing himself in the hope of defusing a family row. ‘She is a prominent lawyer in France with – how would you say it? – a high profile. She appears on television and writes for the national newspapers. She is known as l’avocat de guerre – the lawyer of war.’

  ‘What the devil does that mean?’ asked a genuinely confused Guffy.

  ‘It means she prosecutes war criminals, whatever the war, whenever the crime. More than that, she does not just prosecute them in court, she hunts them down.’

  For a full minute, Mr Augustus Randall’s brain digested this information before he reached for his glass, took a long draught and said: ‘Be a rum do if she was here tonight on business.’

  Rupert Campion, sitting at the corner of the top table, could not help but be aware that his mother and Madame Thibus were, if not locking horns, then at least flexing their feminine muscles and, showing a maturity beyond his years, decided to keep well clear of any potential storm front. Instead, he turned to concentrate on the woman on his left, wondering what he had done to deserve being placed between two formidable Frenchwomen; for, in his limited experience, all Frenchwomen were formidable, especially when they are mistaken for being Spanish.

  ‘My second husband was Spanish,’ Señora Vidal informed him in faltering English. ‘My first was French and I was born French. Husband Number One was killed in the war but soon after I met Husband Number Two. Now he is also dead, but from the cancer of the lungs, not war.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ Rupert sympathized.

  ‘Do not be; it was his choice to smoke the cigarettes so much. That is the trouble with Spaniards: they smoke too much – even more than the French.’

  ‘But you live in Spain?’

  ‘Yes, I have a small business as a couturière in a little town near Pamplona. The ladies of Spain seem to think they are better dressed if dressed by a Frenchwoman, even a Jewish one.’

  Sensing he was being offered a nerve to prod, Rupert wisely changed the subject.

  ‘And is this your first visit to London?’

  ‘It is, and it may be my last, as your weather does not suit my blood. I cannot stand to be cold.’

  Rupert drew on his admittedly limited thespian talents and mugged an expression of shocked surprise. ‘But we have been counting ourselves lucky as the Met Office thinks this could be the warmest May since 1940.’

  Señora Vidal was unimpressed by both his acting and his statistics.

  ‘In 1940,’ she said solemnly, ‘the weather was the least of my concerns.’

  Rupert straightened his face. ‘You must mean the war.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Is that how you know my father?’

  ‘It is, and it is why I have come here tonight.’

  The woman leaned back in her seat to allow a waiter to remove her plate. It was as if, Rupert thought, the interruption had disconnected their conversation; as if she had chosen to hang up on a frustrating phone call. If only to avoid the embarrassed silence which often envelops strangers who find themselves adjacent diners, Rupert persisted.

  ‘Have you been friends since then?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said casually, dabbing her lips with her napkin, ‘we were never friends. I came here out of a sense of … is the word “obligation”?’

  ‘Well, it is certainly a word, but why should you feel obligated to my father?’

  The woman turned her eyes – wide, brown and deeply soulful – on the younger man.

  ‘Because he saved our lives.’

  Several yards as the cruet flew down the table, Precious Aird was finding the younger Vidal female as unforthcoming as Rupert was finding the senior one. In her attempts to be sociable and to strike up a rapport with someone who was not only of the same sex, but roughly the same age group, give or take six or eight years, she thought, Precious was not helped by the overwhelming presence of Mr Magersfontein Lugg, seated solidly at the end of the table, as if he had been left by Horatius to guard the bridge across the Tiber on his own. He appeared impermeable and immovable but not necessarily displeased with his lot.

  Mr Lugg had, over many years, become accustomed to being assigned by Mr Campion to ‘the children’s table’ whenever an occasion demanded mass catering and the marshalling of a youthful population. Whether his substantial physical presence was meant to provide comic relief or inspire fear in the younger generation was never clear, but the usual result was the production of giggles rather than tears.

  Rather than feeling he had been sent into exile, his position at the far end of the right-hand table extension gave Lugg a sense of tactical superiority. From there he could survey all the dinner guests and the meanderings of the waiters in and about them, secure in the knowledge that L. C. Corkran, in the same seat on the other extension, was guarding the left flank, and that Mr Campion was in his clear line of sight. He could, he felt sure, attract Campion’s attention quickly and easily should the need arise, if only by flicking peas in his direction.

  He was closely observing the wine waiters and mentally marking them out of ten, which he regarded as something of a professional responsibility, when he felt the soft tapping of a stockinged foot beating a tattoo on his right shin. His expression remained that of an Easter Island statue, and he waited until a gaggle of waiters swarmed in to remove plates and cutlery before he leaned forward under cover of the symphony of the chinking of china and the clash of metal.

  When his melon-shaped head was within range of Precious Aird’s left ear, he spoke out of one tiny corner of his mouth.

  ‘If you want to play footsie, my dear, you’d best pick on someone your own size. You don’t want my plates o’meat tap-dancing on your ankles.’

  The American girl had known Lugg long enough to know that it was rarely worthwhile asking him to repeat or elucidate on any of his pearls of wisdom, but at least she had his attention.

  ‘You’ve got to help me out here,’ she hissed in reply. ‘My neighbours are really heavy going.’

  ‘Wot? The children not playing nice together? Come on, yer all old enough to drink so yer should know better.’

  Precious exhaled through pouted lips and drummed the painted fingernails of one hand on the white linen tablecloth where her plate had been. Suddenly she decided on her tactics.

  ‘Why, Mr Lugg,’ she said loudly, ‘it really isn’t fair you perched on the wing-tip of this buffet bar with no one of your generation to chat to. How did you get the short straw and end up with all us young ’uns in the kindergarten?’

  Lugg’s massive head turned slowly on its axis, as if he was taking in the room for the first time.

  ‘Just about everyone here�
��s a nipper compared to me. If I was an MP, I’d be the father of the ’ouse, I would. That’s why they put me here, to keep an eye on you young tearaways. It’s my job to break up the food fights, make sure you eat your greens an’ count the spoons after you’ve gone.’

  Despite his air of professional indifference, Lugg had been keeping a close eye on his fellow diners on ‘the kids’ table’ and indeed had been secretly pleased to find himself seated next to Precious Aird, who had proved only a few months before that she could not only ‘look out for ’erself’ (a most useful criterion in Lugg’s book) but also was an enthusiast for British beer and the honourable custom of buying one’s round (vital criteria).

  Next to the American girl was the young Spanish woman, although she did not look particularly Spanish to Lugg. Admittedly only the wearing of a black silk mantilla and holding castanets would have instantly registered ‘Spanish’ in Lugg’s mind, as she was as smartly dressed – ‘Sunday best’, he decided – as any respectable young lady of her age these days which, given what could be seen daily on the streets of London, was something to behold. She was, he guessed, roughly the same age as Mr Campion’s son Rupert, but a more practised female eye might have observed that her two-piece dress suit in pink linen, with its princess line seams and a fitted jacket with wide lapels, shaped waist and matching belt might have, with the addition of a string of fake pearls and some white gloves, been worn by a woman twenty years older. A cynical female mind might have presumed that Señorita Vidal was making a conscious attempt to look as old, if not older, than her mother, and that she was well on the way to succeeding.

  The young man seated next to Prisca Vidal did not seem interested in her fashion sense, deportment, or even her presence, except in the way it prevented him from sneaking frequent and all too obvious sideways glances across her in the direction of Precious Aird’s lap. The reason for his interest was clear, as Precious’ minidress rode up even higher than Carnaby Street had intended every time she made the smallest alteration to her position.

  Lugg did not moralize; it was only-to-be-expected behaviour from a lad who was probably on the verge of being a ‘first-year varsity man’ after a dozen years in all-boys’ schools. As long as he used his knife and fork properly, didn’t get drunk and refrained from saying out loud what he was undoubtedly thinking, then Lugg saw no reason to be heavy-handed and interventionist. In truth, he felt quite sorry for the lad, whose name he had learned from the seating plan was Mr Robert Oncer Smith, although the boy’s provenance and history was unknown to him. He was vaguely aware that he was one of Mr Campion’s waifs, someone Campion had befriended on his travels, but he could not recall when or how. Mr Campion was prone to befriending any number of waifs and strays who would turn up on the doorstep months or even years later, quite often when they got parole.

  Robert Oncer Smith must have thought the evening would be a memorable one the minute he set eyes on Precious Aird; eyes which seemed reluctant to give her more than a minute’s peace. She was, after all, vivacious, attractive, exotically American, and almost exactly the same age as young Mr Smith, so his disappointment could only be imagined when he found himself separated from the object of his desire by the older (not that much older, he considered briefly) and rather prim and starchy figure of Prisca Vidal, who was uninterested in any form of small talk and whose rigid frame prevented him from communicating with Precious Aird, with whom he felt he could quickly establish a rapport. Unable to get the American girl within range of his witty and flirtatious repartee, Master Smith resorted to sulking quietly over his dinner.

  He was sulking so effectively that it seemed almost too much of an effort to push stray peas around his plate, and not once did he catch Lugg’s beady-eyed stare of disapproval. This annoyed Lugg to the extent that he was forced into, for him, the cruel and unusual practice of making small talk, if only to break the uncomfortable silence and stop Precious kicking him under the table.

  ‘Come a long way for this do, have you, miss?’

  Señorita Vidal responded like an automaton, and without lifting her eyes from the table.

  ‘From Madrid. It was a very poor flight; a cheap one, I think, for my mother is cautious with money. It was full of English holidaymakers. Many were drunk and they all carried burros.’

  ‘Donkeys?’ Precious blurted.

  ‘Toy ones, stuffed soft toys. Not real ones,’ Lugg explained. ‘Everyone going to Spain on holiday has to bring one back. No one knows why. That’s a fair trek, miss. How do you come to know the birthday boy?’

  Lugg flicked a glance towards the top table, as if he was heading a cup final goal.

  ‘I do not know him at all. Tonight is the first time I have ever seen him.’

  The woman seemed reluctant to offer any further information.

  ‘I suppose he was a friend of your mother’s then, from’ – Lugg chose his words carefully, always a painful process, before settling on – ‘way back when?’

  ‘They met during the war.’ It was a statement delivered with the maximum neutrality.

  Genuinely pleased that the woman had made some sort of effort to come out of her shell, Precious was keen to keep a conversation going, but Robert Oncer Smith suddenly came to life and interjected: ‘Was it one of Mr C’s wartime adventures? I bet it was. He’s just the sort of chap to have had a good war, I always thought.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a good war, my lad, as I ’ope you never finds out,’ said Lugg, giving him ‘the look’ he usually reserved for waiters who laid out dirty cutlery, landlords who pulled short pints and cab drivers who refused to go south of the river after dark. This time, there was no doubting that young Mr Smith knew he was under scrutiny, but his agony did not last long.

  Lugg’s ever-watchful eye had, when not boring into Master Smith’s face, noticed a movement on the top table. Mr Campion, in something akin to a cross between pantomime and semaphore, was gesticulating with his hands to encourage action of some sort, reinforced by the tapping of a forefinger on the face of his wristwatch.

  ‘Aye aye,’ he said to his young audience, ‘duty calls. Time for me to do me bit.’

  Laboriously and with much wheezing and puffing out of cheeks, Lugg pushed back his chair and levered himself upright, causing a rare expression of surprise to disturb Prisca Vidal’s sculptured visage. It was as if she was observing a South Pacific volcano emerging from the waves and becoming an island.

  Once on his feet, Lugg braced himself and cleared his throat loudly. The rasping, gravel-filled sound was more effective than any High Court judge’s gavel demanding order in the court. ‘Me Lords, Ladies and Hetcetras,’ he began, with a portentousness befitting ill tidings, ‘if we was down the pictures, this would be the intermission but ’ere, among such distinguished company, I ’as to refer to it as the entremets.’

  There was a ripple of giggling and some whispered comments over Lugg’s pronunciation, as if he were giving directions to the centre of a town in north-west France, all of which he ignored.

  ‘Smoking between courses is now frowned upon by all them that believes in ’ealthy livin’, but for them that ’as to, there will be an opportunity to satisfy their cravings in the reception room, where liquid refreshment will be available along with canapés, sweetmeats and dainties. A warning to the unwise, though. Be sure to leave room for pudding and cake!’

  Under cover of the partygoers scraping back their chairs and searching jacket pockets and handbags for cigarette cases and lighters, Amanda saw her chance and leaned across her husband to clamp his left forearm with both hands, as if saving him from going over a cliff.

  ‘Come and mingle with your guests, darling, and give these nice people a rest from your interminable historical meanderings.’

  ‘Oh, please, Amanda, let him keep going. It’s all getting really exciting,’ pleaded Perdita, ‘and showing us a side of Albert we knew nothing about.’

  ‘He’s not breached the Official Secrets Act just yet,’ grinned Charli
e Luke, ‘but I’m keeping an eye on him and have the handcuffs ready in case he does.’

  ‘I was thinking more of the sensibilities of Freiherr von Ringer,’ said Amanda severely. ‘It cannot be comfortable for him, this dredging up of old war stories.’

  To Amanda’s surprise, the German held up his hands, palms out towards her.

  ‘Please do not distress yourself on my account, Lady Amanda, I am far from offended. In fact, I am greatly looking forward to the part of the story where I appear in person. So far I have been something of an “off-stage” character; often referred to but never appearing at the heart of the action. Please do not deny me my big entrance.’

  ‘There you see,’ said Mr Campion, ‘my audience awaits and I cannot disappoint them. I must continue. A good story can’t be stopped, even for entremets.’

  SEVEN

  Hush-Hush

  England, Spain, France. August – September 1942

  Of course, I had a lot more hoops to jump through before I was despatched on my most secret of missions, and the most arduous of them all was keeping things secret from Amanda. Mind you, she was good at keeping secrets from me, so I had absolutely no idea that she was pregnant with young Rupert. Much later she claimed that she had told me, or had dropped innumerable subtle hints which only a deaf-and-dumb drunkard would have missed, making it, as usual, all my fault.

  Once the decision had been taken that I should go to France and make contact with Robert Ringer, I was sent on numerous crash courses. I mean, we couldn’t unleash such a deadly weapon on the enemy as myself unless I was honed to perfection, could we? Consequently, dear old Elsie Corkran insisted that I tootle off to Scotland for training with some very beefy Commando types, who took an inordinate amount of pleasure in teaching me unarmed combat and something they called ‘escape and evasion’ techniques across vast swathes of damp and very prickly heather. They also had a variety of German pistols for me to play with, and a shooting range run by a grizzled corporal called Colgan, who took a particular interest in making sure I would be quickest on the draw when up against a charging Nazi. I’m afraid I disappointed him when it came to the accuracy of my marksmanship. He would tell me to get closer and closer to the target, which was a rather frightening life-size Hun made from cardboard, but was never satisfied that I’d scored a ‘killing hit’ with my borrowed Luger. Eventually he told me my best hope was to get up really close, almost nose-to-nose, and hit the blighter over the head with the gun.