In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

  He said, ‘Mary, you won’t leave me, will you?’

  Her laugh was uncertain. ‘Because you’re in trouble with the Customs?’

  He let go her hand. ‘No. For any reason.’ He made a quick, exasperated movement of his hand. ‘I know I’m a bit of a flop. I don’t know how it happened, but I am.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ she said automatically. She smiled, wanting to console him as she would have consoled Martin for some childish disappointment. ‘What do you expect after all? To be king of the world?’

  ‘No. But I’d like to think things were opening out instead of closing in. I’d like to be a good husband for you.’ He looked away from her. ‘I’m not, y’know. We’ve never talked about it, have we? I’m not even a good lover.’ She put her hand on his arm but he shook it off almost roughly. ‘D’you think I don’t know?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s no need to talk about it now.’ The idea filled her with a deep, shrinking reluctance that amounted almost to horror. ‘People talk about sex far too much. It’s not so important.’

  He gave her a long, unhappy look. ‘I wish I could be sure of that.’ He hesitated. ‘I love you. I ought to say it more often.’

  ‘There’s no need to.’ She found herself wishing that he hadn’t said it now; it seemed to put her under such a terrible obligation.

  ‘You’re fond of me, aren’t you?’

  ‘I love you,’ she said almost sternly, thinking: how simple it is to say this, how simple almost to believe it, to slip into the treacherous bog of easy, sentimental affection. But to think like that was in itself a kind of dishonesty, she told herself. She did love him. It was only that to say so seemed stagey and embarrassing and somehow too formal, like offering condolences on a bereavement.

  ‘Good,’ he said. His expression lightened and he smiled as if he had just disposed of some small niggling matter that had been troubling him. He fetched two glasses out of the cupboard and took the whisky from her.

  She watched him, busy with the lemon peel and noticed, for the first time, that there was grey in his hair. She said, suddenly more touched by this than by anything that had gone before, ‘Try not to worry about this business. I’m sure it isn’t as bad as you think. But perhaps you ought to get hold of Rudge in the morning.’

  He lifted the glass to his lips and frowned, seeming to concentrate on nothing more than the taste of the drink.

  ‘I don’t think I need bother Rudge. Certainly not until Julian’s back and we know exactly where we stand.’

  ‘You mean, you want to know first what sort of story Julian is likely to cook up?’

  His frown deepened. ‘Well—yes. Not to put too fine a point upon it. If what Coker said has any kind of truth at all, it looks as if Julian has got himself into a slightly tricky situation. I don’t want to put anything on record that might make things worse for him.’

  She said impatiently, ‘I wasn’t thinking of Julian.’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t think you have to worry about me. But I’ll have a word with Charles if it makes you any happier. Not immediately—sometime in the next day or two. I’d like to have a chance to sort it out myself, if I can. Out of pride, if you like.’ He looked at her, then took hold of both her hands and held them tight. ‘Don’t worry. Please.’

  She smiled uneasily. ‘All right.’

  ‘All right,’ Joseph said. ‘I’ll tell you what I can. It’s a confidential matter, you understand.’ He rubbed one side of his theatrical nose and looked slyly at his nephew. ‘And of course it may have nothing to do with your friend’s case at all.’

  Charles looked at the pattern of sunlight streaming palely across his uncle’s desk. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I hope it hasn’t.’

  ‘I hope not, too. It is the sort of thing that makes all good businessmen uncomfortable.’ Joseph smiled, a broad, monkeyish grin that made an odd contrast with the dark, liquid tragedy of his eyes. ‘This man, Theodore Kranz, is a ships-broker—a cargo wouldn’t be his concern in the normal way. But he was in on this particular deal, my friend guessed—the word had gone round, you see, and this particular deal had a bad smell.’

  He looked thoughtfully at Charles. ‘Now—let’s see the sort of thing that could happen. You can get a lot for copper since the restrictions were lifted, particularly if you can sell it to the people who want it badly. The question is how to get it there—the physical question, you understand, Charlie, not the moral one. If you get an export licence for the Commonwealth the normal thing would be to send it by cargo liner—one of the big lines. You don’t charter a ship for two or three parcels of copper, that would cost a fortune in ballast. For Pakistan or Australia, that is. But to send to Antwerp—that wouldn’t be so expensive. Naturally, there would be the small matter of defrauding the Customs.’ He sighed regretfully. ‘There would have to be double sets of papers, double charter parties and false bills of lading, one for Customs in London who think the cargo is going to Calcutta, say, or wherever the export licence so kindly issued by the Board of Trade allows it to go, and one for Customs in Antwerp. And for that you need complacent chartering brokers, you see.…’

  ‘And the ship’s captain?’

  Joseph shrugged his shoulders. ‘He may be innocent or not. You can telegraph him once he has left port and instruct him to change course.’

  Charles laughed. It was the only thing that had made him laugh in a long morning. ‘You seem to have got the process pretty well taped for an honest man.’

  Joseph grinned. ‘There aren’t many men who never think of the money they might make if they weren’t so honest.’

  ‘Is there any proof—about this man Kranz—apart from your friend’s sensitive nose?’

  The faintest shade of disapproval was visible on his uncle’s face. ‘Now Charlie—was that a question to ask? If I knew, would I tell you? How could I have proof anyway?’ He stroked his nose. ‘Kranz works for a firm of chartering brokers, very respectable. My friend mentioned certain suspicions to the director. A word or two over lunch one day. I think Mr. Kranz will lose his job quite soon.’

  ‘I see. Did he charter a ship from you?’

  The tragic eyes widened. ‘Ah—so you’re concerned for my reputation, are you, Charlie? No, he didn’t. That’s a straight answer. But if you’ll take an old man’s advice, you won’t go round asking too many straight questions. Various people are rather sensitive at the moment. Searching their consciences or their files, which comes to the same thing in the end. With this rumpus blowing up.…’ Joseph stopped and looked as if he could have bitten off his tongue.

  Though the room was hot as an orchid house—Joseph always kept the heating on full blast and never opened a window—Charles felt suddenly cold.

  ‘Then it wasn’t just a hypothetical case you were putting to me?’

  Joseph shook his head slowly and sadly. ‘I never had much imagination, Charlie.’

  Charles said haltingly, ‘Suppose I put a hypothetical case to you. If you had been involved in something of this kind, what would you do?’

  Joseph laughed shortly. ‘Get out fast.’

  ‘And if you’d been innocently involved?’

  ‘Is that possible?’ He looked almost shyly at Charles. ‘All right, if you say so.…’ His voice died away, he gave his shoulders the slightest shrug.

  ‘It is possible,’ Charles said. He hoped this was true. With all his heart, he discovered, he hoped this was true. And he believed it must be. Johnny must be innocent, he had never in his life done a mean or dishonest thing. Then Charles’s mind stopped abruptly at the thought that of all the illusions, the ones you have about the idols of your youth are always the last to go. He looked up to meet his uncle’s eyes, dark, poignantly sad, and felt sick—physically sick as if he had just been kicked in the stomach or faced with some hideous betrayal.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charles, I’m being a rotten host,’ Johnny said. The thought shot him to his feet out of his wing chair like a s
tarter’s pistol. ‘What would you liker There’s some tolerable port, or Irish whiskey. We’re out of Scotch, I’m afraid. I’m terribly sorry.’

  He hovered behind the table, a conscientiously distraught host, as if there was nothing else on his mind at all.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ Charles said.

  He looked, not at Johnny, but at the sofa table which was a little too low for serving drinks from if you were standing up, and too high if you were sitting down. It had slender, curving legs and elegant claw and ball feet on brass castors. Just behind it, against the wall, was a small walnut knee-hole desk that had been made around 1790, he remembered Johnny once telling him, for a lady’s boudoir. When you lifted the lid, the interior was fitted as a combination of desk and dressing-table, neatly and carefully contrived. There were even two silver inkstands, the glass wells black with dried ink.

  It struck Charles that the room held too many beautiful things whose useful function had been expended long ago. They gave the flat a peculiar quality of oppressiveness—a kind of museum airlessness. He remembered Mary had said it was like living in an antique shop and looked at her for almost the first time that evening. She was sitting straight in her chair, her legs neatly together, hands clasped in her lap like a good child at Sunday School. She met his eyes briefly and looked away.

  Johnny said, ‘Well, anyway—I got hold of Julian in the end. It took most of yesterday morning. He was there all right, in his hotel, simply fast asleep. The old boy must have been whooping it up the night before. And he wasn’t in very good shape when I did get him. Didn’t know where the file was, couldn’t think what had gone wrong. He was completely bowled over.’

  ‘Was he?’ Mary said.

  Johnny looked at her. ‘I think so,’ he said. Apart from the slightest inflection on the ‘I’, his tone was level, almost too level, Charles thought. Or perhaps he had imagined it. Certainly, when Johnny went on it was without any trace of doubt of any kind in his voice. ‘But the main thing was that he seemed pretty sure that the Customs had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. He admitted straight out that he knew it had gone to Poland but he said I was to explain to them that it was trans-shipped copper—not of British origin, you see. So it would hardly be their concern.’

  There was a silence. Charles said, ‘And did you tell them that?’

  Johnny seemed not to hear the irony in his voice. ‘Well—yes. When they turned up again. That was yesterday, about lunch-time. There were two of them—Coker and another man.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Charles said. ‘For God’s sake.’ His stomach contracted with fear that turned into anger. He lashed out with it. ‘How could you be such a priceless fool? You got an export licence for the copper, didn’t you? You don’t need that for stuff that’s going from one country to another.’

  Johnny said in a low voice, ‘I knew that. I thought—I hoped—it was some sort of mistake.’

  It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. There was nothing in his expression but a glimmer of rueful humour. ‘I thought you knew practically nothing about this sort of thing,’ he said.

  ‘I found out a bit. Enough to know that you’ve got to be damned careful what you say.’ He leaned forward, stabbing the air urgently with his forefinger. ‘These people aren’t fools, Johnny. Don’t let yourself think that for an instant. And don’t, for Christ’s sake, pass Julian’s excuses on to them. From their point of view they’ll simply sound like your own. If Julian’s got himself into a mess, you can’t protect him.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not protecting myself?’ Johnny faced Charles, shoulders straight, fair head thrown back. It was a curiously youthful and insolent stance—the school hero, Charles thought angrily, on the mat in front of the Head and refusing to sneak on his friends.

  ‘I don’t,’ Charles said.

  He heard Mary catch her breath. She said nothing however, only lowered her head and looked at her hands. Charles saw that they were clenched, no longer just clasped together.

  The stiffness of Johnny’s pose slackened. ‘Of course you don’t, Charles. All I can say is—I give you my word—that I don’t know a damn thing about this except that I applied for the licence. The first time I knew anything was wrong, was when this man Coker turned up the other day.’

  ‘Do you think he believed you?’

  He shook his head and laughed without much amusement. ‘I don’t think so. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me.’ Charles saw that it really did surprise him very much.

  He said, ‘I believe you.’ He felt suddenly depressed. ‘Let’s leave that part of it, shall we? I can’t help you much. You want to go to a good solicitor. But you ought to get your story straight before you do.’ He was irritated by a flick of disdain on Johnny’s face. ‘It’s not enough to be innocent. You’ve got to look innocent, too.’

  He paused, wishing he could think of something to say that would soften the pervading air of harshness in the room. He said, ‘What do you know about Theodore Kranz? Have you had any dealings with him? You yourself, I mean.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose you could call it that. We took him out to lunch once, Mary and I.’

  ‘Why both of you?’

  Johnny said reluctantly, ‘It was Julian’s idea. I think—no, it’s more than that. I know Julian thought Kranz would be useful. He suggested I brought Mary along too. He thought Kranz would like to meet her—socially, as it were.’

  ‘I see. And that was all? Just the lunch? Kranz was to be flattered by being taken out by an English gentleman and his lady?’

  Johnny winced perceptibly. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Mary said, ‘Johnny, you wrote him a cheque. After lunch. Julian wasn’t there, he had to leave early because he had an appointment.’ She stood up, her whole body tense, and glanced at Charles, a look of uncertain appeal as if she wasn’t sure whose side he was on.

  Johnny frowned. ‘I remember. But that was nothing to do with the firm. It was a personal cheque. Julian asked me to do it. It was a debt, I think—Julian hadn’t got his cheque-book on him. It wasn’t anything important.’

  He spoke quite confidently. Charles stared at his shoes. He was afraid that if he looked up he would meet Mary’s eyes. He didn’t want her to know what he was thinking, which was that the simplest things can be distorted if you look at them through a certain kind of glass. But he felt that he didn’t want to say any more or hear any more.

  ‘I should forget about it. Though you must take your solicitor’s advice, of course.’

  He had the uncomfortable feeling as he said this, that he was running out on an obligation, defaulting on a debt he had incurred long ago. A debt that nobody remembered but himself.

  Johnny said, ‘Of course.’ He added warmly, ‘It’s tremendously good of you to have taken all this trouble, Charles.’

  ‘It hasn’t been any trouble.’ He smiled rather awkwardly. ‘It seems to me that all I’ve done is to produce a few rather sour notes. I haven’t helped you to solve anything.’

  ‘How could you?’ Johnny’s smile was open, reassuring. ‘I simply meant it was terribly decent of you to listen so patiently. It’s a marvellous thing, to know one’s friends are with one, whatever happens.’

  His eyes were bright. Charles tried not to feel embarrassed because Johnny so obviously meant what he said, and thought with surging relief that at least he had not betrayed that gentle, trusting affection in the way he might so easily have done. He glanced at Mary and saw her cheeks were burning bright.

  Johnny said, ‘Love—if Charles won’t have a drink, what about some coffee?’ He bent over to poke the fire which was burning logs brought up from Fitchet in the boot of the car, and Charles watched him carefully so that he shouldn’t look at Mary as she went out of the room.

  Johnny straightened up, the poker still in his hand. ‘By the way, Charles—Julian isn’t coming straight back to London. He’s going to Paris for a few days. Actually, this was something tha
t was arranged before I managed to get hold of him. Clara is supposed to be joining him—he decided that it wasn’t necessary to disappoint her. Naturally, he’ll keep in touch.’ He glanced sideways at Charles. ‘The point is, I haven’t told Mary yet. I’m afraid it may upset her.’

  Charles wondered how he was expected to take this piece of information. ‘I suppose it may,’ he said, and hesitated. It was a difficult thing to phrase delicately. ‘You’re sure Julian isn’t going to leave you to take the rap? I’m sorry—that sounds very juvenile, but there isn’t any other way of putting it.’

  Johnny prodded aimlessly at the fire for a moment and then laid the poker down on the hearth. ‘It’s what Mary will say at once, of course.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘No. Not for a moment.’ He turned to Charles. ‘Of course it’s obviously on the cards that old Julian has done something—well—technically illegal. He may even have an idea that it’s a good thing to keep out of the way until he sees which way the wind blows. But I’m perfectly sure that he’ll come back from Paris with it all sorted out.’

  Charles looked at him. It wasn’t difficult to believe that he believed this. And he smiled so confidently that it was almost possible for Charles to believe it too.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Julian did not come back from Paris. He was summonsed, as were Johnny and Theodore Kranz and two directors of the firm he worked for, to appear at Bow Street on charges of conspiring to avoid prohibition on the export of strategic materials and wrongful export and false declaration on customs forms. At Bow Street, Kranz was remanded in custody, the two directors were dismissed the case and Johnny was released on bail. A warrant was issued for Julian’s arrest.