The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  Then Tadek wanted my own story. So I told it. Afterwards they looked at one another. She took his hand – not mine.

  ‘Tadzio, I was only doing my job, you know. I just wasn’t good at that side of it. If I’d seen we were being followed, I would have turned back. If I had known...’

  ‘Time for lunch,’ said Tadek. We walked in silence to Frederick Street. ‘The Apéritif is the only place these days. And there’s another surprise waiting for you.’

  When we entered, the white-haired and magnificent head waiter slapped the menu against a table with a crack which made the diners start and glance up at him. He advanced on me as if I were an apprentice advocate daring to challenge his judgement.

  ‘At ease, Szczucki.’

  ‘Colonel!’

  We arranged to meet each other in the restaurant next morning, before the first clients arrived. ‘He’s not the only one,’ said Tadek, as we waited for our fresh River Add salmon. ‘Our old Baca – our “shepherd” – yes, General Maczek himself. He’s working as barman in a hotel near the Dean Bridge. No pension, and he’s declared a traitor in Poland. But you should see the old warriors who visit him at the Learmonth – Brits, Canadians, Americans as well as our own lot. They salute him before they order a whisky.’

  When Tadek went off to find my Colonel and pay the bill, I had to ask Margaret a question. Were her old employers still interested in me?

  ‘God, no! The idea was to fit you into a network out there. But when you were arrested, obviously they dropped you like a hot brick. That’s how it goes, I’m afraid.’

  ‘They were going to hand me over to the French, if I didn’t do what they wanted.’

  ‘Oh Maurycy, honestly! All that was just to get you to go back to Poland. They didn’t mean a word of it. All forgotten now, anyway.’

  *

  In the afternoon, I went to see a lady at a Polish charity and asked how to apply for political asylum. She gave me a typed sheet of instructions, and the address of a chapel where a Father Wis´niewski kept bunks for Polish vagrants.

  I fancied this idea of becoming a barman. But it’s not easy to impress a pub-keeper if you don’t have enough money to buy yourself a drink. Still, I did make my way to the Learmonth.

  ‘Sir! Szczucki, Maurycy, intelligence officer Headquarters Squadron!’

  ‘No need for all that. I remember you.’

  He smiled. ‘We missed you at Falaise. But you made up for it in the Netherlands. Didn’t you go back to Poland afterwards? Into big trouble, so I’ve heard?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Was it worth it? Going back?’

  ‘No, and yet I don’t regret it.’

  His smile broadened as he noticed my embarrassment at ordering a drink from him. But he measured out a whisky in silence and set it on the bar, and when I reached into my pocket made a little dismissive flick of his hand. As I set the glass to my lips, a big man in a British Railways donkey jacket stamped to attention beside me.

  ‘Sir! Krotowski, Jacek, Corporal, 24th Uhlans!’

  ‘No need for all that, corporal. I remember you...’

  *

  The Colonel and I sat in a corner of the empty restaurant while the tables were being laid. I admired the sprightly nudes traced on the green walls. One of the waitresses timidly brought the Colonel a glass of black tea in a silver holder. He didn’t thank her but lit a cigarette, cocked in his old way.

  ‘I told you to make for Canada, didn’t I? But you went back to Poland instead. And you from the Borderlands, too. What the hell were you thinking of?’

  ‘Well, there were ugly, complicated reasons why I had to get out of Britain. You knew a bit about them. But even in the war – can you understand this, Colonel? – I never lost a feeling that it would be wrong not to stand on that soil of ours again. Even after Yalta, even in that unfree Poland.’

  ‘Wrong? Are we all wrong, these hundreds of thousands of us living stateless in the West? Poland is where Poles are.’

  ‘Yes but, Colonel, that means that our ojczyzna isn’t just a country. It’s a duty. A duty that hurts, but it’s for life and we can’t turn our backs on it wherever we are. I am glad to be here again, but I also did right in going back.’

  ‘Szczucki, I cannot allow you to tell me about duty and patriotism.’

  A short man with red curly hair came to the table. ‘Who’s your pal, Marek?’

  The Colonel, after taking a heavy breath, introduced us.

  ‘This is Mr Ross, the owner. My employer, so to say.’

  ‘Another Pole? Jolly good. Wanting a job, I’d guess.’

  I explained that I had to go back to Greenock, where a friend was putting me up.

  ‘I’ve got a boat there, waiting on an overhaul. Know anything about engines?’

  ‘Tank engines?’

  ‘Well, one diesel’s much like another – just a matter of size, really. My man down there needs help. Say Donald sent you.’

  The Colonel rose to his feet when I left. But he did not shake my hand.

  *

  When the first letter arrived from Warsaw, Mrs Melville had telephoned Jackie. ‘You’ll never guess...’

  Jackie took the call in her Glasgow office. The new School of Pelagic Studies was a concrete bunker, halfway down the slope between the university and Byres Road. ‘See, Grannie, I’ve a lecture to give later this morning and then a student wanting her grant application checked. Aye, busy-busy! But I’ll look in on the way home.’

  She parked the little Ford in Union Street and ran up the steps. (That key, into that door... never done without telling memory to crouch and cover its eyes.) Inside, the greenish scent of gas still clung to the walls, years after the electricity had been wired in, and today everything was darker than usual – the dead bulb in the hall still not replaced. If only there was somebody younger to stay with Mrs M.

  They took the letter into the kitchen, where the light was better. ‘I’ll send him the last address I have for Helen. But he’s wanting to come here, back to Scotland. And he needs some sort of written invitation from us, before he can get a passport and a British visa.’

  ‘I can do that, Grannie. Better coming from me, with Assistant Lecturer across the top and a big rubber stamp from the Department.’

  ‘Well, but do we really... after all that time? Bringing things up again? And then there’s your mother.’

  ‘Mum would say yes if she was here, I know she would. C’mon, Grannie, it’s our Mike; see what he’s been through.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s just for a short visit. That’s all he’s allowed if he gets a Polish passport, then away home again. That’s assuming he means to go home at all.’

  Jackie recognised him before he recognised her. Who else could it be, coming off the train dressed like that? A foreign-looking green raincoat, a brown beret, a rucksack and an old suitcase with straps.

  ‘Is it really Jackie? This beautiful girl?’ His hair was grey. And there was something odd about his face, like a tiny delay mechanism before he smiled.

  ‘No girl, Mike. I’m a married lady, past my prime at twenty-six.’

  ‘Married? Who on earth with?’

  ‘He’s called Malcolm. You’ll like him fine: he builds boats, writes poems, has daft views about politics. We met when he was a diver and I was at St Columba’s. Mike, d’ye know something?’

  ‘Do I know what?’

  ‘You still have a wee Scottish accent!’

  *

  He seemed to settle in. He kept very quiet, replaced light bulbs, dug the garden, and sat with Mrs Melville to watch news on the television set Jackie had rented for her. Every morning, he went for a walk along the Esplanade. Every weekday afternoon, he went down to the yacht basin and on Friday came back with money for working on Donald Ross’s launch. He often got up in the middle of the night, sitting alone at the kitchen table with his cigarettes and writing in notebooks.

  Jackie and Malcolm Greig lived near the seafront at Largs, in an apartment
they had rented when she still worked at the Millport research station. One weekend, she picked up Mike in the Ford Pop and took him down to Largs where he and Malcolm marched along the beach talking, heads down against the wind.

  ‘In the end, when we’re rid of this crumbling Empire, it’s got to be an independent Scottish republic!’

  ‘What’s kept you? Why didn’t you go for it a hundred years ago?’

  They liked each other, and kept laughing and shouting over lunch. Jackie watched Mike, who could almost have been Malcolm’s father, and wondered where his quietness had gone. They were like two schoolboys on a coach outing.

  When they were back in the lounge stirring coffees, Jackie asked: ‘What’s your plan, Mike? You’re getting asylum in Britain, but could you ever go home again?’

  ‘What do you mean, home?’

  ‘I mean Poland.’

  ‘This is home now. Scotland is home. Poland is my... you don’t have a word for it in English. More complicated than home; not just a place but a duty, an obligation. Something you judge yourself by, wherever you are.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. Just a place is all a country is.’

  ‘You do so know about all that,’ said Malcolm. ‘Go on and tell him what you used to tell me: where do you feel at home?’

  ‘Underwater,’ said Jackie absently. She looked away from the two men, towards the sea in a gap between the houses opposite. ‘Down there, I’m doing no harm to anybody. I trust it all, and it trusts me – the creatures, the wrecks, the boulders that never see the sun. Sure, I’ll take specimens. But to me that feels like adding, not taking away. Am I making sense?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say you were making nonsense,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Oh my, thanks! But listen: up here – yes, up here with you – there’s not a moment I don’t feel anxious. If I go out the door, that’s me treading on some tiny wee beetle or slater. If there’s a cyclist falls off on the ice in University Avenue, I should have warned him before he started downhill. If I read about a train crash in London, I’m thinking: what did I do wrong?’

  Malcolm clutched fingers into his black hair. ‘See, Mike, I married a mermaid. A Hans Andersen mermaid who walks on jaggy things when she’s ashore. But when she talks this way, I think: what entitles her to carry the suffering world on her shoulders?’

  Mike said: ‘She turned a key in a lock once, and the world blew up.’

  ‘She told me about that. But, ach, she’s an educated woman, she should have put that bairn’s fancy behind her. I’ve spent as much time on the seabed as you, Jackie, and that place is nobody’s home unless you’re a spootie-shell in a burrow. Your country and my country is Scotland. You’re getting to be like your mother, who spends her life running away from it.’

  ‘The world’s bigger than wee Scotland, and it’s full of horrors. Do you never feel you could have prevented things?’

  ‘Jackie, everything that happens was bound to happen. You’re a scientist, no Jesus Christ, nor God the bloody father either.’

  ‘Ach, that’s enough of it!’ Jackie jumped up and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a bottle. ‘See what I found at the back of Grannie’s cupboard. All over dust, and never opened. Away and get glasses, Malcolm.’

  Mike saw the same bottle of cherry brandy which Eric Kent had once offered to a young, disdainful Helen. He said loudly: ‘Exotic!’ The other two gave him a puzzled glance and set about loosening the cork.

  *

  It was two years later. Jackie told Malcolm to stay out of this. Malcolm, now a bit old for the jeans he wore, had gone into building wooden beach-huts after his boatyard had failed.

  He said he didn’t want to know anyway. It was bad enough being told only the day before the wedding that he was marrying his old boss’s daughter – that fat ginger sod. He wasn’t going to keep any more of that bastard’s secrets, even if he had been some sort of deserter in the war.

  ‘That’s your father’s ain stinky problem, no mine and no yours either. Swim clear, mermaid!’ He kissed Jackie hard, grabbed his safety helmet off the peg and left the house.

  At Union Street, Mabel Melville said it was none of Mike’s business; she didn’t want some foreigner, not even Mike, poking his nose in. Come to that, she would thank everyone to let her settle this her own way. And that included Jackie. This was for a mother to deal with, not for some sort of family doon-the-watter outing.

  Jackie said that of course Mike has to come too, will you just listen, Grannie? Of course he needs to be there, it’s just screaming obvious he must have known about the strongbox and the message in it all along.

  She didn’t explain that she had put through a long telephone call from Largs to the Duchal Hydro at Kilmacolm. There, on the crest of a misty hill, the quiet Pole known as Major Mike presided over the temperance bar and the guest bookings for the golf course. ‘I see. Yes, I did know. A box – was there a box with it?’

  Jackie now told Mrs M that a daughter had as good a right to confront her father as a mother. Anyway, how did Grannie propose to get herself to Faslane without a car?

  They wondered what to do about Helen in Canada. ‘She’s about the last person we need. And she’d never keep her mouth shut.’

  ‘She’s got a right to know, Grannie. Well, she may even know about it already. And she does so know how to keep secrets.’

  *

  There was no key with it, the man had said. His clothes fairly reeked of cigarettes. With no key, he had never got round to forcing the lock and it dropped out of mind. Then it was just last month he was clearing out the howff on the back green and there was this box, see it’s like a wee strongbox from the bank.

  Mrs Melville said she couldn’t imagine what all this had to do with her. She had kept the man standing in the kitchen, clutching his stained cloth bunnet in one hand and the box in the other.

  ‘See, I took a wrench to it. It came away easy, and there was thon paper, the water didnae dae it any good but I could read just the end of it. And one of the names – I thought surely is that not the name of the laddie from Union Street wha got killed. Johnston Melville. Am I no right?’

  Mrs Melville took the sheet of paper and read it carefully, twice. Then she looked up. The man backed away from her. He explained that he had found the box in the Fronsac wreck, many years back. He was working on the salvage team for Alex Ketling. ‘Him that has the Faslane shipbreaking yard. Him that’s convener of the Development Agency and up for a Parliament seat.’

  ‘Does he know you took this?’

  ‘Mr Ketling? Ach, no. He wouldnae bother with a wee thing like that.’

  Mrs Melville asked what else he had stolen. The man said that folk like her aye thought the worst of people. Mrs Melville gave him one minute to answer before she called the police.

  ‘It’s never stealing, it’s the custom. It was another lad took most of the binoculars; I had only the one pair, beauties from a U-boat. Okay, two silver cigarette boxes in the wardroom, French coins. A few gold ones, right enough. But that’s the custom, it’s aye been.’

  He had thought a mother would be glad to have a message from the dead, the man went on. In a manner of speaking, was he not bringing her words from a Loved One on the Other Side? He found himself outside on the steps, holding a ten-shilling note. ‘Ya auld bitch ya.’

  Alone, she fetched a box of matches from the stove and struck one. She lifted the letter with her other hand, and hesitated.

  The document, typed, was water-stained but still just readable. ‘We, the undersigned, declare that in the interests of European peace and Western civilisation we are taking a symbolic action against this war, by disabling a torpedo tube on this warship. It is not too late to end this pointless aggression against Germany and its farsighted, peace-loving Leader, which can only benefit the Jewish–Bolshevik world conspiracy which...’

  The match burned Mrs Melville’s fingers. She shook it out and put the letter down again. She went to the telephone instead. />
  *

  Mr Ketling was away in Italy at a conference on the Law of the Sea. But the secretary could offer Mrs Melville a short appointment with him on Tuesday week, eleven thirty. She was sorry but it would need to be down at the yard at Faslane, not at the Glasgow office.

  This left Union Street with time for arguments. Jackie wasn’t allowed to take the letter away, but she could remember it accurately enough to mail a version to Canada.

  ‘Jackie, just put it on the fire,’ said Helen on the phone from Toronto. Her voice warbled with distance, as if she was talking through a tin can of water. ‘No good will come of it.’

  ‘Did you know, then?’

  ‘Sure, he was in some daft Fascist thing when I first met him. I mind telling him to stick to the BB – the Boys’ Brigade – and that’s the last I heard of it.’

  ‘But how did you not say something? How did you never tell me?’

  ‘How was I to know he’d write this stuff years later, and him a father and a reserve officer? The other guy must have put it in his head. He’s no very bright, your dad.’

  ‘He rates as pretty bright these days. Big shot in Scottish industry, great at his job.’

  ‘So let him get on with it.’

  ‘But the other man – Mike says he saw this in a secret report – the other fellow told the French that it was Dad who went on and made the torpedo launch itself. So he’s a mass murderer. So he needs to face up to it.’

  ‘Daughter mine, you’re awful young yet! Men don’t face up to things like that. Aye leaving the lavvy seat up – you’ll get an apology there, though it’ll count against you. But assisting the enemy in time of war – he’ll just tell you to away and boil your heid. You cannae prove a thing, anyhow. Burn the letter – I’m having nothing to do with this, and no more should you.’

  ‘We’re going to take him the letter next week and ask him if he did it. Mum, you should be there.’

  ‘Och for God’s sake! Well, off you go and make bad worse, but I’m taking Hughie to the CNE – the Canadian National Exhibition. We’ll eat Beaver Tail pastries and see all the new gadgets. Could you not get your head out of the deep sea and look to the future?’