In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  ‘Not as bad as it looks,’ Denis grunted. ‘Told you that German gun of yours has no punch.’ But it obviously wasn’t all right. A thin, dark trickle of blood ran from his mouth and down his chin.

  Malcolm straightened up. ‘I really have torn it now, haven’t I?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I think I really must be mad.’ He looked at me, searching for forgiveness or at least understanding. I stared back, with nothing at all to offer. ‘If Denis dies, I’ll find you wherever you are, Malcolm,’ I said. ‘And I will kill you.’

  He got up and checked the pistol. I thought he was going to shoot me too, but instead he gave a sort of half salute, and then started walking towards the door.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Denis called out. ‘They’ll shoot you if you go out there with a gun. Wait here with us.’

  Malcolm hesitated, looking back over his shoulder. ‘I have to go, Denis,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to rot in some asylum. But I’m not very brave, so don’t make it harder than it is.’

  I saw it all through the window, and despite everything it seemed rather fine. Malcolm strolled towards the helicopters firing his little gun at their searchlights. The Walther PPK is an accurate weapon, and he put most of them out one by one. When the soldiers started shooting at him he didn’t return their fire but simply stood there until he was brought down, to lie tangled and awkward in the changing shadows.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  They operated on Denis twice in the next thirty-six hours, and I spent the time sitting in a dingy waiting room at the Bournemouth General Hospital, fearing every set of footsteps that drew near.

  Sir Stewart Menzies came down from London and sat with me for a while. ‘The raid wasn’t my idea,’ he said. ‘There was a flight of Sikorsky S-51s training with the Special Air Service people on Salisbury Plain, and when they worked out where Bryant was the local Chief Constable thought it was too good a chance to miss. I hope sincerely that Denis doesn’t think I broke my word.’ He was clearly lying, because you don’t invoke military aid in support of the civil power without the Home Secretary’s authorisation, and in any case his eyes told me the truth. But I didn’t argue. Denis and I had passed beyond all that nonsense: the need to lie and the need to justify, and the guilt that goes with it. So I just smiled and gave him absolution, and he went back to London perhaps a little happier than he deserved.

  They came on the evening of Boxing Day and told me that Denis had contracted septicaemia, and that he wasn’t expected to live. ‘I’m afraid it’s pretty bad,’ the doctor said, a small pinch-faced man who looked down at some papers in his hand rather than at me. ‘A generalised infection of the blood. We are trying a new antibiotic, but you must be prepared for the fact that he is most unlikely to survive the night.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything anyone could do?’ I asked.

  The doctor didn’t answer directly. ‘If we can get him through tonight, he might have a fighting chance. But tonight is the problem. Shock is a dreadful thing. I think he might be holding on just for you.’

  I couldn’t help it – tears welled up in my eyes. ‘Can I sit with him?’ I asked, and the doctor looked at me and nodded. ‘It might even help,’ he said. It was the first time his eyes had lifted from his papers.

  Alan Hillgarth arrived just before I went into Denis, and hugged me. ‘Mary and I are praying,’ he said, ‘and I’m staying here as long as you need me.’

  So I sat with Denis in his little room crammed with medical equipment. At first he didn’t seem to recognise me, lying with his eyes on mine for a long moment without any sign or movement. But then he lifted his head a little. ‘Took your own sweet time, didn’t you?’ he said gruffly, and smiled his slow, incomparable smile.

  At first we talked about what we’d do when he came home. Or rather I talked and Denis put in the odd wry word. ‘There’s so much to see all around us at Almer,’ I said. ‘We’ve hardly scratched the surface. When you get back we’ll make a bit more of an effort. Heaven’s above, we haven’t even seen the Bradbury Rings! They go back to Neolithic times, you know. Stone Age princes died there, fighting on the earthen ramparts for their people. And Vespasian is said to have stormed the place when the Romans took England. We’ll take a picnic and spend an afternoon telling the children all its history.’

  ‘Bore them silly,’ Denis said. ‘Boys and girls need action. What about sailing on the Solent? We haven’t done that yet.’ I could see it was difficult for him to speak, and put my finger gently on his lip in the way he did to me.

  ‘Of course we’ll go sailing on the Solent,’ I said, ‘in our new boat. Oh, I do wish that summer would hurry up. There is so much to do.’

  I babbled on, frothy and bright, spurred on by a growing pain in my heart as I saw Denis tiring. Then I realised that he didn’t want to talk about tomorrow, but about the years ahead. So I calmed myself, and sipped some tea the nurses had brought, and talked about real things. The children’s education, the stud farm, whether we should buy a flat in London while prices were still low.

  ‘I think the children should each have a profession,’ Denis said, so softly that I hardly heard him. ‘The world is changing.’

  I thought about that at bit, then nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think that Tony should study to be a naval architect,’ I said. ‘That’s certainly where his interests lie. Bobby will want to be a Test cricketer, but we’ll be firm, and make him study medicine, or law. I think Frances could be anything she wants to be. She’s inherited your brains.’

  The nurses came in at that point, and went over poor Denis like mechanics swarming over a broken-down car. They gave him something for pain, and after that he seemed more relaxed, even sleepy, and he left the talking entirely to me. Somewhere in the background, I heard a radio broadcasting the sounds of Big Ben tolling midnight. But in our room time wasn’t relevant because we were years and years into the future.

  ‘They will all be married at St Mary’s,’ I said. ‘We’ll insist on that. Tony first, of course. I suspect she’ll be a modern girl, perhaps studying at the Slade, and we probably won’t like her to begin with because of her smart clothes and her artistic friends. But then we’ll fall in love with her, and look on in admiration as she and Tony take London by storm.’

  Denis raised an eyebrow and I knew exactly what he wanted to ask. ‘Lots of children,’ I said, warming to my task and peering deeper into the future. ‘Happy little people, all mad keen on boats and riding. Bobby and Frances will have them too. We’ll be besieged at Christmas time, with dozens of little feet running everywhere. You’ll have to barricade yourself in your study.’

  I paused as a nurse adjusted a pillow I had brought in from the Manor, and wiped Denis’s face with a cold, wet cloth. And then I continued, chatting softly and smiling into my husband’s tiring eyes.

  ‘I suspect Bobby will live nearby,’ I said. ‘He can be a bit of a busybody, and he’ll want to keep an eye on us as we grow old.’ I paused, and sighed in a happy, comfortable way. ‘It’s going to be nice growing old together, don’t you think?’ I asked. ‘We won’t be any trouble to anyone because you’ll keep fit walking the dogs, and I’ll be kept on my toes by the grandchildren. We might look old to others, my darling, but in the evenings we’ll toast each other in the firelight, and seem to each other as young as we ever were.’

  ‘Frances?’ Denis whispered. He needed me to account for everyone.

  ‘Oh, Frances,’ I said. ‘Frances will be the first woman vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, I’m quite sure of that. We’ll visit Cambridge just to sit with her at High Table and bask in her reflected glory. Of course, while we’re up there we’ll take the opportunity to drop in on the Haymarket sales. I’ll have to be firm though, Denis, and stop you buying another stallion because I won’t see our darling Richelieu outshone.’

  It must have been some time after two in the morning when Denis looked at me inquiringly, and I hesitated, and then smiled my grudging consent. The dice had skittered across the brigh
t and shiny surface of the playing board and come to rest against us.

  Alan had waited at the hospital all night, and he came in when Denis had gone and took me down to his car. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone, emerging into the cold, grey streets of Bournemouth on that awful day. Alan offered to hold my arm but I walked alone, my chin up, as Denis would have wanted.

  I dreamt of Denis that night. There was nothing in my dream about hospitals, or grave-faced doctors, or even helicopters clattering across the black winter sky. In my dream we were riding in Malaya. I was on Dame Fashion, and I knew I was in a dream because Denis wasn’t on Thor but an earlier horse, his beloved Soliloquy. At first we were alone in open country with scattered coconut trees and the gleam of water in the distance, and then there was a change. Suddenly we were in difficult terrain, with stands of oak and beech and with the fields criss-crossed by hedgerows. And we were in the middle of a fox hunt, with lolling-tongued dogs and red-coated riders in full cry. I saw Stewart Menzies, his eyes popping with effort as he galloped past me in pursuit of the leading riders. A gully opened up on my right, a dangerous, tangled, thorny place, and I instinctively veered my horse to the high ground on my left. As I did so I saw that Denis had not followed me but had plunged down into the gully to be lost to sight. Just as I was becoming concerned the gully ended and Denis reappeared, galloping up to join me, his face alight with triumph. Safe on the pommel in front of him there was a pure golden fox, its head resting against his chest.

  I knew immediately what the dream was all about. Stewart Menzies had told me that no one would qualify to take the pure golden fox of Stirlingshire in the last, symbolic outing of the Linlithgow Hunt because all its members had been forced by the nature of their craft to compromise.

  But Stewart had been wrong. Denis had not compromised. In the last, fatal moment, when the trap at Monk’s Farm had closed and the helicopters had come clattered in on us, he’d kept his word and handed Malcolm a loaded gun.

  That is where my story ends: all else is postscript.

  I sold everything we owned in England – our leasehold on the Manor, Monk’s Farm, Richelieu, even the Wolseley – and the children and I sailed for Australia at the end of March 1950. Denis had been cremated and I took his ashes with me, in a small metal box in the bottom of my suitcase. Good friends had begged me to stay, to fulfil the dreams that Denis and I had shared, but of course I couldn’t. They had been our dreams, Denis’s and mine, and they meant nothing to me after Denis died.

  At first we tried to settle in Melbourne, but the place carried too many memories and so we moved on to Western Australia where I had learnt to live without Denis once before. I bought a rambling, friendly house in the hills just outside Perth, and tried to make it into a happy, busy home where the children could grow up surrounded by stability and love.

  In time they all went their individual ways. Tony didn’t end up as a naval architect after all. He fell in love with languages – Russian in particular, which is curious because I had never mentioned his Russian heritage – and today he teaches Modern Language at a university in Canberra. Bobby did become a lawyer, with his interest in the wide scope of administrative law rather than the minutiae of a solicitor’s practice. Frances became a doctor, a specialist paediatrician, and if I say so myself, a successful and a rather famous one.

  All three of my children have established families, and though we are scattered around Australia and the world we are all still close and loving friends. Though I do have my moments with Frances. It is in her nature to need to know things, and one thing she wants to know with a passion is everything about the past. But the past she wants to know about is Denis’s and mine alone, and not for me to share. So we row, Frances and I, and make up, and then row again, and in the meantime she has achieved all those glittering prizes I knew she would achieve.

  A few years ago I sold the house outside Perth, which had become too big for a single woman of ancient years, and moved to the east coast. At first to Canberra, where some of the family had settled, and then to the unit I now occupy in a retirement village on the south coast of New South Wales.

  And it was here that I discovered that the gods had granted me one last favour. On my first morning after moving in I was sitting on my small deck overlooking the sea when I saw my neighbour staring at me from his little garden. He was a tall, sunburned man with a long, friendly face, vaguely familiar, and he raised his battered hat politely. ‘Norma, my dear. Fancy meeting you.’

  It was Tim Featherstone.

  EPILOGUE

  By Timothy Featherstone

  (Executor of the Estate of Norma Felice Elesmere-Elliott)

  Norma died in her eighty-second year, sitting alone on her deck at sunset. I’m not usually an imaginative soul, but I like to think that Denis had joined her there in the evening shadows, and had smiled his ineffable smile, and taken her hand to lead her home.

  She had made me her executor, and so I was the one who went through her financial and private papers. They were all in immaculate order: bank statements, share certificates, certificates of deposit, instructions about how to dispose of her effects, and directions for her cremation. It was her wish that her ashes be mixed with Denis’s and scattered ‘somewhere beautiful’.

  Amongst her papers was a manuscript. I hesitated before reading it, because it was at first glance intensely personal, and a love story. But it also deals with some of the most sensitive secrets of our times, secrets that may well change our perception of events and personalities, and for that reason I decided that it needed to be published.

  Norma’s and Denis’s ashes were scattered from a wild and beautiful seacliff at the tip of Pretty Point. It was a fine, windy day and I stood in the background while Norma’s children and grandchildren said a prayer and released the mixed ashes to the sunlight and the fresh sea air. A sea eagle soared above the group, circling with rigid pinions on the eternal winds of the Tasman Sea.

  I often visit that spot, and sit in quiet contemplation on a convenient root of an upturned tree. It is a considerable walk from my unit, but I enjoy it because it is a walk I used to take with Norma before her hip began to trouble her. We would stroll from the neat, trim gardens of the retirement village down to the craggy beaches that line this part of the coast, and when we came to Pretty Point we’d stride out to the very end, to the windy promontory above the sea. The walk would take us half the morning, and we’d chat all the way, about Malaya and the old days, about mutual friends, and about those we had loved and lost.

  I loved Norma all my life, of course, but that is neither here nor there because she only loved her Denis. But she gave me a place in her heart, and that is enough for me. So I sit there, on my gnarled seat beneath a casuarina tree, and guard her memory.