by John Gardner
How did it all begin? Where did it start? What was it that made him behave as he did? Was it Paris? Certainly there was no hint before that August afternoon, among the sweltering rues and avenues and boulevards, the torn Nazi posters and the faded Dubo-Dubon-Dubonnet advertisements. Even after the Paris thing, life had been normal: he used to think about the incident, yet he was never haunted by fears.
These anxieties had certainly not started before Paris. Nothing could have been more prosaic than his childhood when - against a backdrop of downs, woods and good growing soil - he had progressed from village school to a scholarship at the local grammar: a likeable lad unhindered by bad dreams and fantasies. True, he could remember that, as a very small boy, he had hated to see cruelty or death meted out to any living creature. He had cried over the stiff, untwittering bodies of birds, had hysterics when his mother drowned a litter of kittens, and suffered agonies of remorse after accidentally squashing a beetle.
All tiny, living things - even the dreaded spiders - were safe when the infant Boysie was around. But there was nothing abnormal about that - nothing 'screwy' as his old Ma would say. He fought, played, swore, took a pride in being fit, and got up to all the filthy tricks of boyhood. When, at last, the time came for him to be foisted on to an ambushed world - armed with a mediocre school certificate - he chose the safest of dull desk jobs: in the rating department of the borough council offices in a nearby market town.
Among the woolly headed typists, Boysie discovered the joys of being a man. Healthy, muscular, with an overt love of his own body, he was soon invested with a reputation for being a bit of a 'lad' with the girls. Indeed, in those quiet, tractor-humming last country days of peace, the quest for ripe maidens became, virtually, a hobby. He was in good company, for, by village tradition, this was the pastime for most of the growing boys: and, to be honest, the girls liked nothing better - in the spring and summer - than to lie on their backs, basking in long, straw-strewn sessions behind the hay-ricks, barns and copses: their wild, weekend trysting places.
When the war came, Boysie - like most of his friends - marched off to do battle. The girls sobbed a little, and Sunday-walked to their favourite dells, and sighed. They had no way of knowing that, in a few years, their needs would be amply satisfied by the big, well-set-up, nasal men from across the Atlantic. But Boysie was now a soldier - though it is doubtful if his mind ever touched on the realities of death, courage, blood or mutilation. The war, to him, was really only an extension of the bang-bang games of cowboys and Indians, or British and German (World War I vintage) - where the dead got up at the end of the day and toddled home to tea.
As it happened, Boysie never saw action throughout the whole of his Service career. By some stroke of incredible executive genius, his name seemed to have been placed on a list earmarked for continual courses, transfers and postings. No sooner had he finished an advanced weapon training course, than he found himself whipped off to join a newly formed unit. From there, he was promptly sent on a signals course, which he failed, necessitating a posting back to the weapon training course. So it went on, right up to the day he reported to an armoured regiment - on an NCOs' course for tank commanders. The reason for this last extraordinary change in his circumstances was entirely due - though he never knew it - to the fact that a randy orderly room corporal had, at a crucial moment, tickled the breasts of a scrawny ATS filing clerk: distracting the girl, and causing Boysie's file to be dropped into the wrong box.
Boysie never complained about his treatment. He even enjoyed the varied life - five weapon training courses, transfers to three different regiments, a signals course (failed), three heavy weapons courses, a catering course (abandoned), a transport course and the tank commanders' course. There was little responsibility, and life in the training camps, haunted by him between 1939 and 1944, had a sense of chaotic order which he appreciated. One usually had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen next. Moreover, there were whole platoons of nubile ATS girls, always ready and willing to drop their service issue (khaki: rayon) at the twitch of a battle-dress trouser leg.
Even on the firing ranges - thumping away with rifles, brens, stens and revolvers - Boysie seldom reflected on the ultimate use of these lethal pieces of equipment. For him, shooting was exciting only in so far as it gave him the opportunity to prove his fine standard of co-ordination between eye and muscles.
So, he was shuttled around, fed, clothed, satisfied and regularly paid. The war was good, and inoffensive, to Boysie. That is, until the hot August day in Paris when he first collided with that irrevocable responsibility which is involved in the business of killing. And the whole of the Paris thing was really a chapter of dreadful accidents.
On the day in question, Sergeant Boysie Oakes, complete with tank and crew, was hopelessly lost. They had been in France for barely two days - making the journey rapidly from the coast to arrive only a few hours after fighting ceased, and the main force had liberated the joyous city.
First, the radio packed up. Then, already bewildered by a veritable guide-book of orders, map references and countermanded instructions, they lost contact with the remainder of the troop. Somewhere near the Madeleine, Boysie - concentrating on Paris and not on his job - ordered the driver to turn left instead of right. Within a couple of minutes, they had ploughed into a peeling, flustering jungle of back streets. Boysie, anxious to prove that he was in complete command of the situation, issued a series of instinctive, authoritative-sounding orders: relying solely on his non-existent sense of direction to bring them back under the safe shelter of the Troop Commander's wing. Instead, they began to travel in an everincreasing circle. For the best part of an hour, they rumbled aimlessly around Paris, and, for all that could be seen of other Allied forces, they might well have been the only detachment engaged in shifting Hitler's jack-booted heel from the soil of France.
It was diabolically hot, and, though Boysie's comrades-in-arms were not a particularly bright bunch, they soon fastened on to the fact that their leader was not only out of his depth but also clasping at imaginary straws. They began by muttering among themselves, and shouting occasional words of abuse up through the turret hatch where Boysie, grinning sickly at the occasional waving Parisian, wrestled with maps and compass.
Finally, the driver pulled over to the side of the road, stopped their clanking sun-trap, and announced that - court martial or no - he wasn't going any farther until bleeding Sergeant Oakes had got down from the ditto tank, discovered where they ditto were, and worked out a ditto good route which would reunite them with their ditto friends.
The street seemed horribly deserted, but Boysie, with no alternative, climbed down and began to amble along the pavement. It was at this point, that he glanced down a narrow side street and saw the three struggling men. Hesitating, he started towards them. Then it happened, with the jerky speed of an old silent film: one of the men - with his back to the wall, taking most of the punishment - was shouting at him:
'Help! Quickly! I'm British! Help! Intelligence!'
The other two looked up, saw Boysie, and started to run. He couldn't possibly catch them on foot so, intending simply to fire a warning shot into the air above their heads, Boysie pulled at the stud-fastening on his webbing and lugged the heavy Colt .45 out of its holster: lifting it, to aim high between the tall buildings.
Usually, Boysie was exceptionally careful about things like safety catches. But, on this occasion, as he admitted to himself later, the catch must have already been set to 'fire' when the gun was bedded down in his holster. As the Colt came level with his waist, he automatically moved his thumb, to release the catch from the 'safe' position. It didn't budge and the increased pressure caused his finger to tighten on the trigger. He felt the jerk, and almost jumped out of his boots at the explosion, magnified in the constricted alleyway. The thing had gone off in his hand. Worse still, the shock set up a reflex, and before he could stop himself, the trigger-finger squeezed back a second time.
It was not until Boysie reached the men that he realised, through a sadistic trick of fate, both bullets had been deadly accurate. Mostyn never knew that only a pure fluke had saved him, instead of his assailants, from being carved up by one of the two chunks of spinning lead.
Boysie, incredulous at the sight, skidded to a halt, his heavy boots sounding like a well shod horse's hooves on the rough cobbles. From the bright sunlight he had come into this harmless little street and shot two men. In less than half a minute he had stopped two hearts, cut off the vocal chords in two throats, and bunged up a couple of pairs of ears and eyes. He opened his mouth to say something about it being a terrible accident, but the words would not come. The tousled man, panting against the wall, was muttering his thanks and talking about it being a 'damned good show'. But Boysie just stood, planted into the ground, immobile and appalled.
He could feel the muscle control going at the corners of his mouth, the left side curving upwards, more than usual - as it always did when he was nervous or under any kind of pressure. His eyes, fixed in shock, seemed to be tied, in revolting fascination, to the two dead things at his feet. This was the strange look of terror, incredulity, agitation and emotion which Mostyn saw and translated into terms of psychopathic bloodlust.
Boysie was so dazed that he took Mostyn completely on trust. The Major - as he was then - explained the situation: how the two dead men were Nazi undercover boys and he was with British Intelligence - and a pack of other stuff which Boysie neither understood nor bothered to take in. Mostyn took Boysie's name, rank and number, said that he might be called upon to make a statement, and returned with him to the tank, which, by this time, had been joined by a scout car - searching for them with a comehome-all-is-forgiven message from the fatherly Troop Commander.
Boysie heard no more about the incident, though the swift finality of its violence stayed with him for many years. Eventually, he reconciled himself with the thought that he had only done his duty: the men were enemies. Admittedly the circumstances were odd, but if ordered into action his scoreboard of killings would have been considerably higher.
Climbing down from the tank, following a routine inspection three days after the shootings, Boysie's boot slipped on the metal and he crashed on to a hard French road, breaking three ribs and both legs. Within the week he was propped up in a military hospital near Oxford, encased in plaster and being coddled by a raven-haired nurse whom he later seduced on a still evening in Christchurch Meadows.
It was in hospital that Boysie met Philip Redfern - a Catering Corps sergeant from Kettering - suffering, at that time, from a serious burn caused by scalding fat: a wound received, late and unsteady, one night in the Sergeants' Mess kitchens. They took to each other at once, and when they were well enough to go out on little convalescent sprees, they went together. Indeed, both were after that same nurse; Boysie winning by a tea, and pictures at the Electra.
Neither had any fully developed plans for dealing with the imminent dangers of peace (Boysie having no desire to return to the bosom of his village-bound family); so it was natural that, in time, they decided to join up in an unspecified venture which, as they assured each other, would eventually make their fortunes.
After one or two false starts - during which they lost their generous gratuities, and Redfern acquired Mona, a busty ex-barmaid, as his wife - the two rather unenterprising partners set themselves up in the Bird Sanctuary Cafe and Aviary.
For five years they thrived. Then, in the winter of 1953, Boysie - who left most of the finance to the Redferns - discovered that Mona's growing and unquenchable thirst, had quaffed a large percentage of the profits. They were well and truly in the bright crimson; and there was a row, of sorts, ending in a general resolution to pull in their horns.
Until then they had seemed to be riding high: now, business began to drop off, and the expensive collection of feathered friends in the aviary started to moult. Money was a perpetual headache and the bank manager stopped calling them 'sir'.
By 1955 Mona had lost all interest in the cafe, and most of her self-respect. Her alcoholic capacity was diminishing as rapidly as her reputation, and she was becoming not only an embarrassment to her husband and Boysie, but also a general liability to the business. Even so her death, in a blazing car after a hectic three-day bender, came as a dreadful shock. Redfern lost heart, Boysie became anxious and the Bird Sanctuary Cafe and Aviary slipped into their final phase of its sear and yellow age.
A year later, when Redfern had his accident and died, Boysie was left carrying the complete can. The mortgage had not been paid for three months and the Building Society was threatening to foreclose. The bank still moaned. A few days after they buried Redfern, Boysie had a lengthy, and uncomfortable, session with the accountant. Debts amounted to £4,262 10s 4d, and he decided that the only thing possible was to cut his losses, get out and try for a new start.
He was then thirty-eight years old; trained for nothing in particular, moderately intelligent and with no true roots. He had four local girl friends, whom he visited in strict rotation; a dozen or so acquaintances; and no overpowering ambitions. If he managed to get a fair price for the business, and was able to pay all the debts, he could reckon on being at financial zero - neither owing nor solvent.
As Boysie stood at these cross-roads of life, pondering the possibilities of emigration, the past and future merged in the visiting personage of James George Mostyn. If he had planned it, Mostyn could not have chosen a better psychological moment.
*
Iris was away, deep in dreams of handsome young men, golden sands and slinky dresses. Boysie looked at her, envious of the complete inertia. He lit another cigarette and slipped from between the sheets, feeling his way to the chair. Putting on his lounging jacket, he went over to the balcony window; then, remembering the possible presence of Yacob or Gregory, drew back: returning to the chair, his mind scrambling about, trying to fix some definite blame on to Mostyn. The blasted man had never given him a chance: the operation, which took him out of the old life and into the new, had been so smooth; so calculated - and the money had been so good.
This exercise of memory, in the wee small hours, brought back a dozen ghosts: his own unsubstantial figure appearing among them as the least real - a shadow; an ectoplasmic jotting in the margin of events. If Boysie of the pre-Mostyn days had walked through the door at this moment, he thought, it would be impossible to recognise him - a different man, from another world: from a land untouched by Mostyn's satin manner, 'withit' philosophy, arty undercurrent and sharply defined system of values: a person who might never have existed.
The Bird Sanctuary Cafe and Aviary seemed a hundred years away; and when he thought of Mostyn's sudden intrusion, there was that same sense of shock, experienced when the second-in-command had first revealed the enormity of his mission.
The Bentley had pulled up in front of the cafe a little before midday. Boysie, going over a pile of bills in the office, heard the door open and footsteps cross to the snack-bar. He got up and went through to find Mostyn, grey-suited, looking a little older, lounging over the counter:
'Remember me, Sergeant Oakes?' The voice had an edgy drawl: the voice of a man who wanted something, and was pretty sure of getting it. Boysie wondered if it was going to be a spot of blackmail. He had recognised Mostyn at once - his body flushing warm, a physical memory of the killings.
'Blow me!... Major? ... Wait a minute, it was in Paris ... I remember .. Major?'
'Mostyn, old son... Colonel now ... Colonel Mostyn.'
Boysie had an uneasy feeling that the little rat eyes held a slight glitter of contempt:
'Well, fancy seeing you, sir ...' Inside himself, he recalled the man leaning against the wall regaining breath while the shots still numbed his eardrums:
'Can I get you anything? Something to eat? Meal perhaps?'
'No, thank you, Sergeant Oakes. Or can I call you Boysie?'
Now he was really on guard:
'How did you know
that? Boysie, I mean?'
'Ah,' said Mostyn cryptically, 'how indeed? Just thought I'd look you up. Heard you were here, you know. Couldn't pass without saying hallo. Can't pass a bloke who's saved your life.'
Boysie didn't like this one bit: there was a sense of thunder in the air:
'No, I suppose not. You sure I can't get you something. Cup o'tea?'
'Been a long time,' said Mostyn, ignoring the hospitality.
'Yes.' Boysie did not sound at all keen.
'Yes, quite a long time.'
Mostyn raised his eyes and looked round the cafe, his face impassive. For the first time, Boysie noticed what a seedy place it had become: the wallpaper drab; paint flaking from the window frames; the tables, solid and stained with their grubby linen and cheap, plastic sugar holders. There were stale crumbs on the counter, and a damp patch, marked with a sugary-brown ring, where someone had placed a wet, unsaucered cup. 'Anybody else around, old Boysie?'
'Anybody else? Why, sir? I mean ...?'
'I want to talk to you, old Oakes. It's rather ...' he inspected his aseptic fingernails '...important.'
Boysie found himself wishing for a charabanc of tea-thirsty trippers:
'The cook's out the back and the waitress will be here any time. I suppose we'd better go into the office.' He indicated the way through the door which led to the living quarters, adding an unenthusiastic: 'If it's important.'
'You have a waitress too? My, my!' Iced treacle.
Mostyn followed him behind the counter, pausing to try for dust on one of the tables. He looked at his fingers and pulled a distasteful face:
'Have to give your waitress a rocket. Not doing so well, eh?'
'Can't grumble.' Boysie was not giving anything away. By now he had made up his mind that Mostyn was out of the service and working for some blasted financial recovery firm. They faced each other in the small untidy room.