by MARY HOCKING
‘What about this chap Kelleher, then? He was in some sort of intelligence outfit, wasn’t he? What was his home life like?’
‘He was dropped over Yugoslavia. But I remember Daphne saying he wasn’t as far into the wood as Angus.’
She stopped, aware of another voice: Louise, saying she could not live so far into the forest, fear in the voice. Louise and fear! How strange that conversation had been.
Ben was silent. Alice thought that he, too, was seeing a path into the wood gradually become so overgrown that the traveller did not seek a way out, because this was another kind of place and once you were in it, there was no way out. But it was the mention of Daphne which had brought him up with a jolt. He remembered his affair with Daphne. To say that they had loved each other would have been grossly to misrepresent their bitter, tormented relationship. Each time he penetrated her she had reacted with a ferocity born of some private agony in which he played no part. Now, staring down at the still, dark water in the shadow of the bridge, the rank smell of her pain and disgust was in his nostrils. And yet the beauty of her body had haunted him, and in one of his worst fevers he had seen her naked form grow into a tree in which the blossoms were the faces of the people he had known, good and bad, all hung from the same tree. He said, I think you may be right. We can’t hand him over just like that.’
‘Oh Ben!’ Her relief was so enormous she knew it was not Angus’s survival which had seemed to hang in the balance as they argued. She leant her head against his shoulder. ‘What shall we do?’
‘We must persuade him to give himself up. And,’ he warned, sensing how easily she relaxed, ‘we shall have to be fairly ruthless about it.’
‘Yes, yes.’
He saw that she did not realise how serious this was, and he was glad for her. But at the same time her unawareness disturbed him. In his weakened state he imagined her to be more fragile than in fact she was.
‘It’s not just us, remember,’ he said, ‘Louise and Guy are going to be involved in this, too, if we’re not careful. It’s their house. And, one way or the other, he has got to be out of it tonight.’
‘There’s a bus coming!’ she cried, eager now to be on the way.
There was no light showing from the house when they came in sight of it. No shadows moved behind the trees in the road. They went up the few steps to the front door, and Alice thought, as she inserted her key in the lock, that she could not believe in this.
The house was quiet. She put on a light. The telephone was standing on the hall table and a note had been secured on the front of the dial. Ben picked it up and they read, standing close together. It was from Daphne. She said that she and Peter had called and taken the package.
Ben said, looking at Alice, ‘Before we talk about this, you are going to have something to eat.’
She was so relieved she felt she could eat hugely, but when they were tackling scrambled eggs on toast in the kitchen, she found difficulty in swallowing.
‘I can’t get Angus out of my mind. Peter would have been hard on him. He’s a very uncompromising man – the John Buchan type, who wouldn’t tolerate betrayal. He wouldn’t have had any of the scruples we have had about handing Angus over.’
Ben said quietly, ‘It’s passed out of our hands now. Try not to think too much about it. And for goodness sake, don’t tell anyone. For their sake, as well as ours, knowledge is guilt in this situation.’
‘Shouldn’t I get in touch with Daphne?’
‘Leave it to her. She will get in touch with you when she thinks it right.’
Daphne thought it right the next day.
On her way to work the next morning, Alice bought three newspapers. The Times had a report on spy fever in America. Following the investigation of Abraham Brothman, President Truman had ordered a check on the loyalty of all government workers. How did one investigate loyalty? Alice wondered. In one of the other papers there was a picture of the woman involved, described as a beautiful spy, looking plump and rather homely.
In England, although Mr Bevin, exasperated by Stalin, had exploded ‘Now he’s gone too bloody far!’ the only real excitement was engendered by preparations for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece. Exhaustive reading failed to discover any suggestion that the Foreign Office might be exercised by anything more grave than the reception of six reigning monarchs who would be attending the wedding.
From the office window there was ample evidence of preparation. ‘You’ll have a splendid view,’ the junior said when she came in with the post.
‘What about all the coupons, then?’ Mr Hadow said, sour in the shiny suit which had acquired a greenish hue as though mould was growing on it.
‘You don’t have to worry about that, Mr Hadow,’ the junior said cheekily. ‘You’re not buying a wedding dress, are you?’ She winked at Alice.
Mr Hadow was proof-reading reports for the Further Education Sub-Committee which was concerned with preparations of another kind. The Olympic Games were to be held next year on the borders of West London and the Further Education Sub-Committee could think of little else. Arrangements for the Royal Wedding, which would be over in a couple of hours, were as nothing in comparison with the burdens imposed by this long-running event. And what were the problems of accommodating six reigning monarchs compared to hordes of athletes with infinitely variable temperaments and impossible diets?
‘I could tell them the result and save them all that trouble,’ the junior said, reading over Mr Hadow’s shoulder. ‘The Yanks will win everything. It stands to reason. All those steaks they eat. Look at Wimbledon!’
‘We’ll have to send you along to the next meeting. Mavis,’ Mr Hadow said, in unusual good humour.
‘Why do they have to have a torch from Greece, then?’ she asked, still reading.
It was while they were discussing this that the telephone rang. Daphne said, ‘Meet us for dinner at the Strand Palace tonight. Eight o’clock. We can exchange all our news then.’
‘The Strand Palace!’ Ben exclaimed, when Alice telephoned him during her lunch hour. ‘How can we talk there?’
He repeated the question when they met. Peter and Daphne were waiting for them in the foyer. Alice saw Peter’s head and shoulders rising like the figurehead of an antique ship above a sea of bobbing heads. Daphne, when they cleaved their way through to her, demonstrated that modernity, too, could be arresting. She wore a New Look dress in Lincoln green, the billowing hemline well below mid-calf. Her head was tilted at that angle which made her seem to be issuing a challenge to an unseen opponent and her face was bright as holly. Alice, who had scarcely slept all night, caught sight of her own face in a mirror, peaked, with owls’ eyes. Daphne exchanged a long unsmiling look with Ben before turning to introduce her husband. It was not only for Peter’s benefit that she had paid particular attention to her appearance this evening. One owed it to one’s self-esteem to let an old lover see how one had flowered in his absence.
In answer to Ben’s question, Kelleher said, ‘Safer to talk here than anywhere,’ and led them to a table in the centre of the room.
The party at the next table had been to a matinee of Oklahoma, and were arguing among themselves as to whether it was better than Annie Get Your Gun. Kelleher studied the menu while Ben and Daphne studied each other – rather coolly, Alice liked to think. Kelleher said, ‘You are our guests – it’s the least we can do after all the trouble you have been put to.’ He made it sound like a reward for some minor service rendered – smuggling tea through the customs or killing a goose. Alice thought there was something excited and almost celebratory in their manner, a certain recklessness, even. She did not know much about gambling, but fancied this was how people might sparkle who had broken the bank. This business of Angus’s had been a great shock, of course, and they must be very relieved; but it seemed a little early for jubilation.
‘Freshness,’ said a man at the next table.
‘So much more zip,’ countered a woman.
When the main course was served. Daphne raised her glass. ‘To castaways, perhaps?’
Peter said distastefully, ‘Outcasts would be more appropriate, don’t you think?’
Alice, who thought this altogether too obscure, decided the time for plain-speaking had come. ‘Did he go by himself, or did you go with him?’
‘We’d hardly be sitting here if we had gone with him.’ Daphne was amused by the question.
Kelleher said politely, ‘You were assuming – what?’
The conversation was not turning out as Alice had anticipated and she was reluctant to put her assumptions into words. Ben, who had taken an instant dislike to Kelleher, had no such inhibitions. ‘That you handed him over.’
Daphne said, ‘Yes, you could put it that way.’
There was an uncomfortable pause. The man at the next table said, ‘That’s as maybe, but it wasn’t Ethel Merman.’
Kelleher addressed Ben and Alice in the manner of a good host, anxious that certain of his guests should not feel excluded by lack of knowledge from the conversation. ‘You see, he hadn’t bodged it completely. It was not one of those unconsidered actions. There was some kind of assignation arranged by his controller. We gave him the opportunity to keep it.’
Alice toyed with whalemeat before deciding she did not want to eat it. She lowered her voice, which was not necessary – a man was singing ‘The Surrey with the fringe on top’. ‘You didn’t manage to persuade him to give himself up?’
‘We didn’t try,’ Kelleher answered. ‘He was much better out of the way.’
Ben said, ‘And that was the only consideration?’
Kelleher looked faintly surprised by the suggestion that there might be another. Alice could see by the deliberate way Ben laid down his knife and fork that he was not going to eat another morsel until he had enlightened Kelleher. ‘You were in the same sort of outfit at one time, I believe? What if Angus had given information that led to your being caught?’
‘If you have any sense, you don’t concern yourself with hypothetical situations.’ Kelleher might have been a lecturer answering an obtuse questioner with patient courtesy. ‘You just deal with the problems as and when they present themselves. I suppose you might say that imagination is not a desirable asset.’
‘Ben isn’t being imaginative,’ Daphne told him. ‘He is moralising.’
‘That would bring about your downfall more certainly than any information Angus might give,’ Kelleher told Ben.
A woman was standing up to sing badly what had come naturally to Ethel Merman. Daphne said to Ben, ‘There are people who share your point of view, though. It was a friend of ours, Ivor Ritchie, who put them on to Angus – when he realised they weren’t going to take any notice of Sergeant Fletcher.’
‘Ivor apparently decided that someone fairly high up was shielding Angus and this seems to have annoyed him,’ Kelleher said.
Daphne went on, ‘He actually came to tell us what he had done! I think he found it more difficult to face us than to ditch Angus. If you can believe it, he was shaking all over, just like a little boy who is afraid he is going to wet himself with terror.’ She spoke with contempt.
Alice said, ‘Poor Ivor!’
‘You are well rid of that little cripple!’
Alice was aware of Ben looking at her, but she was too angry to care what he made of this exchange. ‘Didn’t you have any doubts about what you should do?’ she said to Daphne. ‘You always hated communism so much. And you admired Mosley . . .’
‘I still admire him, but I don’t see what he has to do with this.’
Ben said, ‘Alice is trying to say that Angus was a traitor and you have given him a helping hand.’
‘He is my brother.’ This was not a statement of love, but a declaration of a paramount interest which overrode all other considerations.
‘He isn’t your brother,’ Alice said to Peter.
‘Daphne is my wife.’ Which, he made it clear, was a matter of possession rather than loyalty.
They both looked so inflexible, secure in the knowledge that they had been true to a code of behaviour which put them above the law, that Alice’s anger dwindled into confusion.
Ben said caustically, ‘And you think you did your best for Angus?’
‘No.’ Daphne was impervious to sarcasm. ‘I don’t think I owed him that. We gave him the chance to get out, that’s all.’ In another age, she would have handed him a pistol.
Ben said, ‘Just supposing someone had followed him when he came to Alice last night? Would you rely on her when questioned – and she would be questioned – to conceal that note?’
Kelleher was massively patient. ‘It doesn’t arise, does it? They wanted him far too much to play games shadowing him around Holland Park. I don’t think you need worry about his being followed.’
‘You said that someone high up . . .’
‘The Special Branch are involved now. They don’t want him to get away.’
‘Whatever happens, Alice isn’t going to destroy that note. I hope that doesn’t worry you?’
‘Not at all. It could have been written any time over the last few years, and it only refers to “a package”.’
It seemed that nothing could shake him. He was not interested in powers and principalities: he was his own country. Then Daphne intervened. Her cheeks were stingingly bright as she said, ‘If you are thinking of that note as some kind of safeguard for Alice, let me tell you that if there was any chance of Alice getting into trouble, I should tell them what happened.’ Kelleher regarded her in an amazement which dislocated his features. His jaw hung loose; his skin was very dry and beneath the overhang of his forehead, the nose was pushed slightly to one side and seemed to be flaking. Daphne leant across the table and said in a low, vehement voice, ‘You don’t understand about friendship. Alice is more important than Angus and not to be sacrificed.’ He sat very upright, unseeing eyes staring across the crowded room, like a strange Polynesian statue which has weathered badly.
Alice said warmly, ‘I wouldn’t give them the note. Daphne, I wouldn’t ever give you away. I should make up some story.’
Ben looked up and shook his head at the ceiling.
The man at the next table said, ‘Yes, well, I prefer the scent of new mown hay. I’m sentimental, I suppose; but I actually want to believe that somewhere out there the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.’
Kelleher said austerely, ‘Fortunately none of this is very much to the point.’
Later, as they walked along the Strand, Alice said to Ben, ‘If she had done it because she cared about Angus I could have understood.’
Ben said, ‘That is a very strange man she has married.’
It was a cold, clear evening, and standing on a traffic island, looking towards Trafalgar Square, they saw the full moon coming up over the Admiralty Arch, and Nelson lofted in glorious isolation on his column.
Alice said, ‘I had a bit of a thing over Ivor Ritchie.’
Ben said, ‘I had more than that with Daphne.’
‘I thought you did.’
His arm tightened round her waist. They walked to the Embankment and sat on a bench near Cleopatra’s Needle. Alice said, ‘Angus told me he sat here – with a dog on his lap. Can you imagine it?’
People walked by without giving them a glance, yet somehow conveying that they knew they were there, just on the edge of vision. Alice had the feeling of having, without her knowing it, stepped outside some unmarked safety zone. This is another place where the boundary doesn’t run, she thought; but it’s not how I wanted it to be when I thought I glimpsed it up that track on the Downs. Perhaps there was something to be said for boundaries.
‘The world is an upside-down sort of place at the moment,’ she said to Ben. ‘But we’ll manage, won’t we?’
He bent to kiss her, and, safe in the circle of his arms, she thought how blessed she was to have him here beside her. She could not have endured this sense of exile on her own, while w
ith him, she felt there was nothing she could not face.
Ben said, ‘I saw a film on the troopship. About a man who went – to France, I think – to bring back a flag. It wasn’t convincing. I remember thinking it was an empty symbol – the flag – because on a battlefield you no longer raise the standard to rally troops. Symbols are only of real significance so long as the things they symbolise are relevant. It’s just silliness, a man risking his life for a square of cotton.’
‘Is this relevant to Angus?’
‘It’s relevant to where we are now. Old Father Thames and the Mother of Parliaments down yonder.’
‘Up yonder.’
‘Our traditions go back so far.’
‘That’s our strength, though, isn’t it? Miss Blaize, of blessed memory, was very hot on tradition.’
‘Is it strength, when they are misted with time and no longer really understood?’
‘That’s not true of all of them.’
‘But which? Which do we jettison?’
‘I don’t like jettisoning things. Look what’s happened to Claire.’
‘Alice! You make everything so personal.’
‘Life is personal. I can’t live anyone else’s life.’
They sat without speaking for a few minutes. The river was threaded with silver and on the far bank a few lights hung like jewels in the frosty air. Alice said, ‘I wonder how Louise and Guy are getting on. Guy wants a house in the country, but Louise wants to live in Lewes. I think I agree with her, don’t you?’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘A county town would have more to offer. Claire and I used to play a game about a big old house in the country where a large family lived whose roots went back and back into the past. I can see that that is something which has to be jettisoned.’
He said nothing, and after a few moments she shifted in order to look at his face. ‘You don’t want to move out of London. Is that it?’
‘It’s a question of keeping in touch with what is going on, of meeting people . . .’