“So we’re under new management now: F. J. Clinton, sole proprietor— and Sir Frederick in the next New Year’s Honours, if I’m any judge of the government’s well-placed gratitude for hushing things up.”
A lot could happen between the Queen’s birthday and the New Year— Bill Ballance always used to say that.
“Which, to do him justice—and the government justice—is fair enough. Because he’ll be a damn good sole proprietor, not like Useless Eustace … And also because the bloody Russians need taking down a peg—which you of all people ought to understand, Major Roche—eh?”
Roche thought of the Comrades as Russians—not for the first time, but more clearly: Russians, not Comrades … not with their union of socialist republics, but with their groaning colonies stretching from Hungary to the deserts of Asia and the Himalayas, where Kipling had played his game once upon a time, and Audley had learnt Kipling’s rules.
And he also recalled Genghis Khan’s confidence, at the prospect of fooling the stupid British again: as much as anything—as much as F. J. Clinton’s clever plans—that over-confidence had confounded the Russians. “You do, don’t you?” Audley read his expression. “They’ve done so bloody well of late that they’re chancing their arm too far for comfort— that’s what Clinton relied on. But some of the things they’ve been doing have been positively dangerous, and that was my best argument for not using you to play games with them—better that we should call a halt, and shut them up for a bit, so we can both catch our breath. Better to clear the board and start again from scratch.”
That put the record straight, but it hurt nevertheless. “And that’s why I’m getting off the hook, is it?”
“With a medal—and a disability pension, Major?” Audley’s lip curled. “Free and clear? Don’t be ungrateful, Major!!”
The Major twisted in the wound, and so did free and clear, he might become the former, but even if he found a place to teach être and avoir, and the kings and queens of England, he would never free himself from what he had been.
“But not just that.” Audley stared at him for a moment, and then rose from the chair and moved towards the window.
Roche waited, watching Audley peer outwards and downwards at the lawns and flower-beds which he had never seen, which lay below the tree-scape he could see from his bed.
“Madame Peyrony sends her regards to you … Her regards, but no apologies for the mortar-barrage… I rather think she takes the view that if the Choosers of the Slain didn’t have your name, then it’s no business of hers. She’s seen a lot of men die in her time, has Madame …”
That was the truth, and maybe more so than Audley imagined.
“But she thinks well of you … Whereas I don’t think I can go so far as that.” Something below him seemed to have caught Audley’s attention, from the way he craned his neck to observe it. “In my book a traitor is a traitor.”
The broad back-row-of-the-scrum rugger-playing back gave away nothing.
“On the other hand a debt is also a debt.”
Roche experienced a curious déja-vu feeling, but this time from inside the van, with his own wasps buzzing him.
“Because you did come back to us, at the Tower … and I didn’t think you would…”
He could feel the cobweb-touch of wasps on his hand, where it lay on the coverlet like an old man’s, with the veins raised on it.
“If I could have squeezed out through that damned hole, then I would have … But I couldn’t, so I didn’t have any choice … But you had a choice,” said Audley to the garden.
Roche realised that Audley was talking about a debt of his own, not something Major Roche had left unpaid behind him.
“Also you warned d’Auberon. And I know that because I phoned him later that night, to tell him to lie low … But you’d already warned him. And you didn’t have to do that either …”
Roche felt light-headed. “But you don’t like d’Auberon—“
“No … Or, more accurately, we don’t like each other—there’s too much history between us, ancient as well as modern … And he’s a most intractably honourable man, and he thinks I’m not… Perhaps he’s right, too.” The immense shoulders flexed under their width of expensive broadcloth. “Though, oddly enough, if he’d given me those wretched papers of his I’d never have turned them over to Fred Clinton—not in a thousand years…”
A thousand years?
It is knightly to keep faith—even after a thousand years!
Roche understood at last what he had never really believed until now. And more than that—that Genghis Khan had been right, and Wimpy had been right too: that Clinton was recruiting trouble—that where he had acted from some irrational urge which he still didn’t understand, this man’s code of conduct was already chiselled in stone, for better or worse, regardless of intelligent self-interest.
And d’Auberon too?
So the French and Clinton—and the British—had both got their bad bargains, to screw up the commonsense order of things … the French already, and the British in due course, as Genghis Khan had forecast—
But he was getting his benefit now, against the odds, because of it. And that was the only thing that mattered now, never mind a thousand years!
Audley swung round. “You probably don’t understand a word I’m saying. But it’s of no consequence, it’s purely a private matter between me and myself.”
He looked at Roche, and dismissed him, and started past the foot of the bed, but then halted with his hand on the door-knob, and turned back.
“The trouble with you, Roche, is … you’ve always been a victim—at least, right from the time that clever little Russian bitch fixed you up in Japan—and we’ve got a picture of her, large as life, in Dzerzhinsky Street three months after she drowned herself—Clinton has, anyway.”
Beyond pain there was nothing. It wasn’t very different from falling under a Delaroche Royale: nothing couldn’t hurt—
“But you weren’t a victim that evening—you were all your own man. So if anyone comes to you now, and tries to change that, I’ve given you more than enough to put them down—right?”
Nothing still couldn’t hurt.
Audley almost turned away, into the doorway he had opened for himself, but then slipped his hand into his pocket before he could complete the turn.
“Don’t let the buggers get you down, eh?” He flipped a letter on to the bed, beside Roche’s hand.
Before he summoned up the strength to touch the letter, Roche saw that someone had already opened it for him. But that was to be expected.
It was funny about Julie: once it had been said out loud it was as though he had always known it, but had merely hidden it from himself as he had tried to hide so many other things. So the words had no echo: they were said and done with, leaving nothing more to say that he didn’t already know.
My own dearest David—
There was a nice breathless Lexy-sound about her proposals for their future, even though she’d got him all wrong. But then so had Audley—and so had everyone.
Also … it did rather look as though he was about to become a victim again.
But this time round that didn’t seem such an unhappy fate.
The End
Soldier No More Page 38