The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  Yet, as they say of childbirth, one comes to forget even the worst kind of pain and one day a few weeks ago I realised I might be coming to an end of my rural needs. I had started, not talking to myself, but worse – holding imaginary parties in the small dining room of the cottage: scintillating affairs with old friends, many of them dead, which spilled happily over into the other rooms of the place as I wandered through them, sherry glass in hand, imagining it zibib or some other sharp foreign drink from long ago.

  On that particular evening, I had begun to recreate the annual reception for the Queen’s Birthday at the old British Residency on the Nile, where I had worked in the mid-fifties. By sunset I had summoned up a bevy of dark Nubian waiters, each slashed at the waist with royal blue cummerbunds, carrying silver trays of iced martinis high over their heads, pushing through the guests under the flame trees on the long lawn which, before the corniche road was built, went all the way down to the river in those days.

  At the end of the evening, the furniture all askew and the sherry bottle empty, I felt a terribly sharp bite of social disappointment that my friends had left. I felt, in my small cottage, the weight of huge empty spaces around me, echoing reception rooms and verandahs, and smelt the mud of the low water riding on the breeze over the Nile and heard the evening cry of the Muezzin, harshly amplified from the mosque tower by Kasr-el-Nil bridge …

  I realised when I woke with a headache next morning that I had cured myself at last – but that if I stayed much longer in the country I should get ill again.

  That was last week: I tried to forget about it and I returned to my book. But this morning the fire has come back and I have drunk nothing. Tomorrow, I know, I shall go to London.

  *

  There was a reason, had I needed one: my solicitor, who also handled my finances, such as they were, had written some time before, suggesting a visit to discuss the possibility of some ‘judicious re-investment’ as he put it – an unnecessary thought to my mind, since what little money I had, in the hands of a well known Irish brewery, appeared judiciously placed already.

  Barker, an Englishman of a lost kind who had only one eye, tended to the legal problems and finances of many retired people from the Service: he had once been vaguely attached to it himself, in 1942, as a Captain in charge of a commando company, before being invalided out, with partial vision, after a sten gun had blown-up in his face, on secret manoeuvres in Scotland before the Dieppe raid. His had been a short, inglorious war. Subsequently he had tried to recompense for this by maintaining contact with a world of derring-do in the shape of elderly Brigadiers with tax problems and younger men in the SIS whose marriages had gone astray.

  He had moved offices since I had last seen him and sat now, back to the window, on the top floor of an old Georgian building in Jockey’s Fields up from High Holborn: a judicious man indeed, surrounded now with his comfortable club furniture, but still with the remnants of unsatisfied activity in his face. He fidgeted while he talked, charging and releasing the silver cap of a ball-point like a rifle bolt.

  ‘I rather think Metal Box might be worthwhile,’ he said, gazing to one side of his desk where a stack of old tin deed boxes ran half way up the wall.

  I followed his gaze, misunderstanding him. ‘Metal box? I don’t have any –’

  ‘Oh, no. I meant the company who make them: containers, foil, wrappings of all sorts.’

  ‘I see. What’s wrong with the brewery?’

  ‘Nothing. But I hear – confidentially – there’s to be a new rights issue with MB: two for one. If one bought in now… It might keep you going for another year.’

  ‘At most?’

  ‘At most, if that.’ Barker was like a doctor staving off bad news: one suspected that he had something worse up his sleeve. ‘Inflation. Your money is not what it was and really a year is too long. It may run out sooner. Had you thought of any kind of – work?’ he added very diffidently. ‘You used to, didn’t you? The Service …’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll have to think of something,’ I said, ‘but not that.’

  ‘Of course your cottage must have increased in value – a great deal. You could sell –’

  ‘No, not that either. That’s the last thing I want. London again, a flat, a job.’

  ‘Well …’ Barker paused, letting the future hang in the air like a bankruptcy. ‘We’ll have to think of something.’

  I’ve forgotten what else we spoke about that morning, except that we agreed to move some money on to Metal Box in a last bid for solvency, since what struck me after some minutes in Barker’s new office, and absorbed me more and more while I was there, was the view from his window: towering up over the old slate roofs of Gray’s Inn, not more than a few hundred yards away, was the monstrous glass block I’d worked in for ten years: naval recruitment at the front with sundry other government offices upstairs, including my own in the Middle East Section of Intelligence.

  Indeed from where I sat I could actually see the window of my old office in Information & Library, the eighth floor, fourth along, where I had thumbed through Al Ahram on damp Monday mornings, waiting for Nellie with the coffee trolley, or gazed out all afternoon at the concrete mess they were making round St Paul’s throughout the sixties, before checking my watch against opening time.

  More and more often, during Barker’s meticulous financial suggestions and provisos, my eye would wander back to the glass façade over his shoulder. And I found, having first recognised it with distaste, that I had begun to think about it with fascination, as a man experiences an extraordinary sense of déjà vu, which haunts him for the rest of the day. I was drawn by incidental memory deep inside the building, through the security checks with Quinlan, the old Irish Service Corps sergeant in the hall, up the murmuring lifts and along the windowless corridors, permanently invested with a lavender-smelling disinfectant they flushed the latrines with, hearing the ‘thwack-thwack’ of busy typewriters running up top copies ‘For Your Eyes Only’ with a single flimsy for registry that more often than not in those days would find its way to Dzherzhinsky Street by the end of the week.

  It was an eerie feeling, sitting safe in Barker’s big red leather chair, huddled among his reassuring nineteenth-century deed boxes, their white lettering naming old families in Herefordshire and great houses in the south-west, while looking out at this glass castle gleaming in the sunlight, an architectural havoc, where all the bad fairies lived and I had worked passage for a rotten decade that had ended nearly ten years before.

  Henry, in his old tortoiseshell specs, had gone from that eighth floor in 1967, sent packing by Williams on his last long journey down the Nile – and so had I, sold out by the same man, from that meagre office with its scratched walnut furniture, half carpet and hatstand I never used, finding solace by comparison in the hospital wing of Durham Jail. Even the duds who left the building in one piece had few reasons to be grateful to anyone in it, while the best usually found death or exile in the small print of their contract half-way through their time there.

  And yet, as I say, I was drawn to it. Even the worst memorials serve to remind us that, as well as the pain, we have lived once, and seen happiness with friends in certain streets when it was evening, had lunch with them on good days or weekend picnics in a Bloomsbury square: that there was some pleasure despite the horror of the times.

  Drinks with Henry, for instance, in that wine bar down the Strand: the champagne which he always ordered, back from some mission, running his finger down the frosted side like a child playing on a clouded window-pane, celebrating a safe return from some folly in the east – the married commuters from Sevenoaks and their secretaries sipping sherry and whispering sweet mischief over candle-lit barrels while we spoke of more distant intimacies: Ahmed’s cloudy news from behind the bar at the Cairo Semiramis and what had passed that week by the pool at the Gezira club.

  These days one can find the past preserved in squalid modern brick and glass as much as in old deed boxes – and s
o it lay now, across the roofs from me, like a temptation one knew was wrong and thus could not resist.

  *

  The wine bar was empty at 11.30, after I’d left Barker’s and walked down to the Strand in the hot summer sunshine. The candles on the barrels were unlit and the manager, an accommodating and sleekly brilliantined Jeeves whom I had known well in the past, must long since have died or moved. But otherwise the place seemed exactly the same as it had been ten years before, almost to the day, when I had last sat there with Henry, swapping gentle taunts about the fatuous vacuity of our lives.

  Even the salt biscuits were the same – too dry and crumbly for pleasure, tasting of old paper.

  And one never forgets a smell, which brought it all back quicker than anything – a musty sourness embedded in the wood and in the furnishings, of wine spilt over many years, that had remained like a coward in the room long after all the happy tribe had left.

  I took a glass of Beaune with me and sat down in the far corner. I thought of my finances and of Barker’s polite warnings. I prayed I wouldn’t have to leave my cottage, which already, after only a few hours in London, beckoned me like a woman. A job, as Barker had hinted? I was unemployable.

  I gazed at the snack menu to take my mind off the idea: ‘Paté de foie à la Maison: 95p’ – a nerveless mix of liver and old bottle-ends still doing time after more than ten years at three times the price. The place began to sicken me with its bland constancy, a stage set always for the same production, with the same props and the same cast waiting for curtain-up at lunchtime: the silly bowler-hatted city men strayed adventurously beyond Throgmorton Street, lunching with fast women – account executives probably – long nosed and 40 who laughed too much; gossip writers from the staider papers, a lone bishop, his purple bib showing like a sore thumb, and country gentlemen in tweeds, up in town for the day without a table in Simpsons, who took the set lunch upstairs in the small restaurant after two rash glasses of South African amontillado below.

  They were beginning to come in all round me now and I was just about to leave, thinking of a more piquant lunch in Soho and some easy film in Leicester Square afterwards.

  I saw him almost from the moment he pushed open the glass doors, coming in out of the sunshine like a harassed refugee: the thin figure sloping up to the bar, in his dark and slightly grubby pinstripe suit, and the old navy blue pullover, same as ever, tight around his neck, so that just the knot of some regimental tie peeped out, like an apology, which none the less could be fully displayed in an emergency and astound everyone with the truth. For Basil Fielding actually had all the right credentials. He hadn’t changed either in ten years, I couldn’t see his face clearly as he moved behind some people to make his order at the bar. But I could remember it well enough, now that the man himself had given me the outlines: the always badly shaved cheeks and chin, stubbled like fine white sandpaper, the slightly blue, spittle-encrusted lips, the ears which drooped thinly down either side of the large face rather like an elephant’s, the air of apologetic dejection. Fielding looked so shifty you couldn’t believe it of him. The devious expression was like a bad caricature, for his eyes always hovered on the edge of such real laughter it made him seem incapable of dishonesty or malice. Or so I had thought in those former years.

  Basil had been the wandering minstrel of our Mid-East Section in the old days, almost a licensed jester, a sad man who yet rejoiced. His job had been ill-defined, most particularly by himself. But it had been in Protocol, even he knew that. It was his function to control liaison and run such formal paperwork as existed between our own and other allied intelligence services, particularly with the CIA. Though I remember once he had lunched at the Soviet Embassy, on some diplomatic pretext or other – for he was officially on the Foreign Office list – and had returned that afternoon with a more than useful piece of information about the rocket base in Baikonur, extracted by Basil from a surprised military attaché, like a poacher tickling a trout.

  There wasn’t really much doubt about it: behind the inefficient footling exterior, Fielding possessed some nameless gift, a man who could lull people with his inanities while all the time calculating just how much he could rob them of without their noticing. While he hummed and hawed and groaned with platitudes, I remember – as though hurtling through some cosmic black hole – that was when he was at his most dangerous, when he had noticed some great potential out of the corner of his eye – some bureaucratic advantage – and was beginning his stalk towards it.

  He hasn’t seen me yet, I thought. ‘Don’t talk to him,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t start anything. He hasn’t seen you.’ And I turned away from him and blew my nose.

  Perhaps this sound alerted him, some sharp aural file index of his identifying me from afar. For the next thing I knew he was beside me, standing diffidently over me, holding two glasses of wine in his age-marked hands – one at such an angle that some drops fell onto my table. I thought he might be drunk for a moment, or hungover.

  ‘Marlow! – the last person. How are you? Haunting the old places?’

  How apt Basil could be, like a fortune-teller who, ten years before, had divined my return here to the very hour and had come now to confirm his prediction.

  ‘Saw you as I came in,’ he went on. ‘Hiding over there in the shadows. You’re not meeting anyone, are you?’ He gestured to the seat beside me.

  ‘No – of course not. Let me get a drink.’ I stood up.

  ‘I’ve brought you one.’

  ‘You knew I was coming here?’

  ‘No!’ he said, drawing the word out in mock horror, as though my thought was quite outlandish. ‘No, my goodness. Just a restorative. In for a whizzer,’ he said brightly, as if trying to jolly himself along with the phrase. And again I had the impression of some unnatural elation in Basil, some disorder in his day which had brought forth such fluent slang. ‘Darley’s here,’ he went on. ‘And Jameson.’ He looked back towards the bar. ‘You remember.’

  I did, vaguely. They had been tyros in my day: new field men making a mess of an old circle in Damascus.

  ‘We’re all going to church round the corner. The RAF place – St Clement Danes,’ Basil went on, licking his dry lips and looking mischievously at me over the rim of his glass before taking a long quaff from it.

  ‘Church?’ I looked at my watch, I remember, the thought so surprised me – as though Basil, an unbeliever of all sorts in the old days, had taken now to some new faith that worshipped on an hourly basis.

  ‘Memorial service. Alkerton. Sir George. Deputy head of SOE during the war, of course. Old fellow died a month ago. You didn’t see it?’ he asked, as thought I might have been an essential witness in a street accident.

  ‘No. I don’t have much interest in that sort of thing now.’

  ‘No,’ Basil agreed and drank deeply again. If not drunk to begin with, as I had thought, he seemed intent on reaching that state as quickly as possible now.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘We’re all going. Everyone’s coming.’ His tone was that of a child anticipating a treat. ‘Drink up and have one at the bar with us. They’d love to see you again. Darley and Jameson, I mean. You’re still quite a hero in the department, you know – though what is it? It must be ten years –’

  ‘I’d rather not, Basil, really –’

  ‘Come on, old man. They’ve seen you. It won’t do any harm.’

  The silly phrase rang out with nothing but innocent temptation then: a day in town, some fine weather, a drink with old colleagues – what could have been more natural? And hadn’t I been thinking of just such things all morning, and for a month before? – the lure of the odd good parts of the past. And here it all was, come timely, in the shape of Basil and Jameson and Darley – if not Henry. All the same, though not close friends, these three had never harmed me, were innocent cogs in another part of a stupid machine: and their names, like those on some old colonial war memorial, suggested only simple comradeship that morning as the corks began
to pop and the bishop took another half of Veuve de Vernay, the perfume of many freshly opened bottles beginning to invade the room and warm the stupid chatter all around me.

  I got up with Basil after a mild argument and went with him to the bar.

  ‘Ah,’ Darley said carefully, holding out his hand, inspecting me like a masterpiece that yet might just possibly prove to be a fake. ‘“Home is the hero …”’

  ‘“And the hunter home from the hill,”’ Jameson added in a deep sotto voce, before turning away and belching a fraction. They were drinking champagne, the bottle between them already badly depleted.

  ‘Coming back into the ranks?’ Darley asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I – I was just up in town. I’m not staying.’

  I felt like one of the tweedy men around me, awkward and guileless in this knowing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, anxious for Paddington at 5.10 and a first-class corner seat to Kemble Junction. I didn’t have the right words with me; I didn’t fit.

  ‘My goodness,’ Darley said vigorously, the drink beginning to talk in him, ‘But you’ll have to come to the service. Everyone’s coming. Church is just round the corner.’

  A week before I should have refused: the idea would have seemed preposterous. But a week before I hadn’t started to dream of the old Residency on the Nile over an empty sherry bottle.

  I didn’t reply one way or the other. But I could feel the drink seeping into me, laying a firm foundation of acquiescence.

  ‘And lunch,’ Basil said in his humble way, eyes downcast, looking at me through his eyelashes like a virgin. ‘There’s a fork lunch at the Special Forces Club in Mayfair afterwards.’

  ‘Ah yes, ‘Jameson said comfortably, ordering the other half of champagne. ‘What a day. What – a – day!’ He smiled beatifically, dragging the phrase out, then raising his glass and savouring the frosty bubbles. He was like Mole too, I thought, released from the underground into the sunshine that first day of spring. ‘We’ve taken the day off, you see,’ he went on. ‘All of us.’