by Joseph Hone
I suddenly saw the telegrams from Cairo and Beirut – the ‘extras’ and the ‘ordinaries’ – piling up all over our building: unheeded, blowing along the corridors in that lavender wind, with only Quinlan, in his smart uniform and old campaign ribbons, left to chase hopelessly after them; the whole of the Middle East – Arafat and Sadat and Gaddafi – who would do nothing untoward that day, who would go into purdah for twenty-four hours or lie prostrate tending their soul, and all because Sir George (the ‘Dragon’ as he’d been known) had passed on and was to be handsomely commemorated with a few hymns, a quantity of drink and international truce among the intelligence community.
A clock chimed twelve from some church nearby. We left the bar and fell out into the sun, dizzy with goodwill, as children released for the day on a king’s funeral.
*
Sir George – we knew now, at last, in a spate of memoirs and histories released by the thirty-year official papers ruling – had been a hero during the war, channelling Allied support through Special Operations Executive to any number of resistance groups on the continent – though much of his effort, it had since been confirmed by the war historians, had unfortunately taken the form of saturation bombing: one agent placed on the continent at the expense of ten caught and executed.
Certainly I didn’t see many women or civilians in the church when we got there: widows or children from that war, bereft by Sir George’s elaborate ploys. No doubt they preferred to keep their own private counsels that morning, sharing informal griefs, far from that loud and self-congratulatory church.
The congregation, then, was official and extensive, filling every pew right to the back where we sat, spilling over to the very doors of the church.
We had heard the babble of many tongues as we came in: hard-faced, white-haired old men – French, Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian, Slav. They’d come in chartered planes, Basil told me, from all over Europe. And here they were, triumphant, as all survivors are, but now with more triumph still, that here, in an old Wren church, rebuilt over the wild flowers and dead masonry of the blitz, they had come to celebrate a final victory: they had outlived their patron and master: the Dragon had been put away. They had at last succeeded him and though it was too late to rule, for this one day they would be kings; memories could be deeply stirred, all sorts of derring-do evoked – now, in the rich history of the church, where even the dirtiest wars became part of the Good Fight, and later, more informally, over a fork lunch in Mayfair.
Yet I didn’t blame them – the old men in their severe suits, some tailored for one arm, the crimson of many decorations and orders peeping over breast pockets and round lapels. Theirs had been a better fight than ours had ever been in the glass tower half a mile away. That was obvious and I felt an interloper, a spy in a glittering council chamber, suddenly seeing for the first time the whole map of the Grand Design.
I don’t suppose that more than a quarter of the congregation knew the words or the music of the first hymn, ‘To Be A Pilgrim’. But the voice of the whole church, like the rising frenzy of a victory parade, hit the vaulted roof by the start of the second verse, when people had found their stride, miming the words where they didn’t know them.
Then the choir sang an anthem, accompanied by trumpeters from the Central RAF Band – the sweet-harsh sounds piercing the silence in a long voluntary when the voices had died: ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’.
An Air Marshal read the first lesson: ‘“I have lifted up mine eyes unto the Lord and seen my salvation …”’
The second hymn had not such a sprightly tune and there was a more ragged response to it. The words, too, were less easy and many among the foreign congregation dipped into their hymn sheets in confusion. Perhaps because of their failure to do the hymn justice in the end, a restlessness fell over the church just after the start of the address, given by an old comrade-in-arms of Sir George’s.
‘Nobody can be all things to all men. And there are people – some of you here indeed – who will have had your disagreements with the Dragon. He was never a man to beat about the bush. But that you are here, however many bones you picked with him in the past, is a measure of his – and your – constancy and success.’
Now the restlessness seemed to have congealed and isolated itself some three or four pews ahead of me: there was a strange movement of heads and flurry of broad backs. Then I saw what it was: a middle-aged man in a white Burberry had slumped across the pew in front of him, and friends or colleagues to either side were trying to revive him, pulling his head back and opening his collar. I couldn’t see the man’s face. But his thin hair was tossed about and his head lolled on a shoulder next him, falling sideways, right down on the pew behind, like a confident lover in the back row of a cinema.
They got him out, sliding him along the bench and onto the side aisle, just ahead of me to my left. His two friends held him, linking round his back, the man’s arms stretched about their shoulders. Then they came past me, holding him up like a hooker going into a tight scrum, except that his legs trailed along over the flagstones like a marionette’s. I have never seen anyone so dead.
But few people in the congregation had noticed. The address went on unabated. ‘… Sir George had many enemies. But at the end only one was undefeated: the Last Enemy …’
Life was imitating death, I thought, as I glanced at Basil beside me, a query in my expression, for he had been watching this little drama intently, as if he knew the man.
‘What? Who?’ I whispered.
But Basil dodged the question, by moving out of his seat as quickly as a cat, and following the grisly trio down the side aisle. I heard one of the small side doors open and the man’s feet scraping over a grating – and when I turned I saw Basil for an instant in his dark suit, framed in the doorway, standing like an expectant undertaker outside in the sun.
2
I remember thinking it was too soon for corpses – that Basil, for all his devious skills, could hardly have laid this on for me. Yet even so, that was surely the moment to have bailed out – away from that victorious church, celebrating death all too effectively – and found myself a back table at L’Escargot.
Instead I hung around after the service. I suppose I was curious: that dull passion of our trade which, though buried for years in Oxfordshire, could not have quite died in me and had come again that day, into the air, warmed by drink and memory and by the vision of a Burberry with a body inside being humped out of a Wren church.
Basil was shifting about uneasily on the pavement like a bookie’s runner when we came out. An ambulance had picked up the man some moments before, the siren trailing away down towards the Strand.
‘Who was it?’ Jameson asked. The Beaune had crusted up on Basil’s lips in the heat and he licked them now, curling his tongue about like a fly-catcher, as though trying to re-activate the taste.
‘Jock. Jock McKnight. He was in Nine with me – just after the war.’
‘Nine?’ Darley asked innocently.
‘Slavs and Soviets.’
‘Heart?’ Jameson inquired anxiously, straightening his tie, sobering up. This untimely death had cast a gloom over the whole proceedings.
‘I should think so,’ Basil said. ‘He must have been getting on.’
Basil peered round him, gazing inquisitively at the congregation as they left the church. Despite his medical verdict, he might have been looking for a murderer, I thought.
‘Yes,’ he went on, continuing his inspection over Darley’s shoulder. ‘We both worked on an inter-departmental committee years ago: set up to deal with Tito after he broke with Moscow. Jock was very good on the Slavs and Soviets. Pity. Ticker must have packed in.’
Basil moved towards the main doorway of the church to speak to someone and we vaguely followed. There was a tub of laurel just inside the railings by the side entrance and I put my foot up on the rim of the barrel to do up one of my laces while I waited.
Just as I put my shoe up a drop of blood fell on the toe
cap. Blood? Yes, it was certainly blood. The bright sunlight showed its colour clearly now – dripping down over the shiny green leaves from somewhere deep inside the bush. Then I saw where it must come from: there was a hymn sheet pressed into the middle of the leaves, about half way up. I could just see the deeply embossed print on the cover: ‘In Memoriam: George Alkert –’ But when I went to pull it out half the thick cartridge paper came away in my hand. The back of the sheet was sodden with fresh blood and my thumb and index finger was soaked with it now, as if I’d just pressed my hand deep into a still bleeding wound.
And there was another moment to run. And yet by then one wanted to know: had Basil lied about the man’s death or was he genuinely ignorant? And what of the man’s two friends who had helped him out? Were they friends or enemies? And what of the man himself, who had obviously put the hymn sheet away into an inside pocket after the memorial address had started. Had he been shot with a silencer? And if so, by whom and why?
Cowardice, I sometimes think, is not so common as we like to imagine. We are more often rash to the point of bravery. And if not that, pride will usually prevent a retreat – even in some unimportant matter like doing the dishes before we allow ourselves to sit down for coffee. We set up borders and checkpoints for ourselves every day, small trials of strength, confirmations of nerve or integrity in a hundred small measures taken. So too, in larger issues, we will set ignorance, curiosity or even superstition up against our better judgement – determined to prove that what is purely wilful in our nature has more value than our sanity. The Greeks defied the fates in myth: but we sometimes do it in fact – sudden spendthrifts, goaded beyond endurance by the prosaic in our lives. And that was true of me, no doubt, as I followed the others down along the Strand, unwillingly yet impatient, pushing through the lunchtime crowds.
The sun lay directly overhead now like a hot plate. Girls in thin dresses floated in the light, shrieking with sudden inane enthusiasms, turning quickly, stopping, getting in our way, exchanging brash and knowing looks with boys in bother boots, their faces happily cleaned out of thought or care. They had the nature of plant life unique to the city: miraculous fruit, erupting overnight, that bloomed on tarmac and oil fumes: diaphanous-skinned girls, ready to drop at a touch now into some lap on a bench down by the river.
I had forgotten the vigorous arrogance of London summer lunchtimes, the mocking youth of secretaries and long-haired clerks. What would I do walking off into those crowds alone? There was no girl to pick up there who wouldn’t think me a middle-aged refugee from the mackintosh brigade; no bar to be easily propped up off Leicester Square with talk to strangers about prospects for the Derby; and to eat alone at L’Escargot would be to sit there wondering about the blood on my fingers. Then, too, there had been the shapes of death all morning in the summer air. An elephant will move away and die apart from its tribe. But humans are less considerate and tend to herd together in the face of mortality, so that when Basil hailed a cab near the Savoy and called me to hurry up, I quickened my step. It was too late to turn back then – even if I’d wanted to.
*
The Special Forces Club enjoyed a small leasehold at the back of a large Victorian town house at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac just off Park Lane. The front and grander part of this red brick pile was now a smart, but not exclusive gambling club, with a candy-striped awning reaching out over the front door. But that day it was the old tradesmen’s entrance, twenty yards away, which commanded attention, as cars clogged up the narrow approach and old, stiff-shouldered, white-haired men embraced each other on the pavements, not yet sure of their direction, so that the lane was filled with guttural continental queries.
‘C’est par là!’
‘Non – c’est tout droit. Et prenez garde!’
‘I’m not a member,’ I said to Basil as he pushed his way ahead through the crowd.
‘Be my guest,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder and looking at me, mischief flooding his eyes. Basil was considerably smaller than me, almost an overgrown schoolboy. And I saw him then as a sophisticated sixth-former abroad with a group of younger boys, pressing us forward towards the first forbidden delights of a brothel.
The heat and the crush inside the club was so great that my first thought was to try and rise above into some cooler airs. Another bar was open on the first floor, we were told, and we all made our way up to it, threading our way between old men already exhausted, sitting on the stairs, underneath photographs of their former glory, great moments from Europe’s clandestine past: Jean Moulin with a machine pistol among resistance comrades on some scrubby hill: Randolph Churchill in a huge sheepskin coat playing chess over a bottle of rakia somewhere in Yugoslavia.
At the top of the stairs we came into a long gilded dining-room where a white-laid table, groaning with food and drink, ran along all one side, and three big bow windows, wide open, gave over a small courtyard at the back, a chestnut tree springing up from the middle of it, some of its mint-green spring leaves almost touching the windows. It was less crowded; there was a glimmer of a breeze coming in, mixing with the sharp, tart smell of lemon and gin and the sound of cracking ice as it drowned in tonic. Basil rubbed his hands judiciously and licked his lips once more. Then, after an interval in which he seemed to calculate the quantity of alcohol available and equate it satisfactorily with his future capacity, he moved off to do battle at the long white table.
And yet he must have drunk no more than tonic water most of that afternoon. Certainly an hour later he was totally sober when he introduced me to the man in the billiard-room: a different Basil, no longer the inane schoolboy, no longer deferential: Basil in command.
I’d been talking to a middle-aged French woman about her experiences in the resistance, how in 1943 she had been put on top of the notorious lime quarry outside Meudon and faced by a German Wehrmacht major with a Lüger, anxious for information about her comrades.
‘I didn’t tell him, though,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t he shoot you then?’
‘I didn’t know – at that moment. I was taken back to Paris – then sent to an ordinary prison camp, and released eventually. The major “lost” my file – on purpose.’
‘Why?’
‘He fell in love with me – there, on top of that quarry. He’d been interrogating me for days before.’
I was astonished and not prepared to believe the story – and I said so.
‘No, it’s true,’ she said. ‘There are stories – some stories – from that war, that ended well.’
‘How do you know – did you meet him again?’
Basil had come up next me meanwhile and was pressing me for a word, but I persisted with the woman.
‘Yes,’ she said smiling. ‘I did. He survived the war. He traced me in Paris afterwards. I married him,’ she added simply. Then she turned and looked round the room, searching someone out. ‘There. He’s over there,’ she said.
I followed her glance and as I looked a man pressed through the crowd, coming towards us, glass in hand: quite an old man, upright, smiling, with the remnants of fair hair.
She introduced us. ‘My husband,’ she said.
We shook hands. Then Basil forced me away. I was glad I didn’t stay longer. I didn’t want to know anything more about it, yet I walked on air with Basil into the billiard-room, thinking how wrong I’d been about life: life only as defeat.
‘This is the Prime Minister,’ Basil said, as we pushed our way into a gloomy, panelled room with long clerestory windows high above the covered billiard-table: a room where the sun had never been and sad old men had played with sticks and balls for a hundred years. In the far corner a group of continentals – a French army officer in a pillbox hat and a one-armed man I hadn’t noticed before in a wheelchair – surrounded a figure brandishing a pipe.
‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Was he in the resistance? I didn’t know.’
The wine I’d had, without much food, had begun to play in me some time before,
and I felt I could see the afternoon out nicely now, with one or two more drinks and a few jokes, before dinner and early bed in a club I belonged to not far down the road.
Basil paused at one corner of the billiard-table, trying to negotiate a passage between two excitable old partisans who were playing a war game with matches on the greeen baize cover.
Basil said, ‘He wants to meet you.’
I thought he meant one of the men in front of us and I half held out my hand before Basil pulled me on towards the corner of the room.
And then I was face to face with the Prime Minister, his sage, plump head nodding rhythmically in answer to some elaborate explanation from the French officer about de Gaulle’s dissatisfactions in 1940 – a matter which the Prime Minister clearly felt uninterested in. Our arrival provided him with a thankful exit, and he turned to both of us, smiling at me hugely, shaking my hand with surprised bonhomie, as if I were a long lost relative come to praise him on ‘This is Your Life’.
‘Mr Marlow,’ he said, again with the hint of deeply considered joy in his voice – as if here at last was the only person in this gathering that he really wanted to meet. ‘How good of you to come.’ He turned to his companions. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’
The Prime Minister put an arm round my shoulder and led Basil and me some little distance along the wall of the room, to where there was a small raked stand of old cinema tip-up seats where members could watch the billiard games. We sat down in line abreast – the seats going ‘clank-clank-clank’ as they took our weight, like louts settling into the back row of a local Odeon, noisily and abruptly. And I thought no more conspicuous meeting with a Prime Minister, about something presumably confidential, could have been contrived. Yet perhaps I was wrong: here in this room crowded with the clandestine, in a building packed to the doors with old secrets now come to a fine and alcoholic bloom, who would have suspected the start of any new conspiracy?