The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  Marcus nodded several times, looking at me closely.

  ‘Very well then. We’ll see. I’d only add, Marlow, that no one can ever really give their words in this business: not me, not even your friend Phillips, who gave so many.’

  Marcus left this curious thought hanging in the warm air before showing me out and when I looked back I saw Arthur carefully stowing the electric kettle away, deep within a tea-chest. This caravan was obviously moving on at once. Marcus was covering his tracks against me already. As far as he was concerned our meeting had never taken place.

  *

  Basil met me in the club that evening at six, wandering brokenly round the lobby in his smudged blue suit, gazing at the cellar notices and club functions as I came down the oak staircase. The valet had pressed my own suit while I’d had a bath. Basil saw this from a distance, sizing me up, his shifty eyes detailing my clothes. Ah, he seemed to say, the clubman hero, up from the country to a world of snooker parties and dinner nights and Margaux ’47, while I risk myself about mean streets and sterile offices; a lone pad in Kensington after a half pint and a divorced wife down in Cornwall.

  What a liar Basil was, I realised again just then. He looked like an embarrassed retainer, a tradesman wringing his hands and doffing his cap, come to secure a debt from a gentleman in his London club. Whereas I knew now that it was Basil who held the advantage, who had me on a string, who had only told me half the Phillips story. I had suspected something of this, of course, since I’d first met him in the wine bar in the Strand the day before – known then that dealing with him was like disabling an octopus: that Basil always had an extra hand to stab you in the back.

  He looked worse than usual, if that were possible: hang-dog and pale-faced, with the blood drained right out of the thin lobes of his elephant ears: a water biscuit now, wafer-thin, who might at any moment disintegrate, flake away right there in the middle of the hall, leaving just a pile of old clothes: a liquor-spattered pullover, minor public school tie and a pair of dirty desert boots from Marks and Spencer. And I thought I knew why he looked like death warmed up: Accounts, he’d probably discovered that afternoon, had held up my first payment on some technicality: his plans for me had been spiked by Marcus.

  The Library was empty. The two long sash windows were open at the bottom, muslin curtains drifting slightly in the warm air, while the evening traffic rushed round Grosvenor Square in the distance.

  ‘You look done in,’ I said. ‘The bar is open.’ I thought what a treat it might be if Marcus were to turn up again and see us both there, for indeed I’d not come to look on their apparent service rivalries as anything but a re-run of an old farce, endemic to British intelligence since the war.

  ‘No. No, I think here –’

  We sat by the long-dead grate filled with a dusty paper fan, in two big leather armchairs, stuffed dusty clubmen in dark suits, a distance apart, up to some weary mischief.

  ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘I saw them this morning. I’m going to help them.’

  Basil’s face didn’t flower at all.

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said at last.

  And then I was surprised. He drew a long envelope from his pocket and passed it across to me. There was a wad of new £20 notes inside an inch thick.

  ‘Five thousand. To start with. Don’t pay it in all at once,’ Basil said. ‘Sign the chit: not your own name. We’ve put you down as Wardell. Alan Wardell.’

  I looked at the flimsy Treasury receipt with its five carbons and wondered how on earth Basil had managed to outsmart Marcus. I supposed the money had come direct from some other secret fund directly administered by the PM. But I signed it anyway and put the money away. It bulged in my inner pocket, a Christmas present without end for a child.

  ‘Cash?’ I said.

  ‘Well, one likes to be definite about money: keep one’s word.’ Basil looked at me sharply, as though I’d tried to make a fuss about accepting it or was about to ask for more.

  ‘No, I meant that it’s usually by cheque. It was last time.’

  ‘Not in this instance. We don’t want any trace between you and us – and in any case you’re not an employee of ours any more, Peter.’

  Basil, just as Marcus had done, preened himself on his secret status and my public exclusion – the invisible membranes between us which we both saw, oppositely, as a division between the quick and the dead.

  ‘So you saw them then?’

  ‘It went like clockwork,’ I nodded.

  ‘What did I tell you.’

  ‘You told me. But now tell me more.’

  I didn’t quite know what I wanted Basil to talk about. But I wanted to get him going on some kind of chat which might give me a lever into what was going on between his faction (and the PM’s, obviously) and Marcus’s. It seemed that Basil was very much the PM’s man; and though I wasn’t going to tell him anything about my meeting with Marcus I wanted to see if this right-wing threat was the real reason for sending me after Phillips.

  ‘Tell you about what?’ Basil said, stonewalling.

  ‘About our meeting, for example. You said there was a leak somewhere in your section, that I couldn’t ’phone you. Is that how it’s always going to be?’

  ‘The leak? Oh, that’s just a precaution. As you know yourself there have always been divisions in the service: presently it’s a slightly left-wing element causing trouble – which Phillips was identified with. Well, quite a few of the traditionalists would be very happy if he never turned up again. So we’re keeping you well clear of them, that’s all: no open contact if possible, no phone calls. I’ll use your club here for any messages. Put them up on the board in the back hall. You do the same for me. Either I or someone else will drop round here most days. Allright?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Basil picked up an old copy of Country Life on the table next him and started to flick through the pages of fine houses. Our interview seemed at an end.

  ‘Good,’ I said, while pondering Lindsay Phillips’s remarkable transference from extreme right to left wings in the political spectrum in the space of a few hours, in the estimation of two of his colleagues. One of them was lying. Perhaps both were. I couldn’t restrain a smile.

  ‘Yes?’ Basil looked at me sharply.

  ‘Nothing.’

  We got up and walked towards the door. One thing at least was obvious: Basil and Marcus were on opposite sides of the fence in the matter of Phillips – Basil anxious to prosper the PM’s cause by nailing these old men with microphones, while Marcus was equally anxious to forestall him. I was the patsy in the middle of what was no more than an unusually bitter internal squabble.

  Basil wouldn’t take any sort of a drink at the end of our meeting, sloping off into the evening without even wishing me well. That surprised me too. Perhaps his merrymaking the previous day had filled him with remorse. But I doubted it. In the old days he’d been such a funny man; now the gift seemed suddenly to have died in him.

  I watched him disappear into the rush hour, merging at once among the other preoccupied, anonymous figures. Basil had suddenly become like them, not a man of witty parts any more, but someone who had turned in on himself, the better to hide some dangerous secret, like a suburban murderer now, hurrying home to bury his wife’s corpse.

  I glanced at the piece of paper he’d given me before we left the Library; he’d written down the name of the man in Scotland who I could safely liaise with in my investigations up there. Chief Superintendent Carse of the Perthshire CID, Court Buildings, Tayside, Perth. I knew the buildings well – a black gothic pile, stained with years of mist and spume from the huge tumbling river right in front of it beyond the quayside – a river fed by all the streams of my childhood higher up, the burns and lakes that spread like fingers and hands between the hills, a whole lost world falling from the moors about Glenalyth.

  5

  A fat man in small gold-rimmed specs – an excessively large and jolly man like an apologetic bear – was marshalling our thea
tre party in the long foyer of the Wigmore Hall for Rachel’s birthday concert that evening.

  They used to say one never spots a rival in matters of the heart until it is too late. But I could see it then, almost the first minute I laid eyes on George Willoughby-Hughes, that he would always be someone’s rival in this way, that he would pop up untimely, like an impertinent water diviner, searching out and tapping every intimacy, for he had that dangerous quality of adolescent energy allied to an equally childish vulnerability: the kind of man who would organise Coarse Rugby parties on Wimbledon Common for his male friends on Saturday afternoons only to have his bruises tended by most of their wives at all odd hours for the rest of the following week.

  He busied himself now, a man gloriously come into his own, bursting out of an old double-breasted ‘thirties dress suit, surrounded by half a dozen of the Phillips’s friends, strangers to me but part, obviously, of a vast encircling intimacy to him. He held out his arms to them, indiscriminately, turning about on his neat dancing pumps, facing one person while still addressing another, like a huge clockwork toy, some masterwork of greeting, where the mechanism had lost synchronisation with the slightly squeaky voice.

  ‘Julia! Max! Come – come!’ He looked beyond me imperiously, towards some new arrivals, then pushed forward to greet them. As he moved I saw Madeleine who had been hidden by his great bulk.

  I kissed her on the cheek. She wore a long midnight-blue velvet skirt, splayed out from her waist, topped by a voile blouse, the arms floating in a thinner weave, but coming tightly up into a sort of ruff about the throat. The others, including her companion, an elderly man in a thick beard, were all in evening dress.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking down at my lounge suit, a little tired now, two days out from home.

  ‘It doesn’t matter a bit. Come.’ She took my arm, looking over my shoulder. ‘Meet George.’

  And I knew at once who George was. I could hear him now, bounding behind me like a frisky animal.

  ‘George?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘George Willoughby-Hughes. You never met, did you? Rachel’s agent, Rachel’s manager, Rachel’s –’

  She paused, looking over my shoulder. ‘Rachel’s lover,’ I thought she might finish with. But she smiled, saying simply, ‘Rachel’s cross.’

  ‘Hello! Good man,’ George said, putting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing it. ‘Fine, fine. Wonderful. I’ve heard so much –’ He looked beyond me again, already marking down another more urgent social call. ‘Just a minute, a moment –’ He pushed past me. Then he turned back. ‘You’re on the aisle: B-10. Behind Sir Brian.’ Then he was gone. Luckily Madeleine was still there.

  ‘Sir Brian?’ I asked her. I felt I almost needed a drink.

  ‘Brian Allcock,’ Madeleine said. ‘The Professor – an old colleague of Lindsay’s. Over there.’ She gestured with her eyes. It was the man with the thick beard: a bird’s nest of a beard: a long, studious slightly eccentric face, like Edward Lear’s in all but the nose which was of ordinary size. He looked like a musicologist, rudely unearthed just a moment before from the pages of some fascinating but smudged original manuscript: a myopic, romantic figure in a dress suit of Edwardian vintage – a man impossible to associate with any kind of secret derring-do. If a good cover were a prerequisite in his trade, then this man must, I thought, have been invisible in his work.

  ‘And June – and Max,’ Madeleine said, turning me towards the most recent arrivals.

  ‘Hi,’ said Max. June and Max were American.

  ‘Friends of Rachel’s –’

  ‘And you! And of you, Madame!’ Max interrupted over-courteously, pushing forward, kissing Madeleine’s hand.

  Max was short and thickset, as his wife (or girl-friend) was tall. Max wore a frilly dress shirt and had barely any hair: a youthful chubbiness about the face but with far older eyes – an unreal tan over the skin, not oily, but something assumed all the same with lotions or sun-lamps, giving him a veneer of slight artistry and inevitable success. He wasn’t old enough to look like a million dollars: give that a year or two, he seemed to say: I still have a leasehold on youth – and the money will come soon enough, goddammit …

  For June, on the other hand, the cash had obviously been inherited already. A woman with a genuine tan and dark Mediterranean hair rising up from a white silk sheath dress, she looked like someone born to lose her father’s fortune gamely.

  ‘Hi,’ said Max to me again, while June smiled at me from a height, beatifically. Her hand was so limp and damp I felt it would come away with mine if I held it too long, and drop like dough to the floor.

  ‘Max writes musicals,’ Madeleine said. ‘With George. George does the music, Max the words. A lyricist,’ she added sweetly.

  ‘Hi.’ Max addressed me thus a third time. He was no spendthrift with words. They must have been quite short musicals, I thought.

  Then there was Marianne: George’s wife. I could hear her loud, broken voice talking rapidly to someone over by the box-office before I met her – the ever more insistent tones of someone who can never bring themselves to get to the point of a story for fear of then losing their interlocutor.

  Marianne – as verbose as Max was reticent: fiftyish and sad, a music copyist once, she soon informed me. She and George lived round the corner off Marylebone High Street, she added, among many other things: Marianne, who talked so much because her world was empty, and words could fill that for an hour or so, words to other people, huge verbal deposits, as I afterwards learnt, from her long silence with George, which she banked now among us with great clatter and alarming gusto.

  ‘Well?’ Madeleine asked me later, looking me straight in the eyes, too forcefully – as if trying to hold on to something, to stop herself sinking in this pool of friendly emotion. Madeleine was sitting on the edge of a cliff. We had left the morning and the stark white tent filled with brilliant colours where she had hidden as a masked intruder. But here, where the drama was far more tense and subtle, the indistinct lines of emotion on her face suddenly reflected this and the pain became awfully clear once more: wounds of past thought opened her eyes again like Japanese flowers in water. She seemed, as I watched her, before the concert started, to pre-empt the music, hear it secretly herself and run through all its heartbreak before a note was struck.

  I thought she was about to break down and cry; I touched her arm. ‘What is it?’

  ‘No. Nothing – of course. Nothing.’ She gripped herself mentally even as she spoke.

  Her face changed then, brightened. Light spread into her eyes, seeped over the edges and crinkled all the valleys in her skin. Her face warmed – as if by a lot of little fires – and the sad mould splintered off her cheeks right there in front of me.

  Just as Basil an hour before had been a dark omen in his shabby suit, a Charon crossing Brook Street into the dull evening, so Madeleine was a harbinger now, marvellously bright, emerging from tragedy, a dove come to an ark where all of us had been lost many days far out on the waters. She cast out pain like a saint just then. Marshalled by George, with her glittering imprimatur, something – faith or art – would lock the doors in the hall and resolve everything for an hour or two.

  The bell went. The flock was finally gathered together.

  ‘Well,’ Madeleine said, ‘shall we go?’ She turned and led us into the evening.

  *

  I am no musician. I might tell some of this story more easily if I were. As it is that evening and most of its characters must remain strange to me. Rachel is the one exception, since it was her particular problem, which came to a head that night, that she so craved an end of mystery, a less ambiguous connection with the world than that which art follows, that she forsook her music in this cause, and thus she entered my dull lists again – which she had escaped from years before: the ambush of verbal cause and effect, the dry rot of why and wherefore, the death rattle of explanation that lies acorss the border from what is simply felt.

  Still, she ga
ve up her music later, after that concert, and there is still that concert to describe. And here, too, since in the estimation of those who were there and knew about music, it was by far her best performance, I am faced with defeat in writing about it. Bad music, since it fails, easily falls into the realm of words. But if the harmony rises, finding perfection, each step it takes is one more giant stride away from language.

  There is a crucial phrase in flute playing, remembered from my days in Notting Hill with Rachel: ‘a good embouchure’– describing the essence of the whole business, in which the player’s lips must be so formed and placed against the raised mouthpiece that the air stream strikes the edge of the hole in such a way as to produce a perfect tone. And tone, of course – I remember too – tone, as Rachel always said, is supreme; the rest is secondary. But, oh, the drudgery of it all – that comes back as well – of Rachel locked in the bathroom playing in front of the mirror for hours, developing that perfect sound. A proper stance, the right way of holding the instrument, ease in the complex fingering; in mastering these, tone could be lost. Playing the transverse flute well is almost a miracle: a juggling act with a half a dozen techniques, each to be kept up effortlessly: to reach perfection requires a mastery which is breathtaking – literally, for here is an art where player, instrument and music must come together as one perfect voice – a human voice, based on air, on breathing, and thus subject to an exactly limited capacity. But that evening one couldn’t tell where Rachel drew breath: the music appeared seamless.

  Accompanied piano pieces by Prokofiev – his Sonata in D Major – by Saint-Saëns, Chopin and Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ which she had played the previous day in the hotel – and finally, before the interval, a flute cadenza, Drigo’s Serenade from Les Millions d’Arlequin, which she made so light and haunting a thing that nobody moved or clapped for a long moment when she had finished.