by Joseph Hone
Yet in a subsequent letter to his mother, a week or so after these bloody events, he had taken quite a different line:
‘…the fighting was severe out in the workers’ suburbs. But it didn’t last long and the bark was worse than the bite – for the damage, as I saw myself afterwards, was mostly just to the masonry of their great fortress-like blocks of flats, which the workers originally built, of course, as military redoubts from which, when the time was ripe, they could sally forth to impose their own socialist dictatorship – something which, thankfully, little Dollfuss has prevented them doing – indefinitely, I should say …”
There were other letters (and notes for some official memoranda) in the same vein, condemning the socialists throughout Europe for rocking the boat and proposing that Herr Hitler’s activities, if not entirely justified, were of an understandable nature and that, when all else was said against him, he did appear to be the only bulwark left against a fast-encroaching Red peril – a line which followed almost exactly British official foreign policy at the time. Yet it was only, I discovered, in his one letter to Eleanor that Lindsay showed himself to be clearly socialist himself. Someone was being lied to: but who, and above all, why? And then it struck me that, of course, it was Eleanor, his girl-friend, with whom he had shared the truth; for the others he had put up a front. And if this were the case then she too must have had socialist inclinations, at the very least. That made sense: a whole generation of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates had gone pink, if not bright red, during the thirties. But why the need to lie about his beliefs to his mother and his other friends? Presumably it had simply been a means of securing entry and maintaining his position in the Foreign Office. Yet if this were so Lindsay had been working for them under very false colours, for they would certainly never have employed any acknowledged left-winger in the sensitive positions he afterwards came to occupy for them. And the answer here seemed clear to me as well: Lindsay must have intentionally misled the Foreign Office, either to subvert its policies, or – like his contemporaries Philby, Burgess and MacLean – he had joined it on behalf of the Soviets in order to spy on it. My experience the week before with old Professor Allcock and his mysterious American visitor now formed a natural part of this elaborate ploy. In sum, I was left with the vague confirmation of my earlier conclusion: that Lindsay had been working for the KGB for most of his life.
Yet I couldn’t really believe it – that Lindsay could be such a traitor. Surely, I thought, climbing down the narrow attic stairs that evening, his sympathy with the Viennese workers could be put down to nothing more than a well-developed Scots social conscience – or that Lindsay perhaps, like so many others of his generation at that time, had momentarily shared the sweet dream of Marx, all the bright socialist fevers of the time, but had not been smitten with either illusion permanently. Yet I remembered how they’d thought just the same things about so many others in British Intelligence over the years – such true men, all of them – until they had turned up in Moscow one day: all of them, just as Lindsay had, having gone to earth completely before surfacing at the Moscow Press Club a year or two afterwards. Philby and MacLean, at least, had been two such utterly trusted secret servants: was Lindsay the last of their mould? – caught out fifteen years after them, the man who had stayed the course longer than any, and who had now, at last, been helped on his way, over many borders, home?
I was left with the entirely unsatisfactory conclusion that Lindsay’s likely innocence was exactly balanced by his probable guilt.
*
Rachel didn’t care for my grubbing round the attics in this way each evening. Yet she stifled the complaints I’m sure she would have otherwise have made, since we so fully shared the days together. I was left curious only by George’s lack of interest now in our close association: he had quite given up the role of jealous lover. It struck me that this might have been because of something that had passed between Basil Fielding and him, when they’d been in touch in London, some hint about my future which Basil had given then; or perhaps, as I’ve said, it was simply that George clearly saw my end in view if I persisted – as I appeared to be doing in the attics – in looking for Lindsay. For whatever reason, George regarded me almost with condescension over the summer breakfast table, as if rivalry with me was something entirely wasted – I, who would not be long for this world.
But here, to forestall such unhappy ends, I had taken secret steps myself. I remembered that Lindsay’s father, the old general, had been presented once with a small ivory-handled silver-plated .22 revolver, kept in a gilt morocco presentation case: I had once seen this fabulous toy as a child in Glenalyth, brought out one day by Lindsay to show a visiting army colleague, and I knew exactly where it had been kept: the middle compartment at the back of his roll-top desk in the morning-room. Which was where I found it on my second evening, using Madeleine’s keys. I got it out, replaced the box and locked the little door again. It was a beautiful object – small enough to hide almost entirely in the palm of one hand, or to pin down into a breast pocket which was where I kept it – but with sufficient weight and such exquisite balance, I thought, as to make it a completely effective weapon. I looked along the chased silver barrel, eased the trigger a fraction, saw the chamber turn and felt the satisfying pressure. A drop of oil and some ammunition was all it needed – and the .22 shells I took from Billy’s estate office in the yard where the guns were kept, opening the gun cupboard with the same bunch of keys, the next day when he had gone out for the afternoon.
*
We were rowing one afternoon on the loch, Rachel and I, making for the small island at the far end, in one corner of it, where we sometimes bathed, out of sight of the boat house: Water Lily Island, for in summer it was surrounded by a thick carpet of these crimson-streaked flowers, their creamy petal cups nestling in leaves like huge green plates, leaving only a sandy channel between them giving access to a small wooden pier where one swam from.
The island had been created in the late nineteenth century by Lindsay’s grandfather, an amateur horticulturist and eminent Indian Civil Service Administrator, who had hammered a large circle of stakes into this shallow part of the loch, filled it in with stone and soil and then planted it out with exotic trees and flowering shrubs, brought back from his sunny travels, which had now come to full maturity and bloom. The island was a miniature botanical garden and arboretum in this sheltered, hidden part of the water, set a hundred yards or so from the shoreline and protected from the northerly winds by the huge pineclad hump of Kintyre Hill immediately behind it. As children we had used the place as a refuge in games of aquatic tag and hide-and-seek, or sometimes as a naval base or gun emplacement in other water-borne battles with local children who had come up to Glenalyth to play with us for the day.
But that afternoon it stood up out of the still, heat-hazed water like a deserted coral island, a thick, silent clump of exotic greenery from some adventure tale by R.M. Ballantyne, where Martin Rattler might already be watching us through a deep filigree of leaves as Rachel took us towards it, rowing in a floppy linen hat and bathing costume, her skin more bronzed than ever now in this long heat spell, like something from the South Seas herself, while I sat in the stern with a pair of binoculars, scanning the shoreline every now and then and the huge green pine hill behind.
She stopped rowing, while I had the glasses raised, looking at a forester’s hut half-way up the hill, and all I could hear was the slow dripping from the oar tips and the dying slap of water under the bows as the boat gradually came to a halt. The heat settled down on us, seeming to suck up all the air around as the small breeze of movement died in our faces. I put the glasses down.
‘What have you found?’ She leant on the oars, holding them together with one hand, while she rubbed some insect off her nose with the other.
‘Nothing. Just a forester’s hut. Empty, I think.’
‘Yes, they were here in the spring. But I meant the attics.’
‘I thought
we weren’t talking about that.’
‘Well, you’ve taken no notice – when I told you not to bother looking for Lindsay. So why not?’ She took off the floppy hat and wiped her brow with it. ‘You’re going to go on looking for him then?’
‘Obviously.’
‘I should be more gracious, shouldn’t I? He was my father after all.’
‘Yes. Why aren’t you?’
We’d stopped entirely now and the boat was like something frying in the soft liquid of the water. ‘Recently,’ I went on, ‘I’ve felt you didn’t want him found somehow.’
‘Recently – I’ve had you. And didn’t want you killed.’ She looked at me candidly, inspecting me, almost, down the length of her long straight nose, her big inky dark eyes calm beneath the loose, raven-sheened hair, her arms resting easily, professionally on the oars: she was like some deft warrior heading a flotilla of tribal catamarans, waiting for a sign, about to lay waste some rivals on a tropic isle.
‘That’s … nice,’ I said. ‘But is it really that simple?’
‘Yes it is.’ She smiled now. ‘You’ve lived so long alone you’ve forgotten how very simple some things are, lovey.’ With that she stood up on the seat, poised herself there for an instant and, just before the boat started to tip, she dived over the side into the greeny-blue depths, her body rippling just under the top of the water for twenty yards like a great fish before she surfaced and swam off towards the island. I thought then how common a longing for simplicity was; and how, since it was so rare a thing, we were usually in the end forced to invent it.
She was lying out flat, soaking up the sun, a little way up from the jetty on a sliver of grass between the trees, when I got to the island and had tied up the boat – stretched right out with her eyes closed, her bathing costume dispensed with, drying beside her, a dark ornament in the light. Some rare Indian tree had shed its papery bark nearby, the minute wood twirls lying about her head like cigar ash. Beyond, the thick greenery spread all around and above, forming a seemingly impenetrable barrier to the centre of the island – and leaning right round over the water to either side of us, enclosing this small area we’d brought picnics to as children, inviolate then as it was now.
‘So?’ I asked.
‘“So, so – break off this last lamenting kiss, that sucks two souls and vapours, both away”.’ She quoted the lines abruptly, still with her eyes closed.
There was silence then. A dead silence filled with heat. The world had gone to sleep for the afternoon. I sat on the wooden pier with my feet trailing in the water.
‘I was thinking,’ she said after a minute, ‘of how much people want to be together, yet how really very bad they are at it. A complete conflict, somehow.’
‘To be bonded yet free – the old irreconcilables.’ I looked out over the water. ‘We should have brought some fishing things, trolled for pike.’
‘Not in this heat. There’d be nothing. In the evening perhaps.’
I turned back to her. She was sitting up now, playing with a twirl of bark, feet drawn towards her face, chin on her knees, looking through me vacantly.
‘You remember,’ I said, ‘when you told me about Eleanor – how she didn’t like the diplomatic life with Lindsay, that she was a countrywoman at heart: were you suggesting they had irreconcilable attitudes?’
‘No – I was thinking of us. When we lived together.’
‘Oh, we just had juvenile rows. But what about Eleanor?’
‘What about her? I never knew her –’
‘Was she … left-wing, socialist in any way?’
‘I don’t know. You found something in the attic?’
‘Yes, a letter Lindsay wrote from Vienna years ago, sympathising with the workers there.’
‘Well, Lindsay wasn’t socialist, you know’ she said firmly. ‘As for Eleanor – well, Aunt Susan might know.’
‘I’ll try and see her.’
‘If you have to. I won’t.’
‘I’ll swim,’ I said. ‘I’m baking.’ And I pushed myself slowly down from the jetty into the water – which swallowed me up gently, curling over my skin like warm mercury.
I swam out to the first clump of water lilies, where I could still just put my feet on the bottom, and ducked my head under then, watching the rising lily stems sway vaguely in the opalescent water; and above them the green hats of their leaves shading the sun but ringed with haloes of dazzling light, so that when I swam forward under water now, pushing between these long green tendrils, the sun burst down in glittering shafts, illuminating the sandy bottom before it sloped away sharply, out into deeper, darker water.
I surfaced and swam out towards the middle of the loch before stopping a hundred yards or so from the island and turning back, treading water for a minute, letting my feet sink into the chillier layers beneath me, while the sun baked my brow.
Suddenly a small fountain burst on the water 20 yards ahead and to my right, and with it came a sound like a stick breaking very sharply, a minute echo over the water bringing an awful change to the miracle of the afternoon. I could see Rachel on the edge of the jetty. She was firing at me with the little silver revolver.
‘Stop it, Rachel – for God’s sake!’ But she took no notice and instead raised the revolver at me once more, like an executioner in the dazzling light.
I had a sudden spasm of thought – ‘She’s gone mad’ – before I ducked under water, going down deep this time and making for the nearest clump of water lilies which would give me cover. And now I was really annoyed and frightened too – for the water was suddenly cold and I wondered if my breath would keep and quite simply I didn’t want to die.
But when I surfaced very carefully, underneath a lily pad still some distance from the island, she’d disappeared from the jetty and only a slight stirring in the thick greenery behind showed where she must have gone.
‘Rachel? Come out! – for goodness sakes,’ I shouted, my nose only just above water. I waited there a minute but there was no reply. The loch was quite still and nothing moved now on the island. The afternoon had died again in the heat.
Instead of landing at the jetty, which I thought she might be covering with the gun from some hiding-place behind the Indian tree, I swam round to the other side of the Island, bobbing in and out among the water lilies, ready at any moment to duck back into the water again. But the whole green clump was quite still and when I got out of the water the far side, pulling myself delicately ashore along the branch of an overhanging tree, I realised that if I ventured into the centre of the island, disturbing the thick undergrowth, I would immediately become the hunted once more – unless I could crouch down and move inch by inch without a sound.
I thought about it for a moment – and thought how preposterous the whole thing was, that I shouldn’t lend myself to this mad game any more, stalking someone – someone loved – like an Indian on all fours; I should simply call out to her in a calm voice and ask her to put down her gun. But I had already done that without result – and it was anger that came then and made me move forward, inch by inch, without a sound: anger and a need to know what I thought at last I could learn in this instance: why twice in a week someone should want to kill me. So I crawled off on my knees, upwards through the bushes, testing every move ahead with my hands, clearing any noisy twigs away, determined to hunt myself now, and do it properly.
About five minutes passed, with several false alarms, before I suddenly saw her ankles several yards ahead of me, my own face almost touching the ground at this point. She was standing beyond a thick, sweet-smelling mock orange-blossom bush – standing quite still to begin with, her two feet like the remains of some discarded surrealist statuary in the greenery. And then, as I froze for a long minute, she began to circle round the bush, as if she’d heard something but wasn’t quite sure where. Finally, making her mind up, she walked straight towards me.
It was a lucky break: she couldn’t have expected me to come up at her out of the earth, as I did, grabbing
her by the ankles first and then pulling them both viciously so that she collapsed like a ninepin in a cloud of white flowers right into the middle of the Philadelphus bush, where I straddled her, pinning her down, the two of us flaying about in the hot, confined space which suddenly smelt like a hairdresser’s shop.
She didn’t seem to have the gun with her now. But she struggled like fury in my arms instead for a minute, saying nothing, looking up at me with a fierce smile – which annoyed me all the more, so that eventually I pinched one of her wrists that I was holding down in fury.
‘Ouch! Don’t hurt.’ She spoke at last, aggrieved now, like a child losing a struggle with an older companion, sensing a dangerous viciousness in the other which they know they can no longer deal with. ‘Can’t you play without hurting?’
She tried to lift her head up but I forced her back against the broken branches of the bush. ‘Du calme, du calme,’ she said then, accepting matters, her heart beating furiously, making her small breasts jump in strange spasms.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Du bloody “calme” indeed – with live ammunition!’
‘It was a game – I left the gun on the jetty for you – didn’t you see it?’
‘I came round the other way. I knew you’d say it was an accident or a game. But how do I really know?’
I began bending her arm. ‘What on earth do you think you’re bloody well doing firing guns at people, you bitch.’
‘Please – you’re hurting!’
‘I mean to. So tell me: the truth – go on.’ I twisted the arm a little more. ‘Why? Why try and kill me?’
She turned her face away and the smile had gone.
‘I – wasn’t!’ she screeched. ‘I was terrified myself when the thing went off. I was just playing with it. I found it in your pocket –’
‘And why don’t you want Lindsay found – or for me to go and see Aunt Susan. Why have you been lying –’