by Joseph Hone
‘But surely,’ I said tactfully, ‘that wasn’t at all uncommon then. Young people, especially undergraduates: so many of them went left in the thirties. It was a bad time –’
‘Oh yes, I know all that.’ Susan looked at me as if I were being intentionally obtuse. ‘I was something of a reformer myself by then. Not socialist, but liberal, if you like.’
‘So – why did it go wrong between you?’
‘Because I became convinced that Lindsay’s socialism – his communism even, for that’s what it was – was a complete fraud. He didn’t mean it – which is what came to infuriate me about him and Eleanor: that he made her believe in it all, hook, line and sinker – without believing in it himself. It was a lie.’
I was amazed by this ready confirmation of my own thoughts about Lindsay. ‘But how did you become convinced – that he was lying about his beliefs?’
‘It was my interest in crosswords and puzzle games and clues generally. I should have been a ’tec writer.’ She smiled, putting down the roses now and straightening her fingers as if they’d been too long at a typewriter. ‘I used to be very sharp – too sharp – about what people said, the way they contradicted themselves.’ She paused now, as if considering a new and risky thought and wondering whether to voice it. ‘You see, the one thing Lindsay was never very interested in was verse. Well, I was in a quiet way. It was when he came up here – that would be the summer of ’33 – and started quoting all the moderns then, Auden and Day Lewis and the others. That’s when I first had my suspicions. I remember particularly walking over the moors at Glenalyth one afternoon – Eleanor was with us – and Lindsay started to quote one of those apocalyptic socialist millenia poems, something from Auden about “giving away all the farms”, I remember. And he said that this would mean giving up all the tenanted farms on the Glenalyth estate which he was going to own. Well, I knew this was ridiculous, that he was saying something he didn’t really believe at all. Lindsay was very land-conscious, you know. And I told him so afterwards – that he was cheating again, or playing games. And we didn’t talk about getting married after that. There was a coldness …’
Susan looked out onto the sun-filled lawn, living that coldness again, her face absolutely immobile.
‘The funny thing was,’ she went on, ‘was that by next year, when he’d left Oxford and was cramming for the FO exams before he was posted to Vienna, he’d completely given up all his left-wing business and taken just the opposite course: became very reactionary, never stopped running the socialists down and black-guarding Ramsay MacDonald – which was a sore temptation then, I’ll admit.’
‘But surely that was a fairly common process at the time? Simply a flirtation with Marx, and then over to the other side. Why should the whole thing have been fraudulent? Lindsay was growing up after all – in Oxford, full of extreme views: but temporary ones. I don’t find it unusual, his trying things out like that.’
‘Yes, I’ve thought of that, of course. But the fact is Lindsay had no extreme views in politics. The pro-Hitler line he took in the mid-thirties was as false as his earlier socialist enthusiasms. I’m sure of that.’
‘But how can you be sure?’
She stood up, taking the trug impatiently from the table, while the dogs came to a canine alert behind her.
‘If you’ve spent a great part of your childhood with someone, growing up together – and if you’ve been fond and close to them – you know. And I know: Lindsay was never more than a simple patriot at heart.’
‘But does one ever really know what happens inside someone else? I grew up with Rachel – just like you and Lindsay. Yet now I feel I never got to grips with the real person.’
Susan shrugged her shoulders. ‘Simply because Lindsay kept her in thrall. I was luckier. He didn’t fool me. It was Eleanor who suffered. Of course, what I’d like to know is why in the first place he pretended to all these things he didn’t believe in. Come, let’s have some tea.’
The dogs were allowed a saucer of cooled milky tea each, dispensed from an elegant Georgian silver teapot, while Susan and I ate some finely cut tomato sandwiches and crumbly oat-cakes prepared for us by the woman in the gate lodge. The drawing-room was bright and cheerful, at the corner of the house, with two large sash windows at each angle looking southwards down the tree-lined valley. There was a steady table in the middle, comfy chintz armchairs by the cold grate, some good Scottish watercolours about the well-papered walls, and what looked like an engraving of Byron to one side of the fine red marble mantelpiece, on which I saw a number of delicately carved wooden and enamelled music boxes – half a dozen perhaps; more, certainly, than the remainder of this collection which I had seen in the drawing-room in Hyde Park Square. Yet there was no sense of any shrine here – unless it were a most tactful one to the bad Lord B. himself. The room was as gracious and carefully composed as the woman who occupied it. Both the windows were partly open in the heat, letting in the summer, with a curtain on one of them half-drawn against the sun, leaving our heads in shade but falling on the silver tea-set and warming it with a great light.
‘You see, what I can’t understand,’ Susan said, ‘was why, not believing in all this socialist business himself, why he then encouraged Eleanor in it. That was the dishonest thing – and the cruellest. For it was she who suffered as a result, long before he did. Wherever he is.’ She looked out of the window dismissively, as though Lindsay had gone down the valley into some well-merited exile in a distant country.
‘You think her suicide came as a result of her believing in him – in their shared socialism, which he then denied?’
‘More than possible – that that was part of it.’
‘There were other parts?’
‘I … don’t know.’ She spoke more carefully now, I thought. ‘I wasn’t there at the time. Though I’d been in Zagreb that summer before she died. The four of us. We’d just come back from a motor trip through Slovenia.’
‘Four of you?’
‘Of course. Zlatko was with us.’
‘Who?’
‘Zlatko Rabernak, Lindsay’s Yugoslav friend.’
‘Not a university teacher?’
‘No. Zlatko was a musicologist and collector in Zagreb.’ She pointed to the row of music boxes on the mantelpiece. ‘All those. He was a great collector of them. Some they bought from him. But most he gave her.’
‘Of course, the music boxes. There are some in London. But I’d not heard of him.’
‘He was a dear friend.’ Susan refilled my cup. The tea was some delicious mix of Indian and China. ‘We’d taken holdiays together several times before,’ she continued lightly.
‘Down the Rhine?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
I produced the old photograph from my pocket. ‘I found it in one of the attics at Glenalyth.’
Susan became animated now. ‘I have some rather better ones than that’ She stood up and went over to a bureau near the fireplace where she took out an album, bringing it back for me to look at.
‘There,’ she said, finding a page in the middle of the book. And now I saw a much fuller and more exact representation of that forty-year old holiday in Germany: some dozens of photographs of the three of them and the man Zlatko – a small-faced, bright-eyed, impish fellow with shiny dark hair going straight over his head: sitting on benches at a river-bank inn, picnicking by a car on a roadside or moving along narrow mountain paths in the sunny Rhineland of 1936. And I noticed how Susan’s expression here, unlike her gloomy mood in my own photograph, was almost invariably happy – especially in the snaps where she and Zlatko featured together.
Suddenly the question in the back of my mind occurred to me, clearly, but I couldn’t voice it somehow. It seemed impertinent to broach so private a thing. And it might not have been true in any case. But here, surely, was one possible answer. Of course, as I had said to Rachel, there had been four of them on that pre-war summer holiday in Germany – floating down the great river and
cruising Hitler’s new autobahns in a Sunbeam Talbot. And since Lindsay and Eleanor were clearly spoken for at that time, Zlatko must have been Susan’s particular friend and companion. And if this were so, had there – as I sensed – been some trouble between the two of them then?
Susan had just described him as a ‘dear friend’: hers, presumably, as well as of the other two. Had Zlatko thrown Susan over in some way? And I remembered the music boxes then and Susan’s slightly tart comment: ‘Some they bought – but most he gave her.’ And I thought, too, how Rachel had told me that Susan had insisted on taking all these little boxes back after Eleanor’s death. Had she done this not to create any kind of shrine to Eleanor (and indeed there was no evidence of such in the house) but in order to take subsequently gifts which she had hoped to receive from Zlatko then? Failing with Lindsay, had she fallen in love with one of his friends – only to find that he, too, was engaged elsewhere. Had Zlatko taken – just as Lindsay had – first to her but then to her younger sister? Yet still I couldn’t put these questions in any direct way to Susan. They seemed too dense and complex, with the implication of appalling emotion, to survive an entry or clarification in this calm drawing-room. Yet I had to broach the topic in some way.
‘Is Zlatko still alive?’ I asked easily, without looking up from the album.
‘No idea, really.’
‘You don’t hear from him ever?’
‘No. Why?’
‘You mentioned – he was a dear friend,’ I said uneasily.
‘I see what you mean.’ And now Susan became Aunt Susan for the first time that afternoon, as she had been to Rachel and me in our childhood: a rather formidable, bossy lady in a long brown cardigan, someone difficult to appease whom one therefore tried to avoid. ‘I was very fond of Zlatko, that’s all – if that’s what you mean,’ she said shortly, closing the album.
I knew then that I had passed over the line between polite adult enquiry and childish impertinence with Susan; that I had prised open a wound in her and come into that brutal estate in memory which we keep most private, where we have been most hurt in some ancient battle.
‘I didn’t want to pry –’
‘How could you?’ she said angrily. ‘You weren’t even born then. Did you find something else in the attic?’
‘No.’
She became calm again after this outburst. ‘It’s so ridiculous … that one should be upset, so long afterwards. I’m sorry.’ She bent down and picked up the two saucers which the dogs had emptied.
‘No, it’s not ridiculous. We spend so much of our lives avoiding the truth. You said so yourself – in the church: “living so long with omissions”.’
Susan said nothing, both hands quietly on the table now in front of her, as if about to start something on a piano.
‘I’ve only ever prided myself on being sensible,’ she said at last. ‘Even the most difficult clue had an answer – a meaning was there somewhere. But I never, ever understood their lives, no matter how I’ve tried. Sense – and sentiment as well – I had both, I think. But the others, Zlatko and Eleanor – and Lindsay too, who was sucked into it – gave up any sensible answers then – in everything. Or perhaps Lindsay was simply mesmerised,’ Susan said, more to herself than to me. ‘Standing there, doing nothing, while Zlatko took over his wife.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘That’s what happened.’
‘Yes – he simply let her go.’
‘Did she want to go?’
‘I don’t know. I could never make the least sense out of it. It defied all reason.’
‘These sort of things usually do.’
The older dog moved over to the cold fireplace now and lay down, while the Highland terrier started to whine, anxious to be let out. ‘Oh, do be quiet Tomkins!’ But I got up and went to the door.
‘Of course, Lindsay may have wanted her away because he no longer shared her politics. She. may have become an embarrassment to him – and his FO career.’ I opened the door. But the dog wouldn’t go out now; it just sat there on the threshold looking up at me expectantly.
‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘I’ve thought of that. And if it’s true – it’s quite appalling. Let him stay if he wants,’ she added. I closed the door and the dog followed me back to my seat. ‘Give him a bit of oatcake,’ Susan said. ‘That’s exactly what I meant,’ she went on, ‘when I told you how it was Eleanor who suffered for her beliefs, not Lindsay – who never held them.’
‘It’s a terrible tale. If it’s true –’
‘It is true. I saw it happen. And Zlatko told me himself – how he’d become involved with Eleanor, which is why I left that summer before she died.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Totally vague about it – they all were: said it was just something that “happened” – and that Eleanor was unhappy with Lindsay in any case. Well, I knew that. But I told him he shouldn’t let it happen –’
She paused now, as though aware of the element of personal bias she had allowed into her description.
‘And Lindsay,’ I said, covering the silence, ‘how did he explain it all afterwards to you?’
‘He never did – other than once ascribing Eleanor’s behaviour to a kind of madness.’
‘Well, there may have been that in it, too. There often is. How did you know Eleanor was unhappy with Lindsay?’
‘She talked to me. For the same reasons as I’d been, I think, though she wouldn’t admit it: she felt something basically false in him.’
‘Living a lie?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know that Lindsay was really working for British Intelligence for most of his career?’
‘Yes. At least, I learnt that only after the war.’
‘And that perhaps wives in such cases don’t always know what their husbands are really up to. It may, in any case, have been necessary for Lindsay to lead a double life – but especially if Eleanor had all these socialist sympathies. You could see the whole thing that way, couldn’t you? That Lindsay married Eleanor in good faith but subsequently his work required him – to withhold things from her, even to lie to her.’
Susan didn’t answer at once.
‘If you looked at the whole business quite without bias,’ I went on, ‘entirely objectively; it could make sense that way, couldn’t it?’
‘Yes, it could,’ Susan admitted at last.
‘And Zlatko was right. These things – I mean he and Eleanor – they do just “happen”.’
The little white dog started to whine again, looking towards the door, and this time I got up and put him firmly outside.
‘What you say makes objective sense, maybe,’ Susan said when I’d got back. ‘But you didn’t know the people involved, weren’t actually there. Subjectively the whole thing was a fearful mess.’
‘As it would be – because you were closely involved. I was simply trying to be fair to Lindsay.’
‘I see that,’ she said reasonably. ‘And perhaps you’re right. But it still doesn’t explain my feeling –’ She stopped, as though she’d quite lost the feeling. ‘My certainty almost, that all these political involvements of Lindsay’s were a charade. Simply wasn’t him.’
‘No, indeed – because British Intelligence could well have required him, from the start, to take up these fronts.’
‘Simply carrying out orders, you mean? Well, doesn’t that make it worse?’ Susan was firmly dismissive now. ‘If that’s so – and let’s say we agree that his socialism was all a pose – why did he encourage Eleanor in it initially? Share it with her, and then – forced into the opposite, reactionary extreme by his bosses – why did he deceive Eleanor about this new course? Why did he carry her along with him, marry her? He should have dropped her, long before, if he felt he couldn’t share anything in his professional life with her. Instead, he held onto her, he lied – he manipulated her.’
It was my turn for silence now. ‘Well?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I agree. It does seem … strange.’
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br /> ‘Cruelty, surely; cheating of the worst sort.’
‘It’s putting country above people, of course. You said he was really a simple patriot at heart.’
‘Yes, a patriot. But not a fool. He knew right from wrong in personal affairs. You’re suggesting he was a simpleton – morally. That wasn’t so. He was a perfectly knowing person at heart, as well.’
Susan finished her little biography with some vehemence. It had a precision and feeling that smacked of the truth, of her direct experience of it and of her sad disgust with the man himself.
‘But,’ I said, ‘you told me you thought all this business with Eleanor had to do with his disappearance. How?’
‘I simply meant that anyone who behaved as he did then – so illogically and unfeelingly – well, one day it was bound to catch up with him.’
‘Isn’t that just the revenge of myth? In reality, don’t the worst rogues always go unhung?’
‘You admit it, then?’
‘No. Well, I don’t know. I’ve often wondered: does cause and effect really operate like that, so far apart in time?’
‘Yes. If you go on living your lies long enough.’
Susan looked at me critically.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘But I thought you might have meant something more precise –’
‘That Zlatko bumped him off, you mean? Forty years later? No.’ She smiled minutely and I was reminded again of the other Yugoslav in Zagreb – Ivo Kovačič, the bee-keeper and University professor whose letter to Lindsay I had found in the attic. I asked Susan if she’d known him.
‘Yes – a big man, very forthcoming, very nationalistic about Croatia, talked endlessly. We used to meet at that café in Zagreb on the main square, the Gradska something. And you’re right – he kept bees. We had some of his honey, I remember. And Lindsay rented his house – when he first came to the Consulate in Zagreb, yes – up in a nice park above the town. Why?’
‘They were quite close friends, then?’