by Joseph Hone
Again, the last part of the message was briefly but tellingly personal:
Do hope I may be released in time for honey crop.
All love, Lindsay.’
Huxley was distantly kind but quite unhelpful. ‘Of course, we’re working on it all the time,’ he said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. ‘Problem is, as you know, we can’t release this man they want in the UK. But at least we can make contact with them now. We’ll put a notice in the personal column, of course – and perhaps come to some other arrangement with them. Who knows …?’ Huxley was expert in leaving things in the air. And he left himself soon afterwards. I wished he’d stayed – which would have postponed, at least, the difficult task ahead of explaining to Rachel and Madeleine what Ivo Kovačič had told me an hour before in the unhappy little room in the Rue de Ham. It was not information, as in Susan’s case, which I felt I could entirely hold back from them any more.
We ate in the formal hotel dining-room, on high-backed chairs, with too much napery and cutlery. I should have liked a simpler meal but the women felt disinclined to go out. And after all, it was a meal from their kind of world, I thought – rather unfairly, realising how far my loyalties had become divided. It wasn’t their fault that they were rich; and neither of them had sent men to their doom in cattle-waggons or pushed someone under a tram.
I told them about Bleiburg and the massacre outside Maribor first. And Madeleine’s reply was expected: ‘But he was only carrying out orders. He told me. How could Lindsay have saved them in any case – and let the others go?’
‘Some of the other British officers there at the time did just that apparently,’ I said. ‘Saved as many as they could. And after all, this man Kovačič was a close friend.’
‘That’s ridiculous. None of us were there. How do we know what the circumstances were exactly? It may have been quite impossible for Lindsay to have done anything about it.’ Madeleine spoke easily, without any rancour at my Devil’s advocacy.
‘I’m only telling you what Kovačič said.’
‘Go on then.’ I felt I was a witness in some nightmare trial, now, forced to speak with intimate knowledge of events in a country and in a time I had never experienced. Rachel and Madeleine stared across the table at me with a cold interest. As I had suspected we had come to a showdown at last between their intuitive love for the man and my knowledge of the dirty world he worked in, that business of endless deceit which could not but infect the men who proposed and manipulated the deceptions. For the sake of whatever he’d believed in, Lindsay had betrayed those nearest to him really from the very start of his career – without realising it perhaps – by the very act of joining a world he could not share with them. The two women had believed in the promotion of a definable truth, through love – where love unbolts the dark; whereas Lindsay all his life had been intent on keeping that door firmly shut. Lindsay’s way – and my way too – of looking at things was simply not possible for them, since, apart from the calculated dishonesty, they could never have seen the usefulness of it. And indeed there was none; which was why they looked at me now with so little enthusiasm once more. They sensed in me what Lindsay had always managed to hide from them: a dissembling nature, that of some animal from a dark wood, apparently domesticated but basically unreliable and potentially very dangerous.
So I decided not to tell them anything – of any importance at least. Why should I tar them with the same brush of dissension and betrayal, the horrors which Lindsay and I had either perpetuated or suffered in the world of Intelligence? If Kovačič’s little dingy room was the fag-end evidence of a European holocaust that Lindsay had had a hand in, did that mean they had to share it? Why shouldn’t some people remain untainted? And God knows, I thought, Kovačič, who bore such a grudge against Lindsay, could well have been a very unreliable witness – and the hall porter at the Palace Hotel even worse. And Susan? Well, she could have been in the same boat with them: possessed by some ancient jealousy that had worked its way into her heart so that she had come to believe what was not true: that Lindsay had been her lover and Patrick her son. Why did I so readily believe the possible fantasies of these distant people and not the factual experience of the two women – my friends – in front of me? Because, like others in my world, I had formed over the years a kind of loyalty towards betrayal. It was so much the expected thing. So I said, ‘Kovačič didn’t say much more – other than that they’d obviously taken Lindsay because of what happened at Bleiburg – a kind of revenge. That follows. But he has no connection with any of these terrorist groups.’
‘What did he say we should do then?’ Madeleine asked.
‘He said we should just go home.’
Madeleine’s eyes flashed with annoyance. ‘That’s nonsense. There’s lots we can do. I’ll go and see him myself. I should have come with you. We could go now –’
‘I don’t think –’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ve just seen him,’ I stalled.
‘You were gone long enough. Was that all he told you? – just to go home?’ Rachel asked indignantly. I’d moved from the witness box into the dock.
‘No. We talked about Zagreb, when Lindsay lived there in the old days.’
‘So you talked about Eleanor then?’ Rachel put in with the enthusiasm of a prosecutor.
‘Yes.’ And then I went on, avoiding the topic of Eleanor. ‘And about the bees he and Lindsay kept together at the back of his house there, somewhere in a park above the city.’
Madeleine looked at me intently – as though seeing in me something of her husband, some fascinating aspect of the man before she’d ever met him – as if I had experienced him before she had. And indeed in a way I had, for I’d come to see that moment when Kovačič had found Eleanor out on the terrace very clearly – the wind blowing the cherry blossom about, the little bamboo table and the dark-haired woman, like the girl I’d seen in the stained glass at Dunkeld, doodling on a newspaper and staring out numbly into the pink trees saying ‘Lindsay is a Russian agent.’
And it was as if Madeleine saw some faint image of these same pictures in my mind as she watched me, so that she said intently, without any sarcasm, ‘Why don’t you tell us what really happened – between you and this man?’
I put down my fork; the food was going cold in any case. ‘Kovačič thought Lindsay was working for the Russians. He met Eleanor one morning. She told him.’ I explained the background to this discovery. They laughed.
‘Is that all?’ Rachel asked defiantly. ‘That old chestnut?’
‘No.’ I was annoyed then. ‘He said something else: he thought there was something funny about Eleanor’s death.’
‘I looked at the two women. They were almost relaxed now, a touch of sympathy for me in their eyes.
‘Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?’ Rachel asked.
‘Peculiar,’ I said slowly, seriously.
‘How would this man know?’
‘He was there – or at least he talked to the hall porter at the hotel afterwards. The man thought she’d been pushed under the tram –’
‘By Daddy, of course,’ Rachel put in, in her lightest mood. But she was angry beneath it.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s nonsense, isn’t it?’ Madeleine said easily, relieved now to hear that the worst was so mild a thing.
‘I don’t know. It’s what he said.’
‘Poor man. He bears a grudge, doesn’t he,’ Madeleine spoke quietly.
‘Yes. His wife and son were both killed after they were sent back into Yugoslavia.’
‘Well, that explains it,’ Rachel said brightly. ‘Doesn’t it?’ She looked at me tartly.
‘I don’t –’
‘Whose side are you on anyway?’
‘I’m not on sides. I’m simply trying –’
‘You know Daddy. Do you really think he could have pushed his wife under a bus?’
‘A tram –’
‘Or do you still secretly
resent him?’ Rachel ran on in a kind of sudden panic. ‘Because of my affection for him. Are you really like this man Kovačič too? Bearing him a grudge?’
‘No –’
‘I’ve told you, so often: it wasn’t Daddy that took me away from you in Notting Hill – it was that bloody dirty bath and broken windows. I don’t understand you – you always seem to want to see the bad in him.’
The two women looked at me now, both with this same question in their eyes, though Madeleine had left it unsaid.
‘No – that’s not true. I’ve only wanted to find him. And as I explained to you both, to do that meant looking into his past.’
‘Where you enjoy coming up with a lot of mud,’ Rachel said vindictively. ‘You – horror!’
‘Don’t try and browbeat me. It’s not true.’
Madeleine entered now as referee. ‘For goodness sake, don’t squabble like children.’
And, indeed, it was an apt image, for Rachel, having been angry, now took on the expression of a hurt schoolgirl, of a child betrayed in some wretched boarding-school, who had expected a parent to come and take her out for the day – a guardian angel who would not now arrive. And I was that person, I suddenly realised – not Lindsay, who had never failed her. I was the man, once more, who had let her down, who had been unable to shield her from uncomfortable reality – from a broken window, scum on the bath, or a woman under a tram. Loving her was not enough; I had to lie to her as well – which I could not do. I couldn’t do what Lindsay had obviously done so well for her – give her that blind peace and security, without which she couldn’t love, so that she had loved only him. Instead of replacing him as her icon I had once more questioned his divinity. She would return to him now, I felt, as a prodigal daughter, a penitent searching for him all the more passionately, blindly – as one must look for a god who is not there.
How tiresome her petulant and immature nature could be. Yet I loved her for it, for her flaws – and I was well able to understand what I had lost as her face crinkled in tears and she got up from the table without a word and walked away. She had been what love was like, I thought.
3
I had slept badly, and alone. Yet my fatigue was more than physical next morning as I stood in the hotel lobby after breakfast, the bright morning sun streaming in from the summer streets outside. Rachel wasn’t up yet; she’d gone to ground, as she so often had in the old days after some setback with me or her father. Madeleine apologised for her and I had tried to be bright about things in return. ‘We must be very bright,’ Rachel had said a week before in Glenalyth. But she had failed. The past had crept up on her again – uncertain images which were not bright and darker feelings even less resolved. And I had no more heart for it all now. I wanted a rest – I wanted something else. You could go on looking for something or someone too long – like a child crying for a ball lost beyond the garden fence, something dearly loved, which finally, like a death, he has to admit he will not see again.
I was tired of Lindsay’s loss, of the pain and anger he could still bring about, the deceptions which surrounded his disappearance. And I didn’t care now who had deceived whom – or when or why. I wanted to go out alone into the summer, have a coffee somewhere or a beer, and think about something else. A trip to the national gallery perhaps – or better, up into those woods on the edge of the city, near that restaurant where we’d been happy.
I said to Madeleine, ‘There’s only one other possible contact here. This man Radovič. I’ll try and see him,’ I lied.
‘How?’
‘He goes riding every morning in the forest – you remember, Willis told us.’
‘And you’re going to get on a horse too?’
‘No. I’ll take a bike. Why not?’
‘You’re mad. How will you recognise him in any case? It’s a huge forest.’
‘All right – I just want to go out by myself, into the air – and think.’
The porter told me of a shop in the city where I could hire a bicycle. But just as I was leaving he came up and said he thought one of the kitchen staff had a bike he might lend me. We went round to the back – and he did: rather a flashy racing machine with dropped handlebars, which he seemed unwilling to part with, until I left him a thousand francs deposit on it. I hadn’t realised how desperate I was to be away from everyone that morning.
But still I was held up. Just as I was pushing my socks into my trousers outside the hotel Rachel rushed up to us, bright again, happy, so that I thought she’d forgiven me.
‘I’ve suddenly had an idea,’ she said. ‘We could all go to Munich – where the letters came from. Klaus would help.’ She stood there, in the slight breeze, her curls dancing round her eyes, smiling with hope.
‘Klaus?’ I said dully.
‘My old husband.’
‘Of course.’ I’d forgotten Rachel’s marriage, let alone remembering the name of her husband. Lindsay had absorbed too much of me, damn him, and here was his daughter, happy once more, in pursuit of him. I had made no real difference to her; it was Lindsay she wanted. Yet what was the point? I foresaw nothing but more lies and evasions ahead of us in our search for him; Lindsay was unobtainable. But I didn’t argue.
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Who knows, he might well come up with something.’
We were fooling ourselves, I thought, as I rode off into the sunlight. And then at the corner, as I waited for the traffic to pass, I looked back and saw the two women standing outside the hotel. Madeleine waved, a little abrupt gesture. She had probably read my thoughts. But then, since she was no fool, she had surely had the same thoughts herself already, I decided. She and I were pretending there were still useful pursuits ahead of us. In fact we were as lost now as Lindsay was. Only Rachel believed otherwise – caught once more in those ecstasies of anticipation, that blind optimism which was her father’s ever-available gift to her in the old days, when I had failed her.
My journey was slightly uphill – all along the length of the Avenue Louise and then through into the Bois de la Cambre before I finally came to the beginnings of the forest – so that it was nearly twelve o’clock before I got there, too late in the day under the huge sun for anyone to be out riding, I thought. I was wrong.
The heat died suddenly under the immense copper beech trees, their darkly bronzed leaves, very high up, blotting out the sun and leaving great cool spaces beneath where hoof-pitted rides and walks and a few asphalt paths criss-crossed each other, running away for miles into the distance, down slopes, over little willow-pattern bridges and round dank ponds. A few minutes after I’d left the roar of traffic on the main road that ran along one side of the forest, I found myself, as if I’d dived under water, in the midst of an extreme silence – a world lit by faint colours, mist-like blues and golds shimmering in the long vertical distances between the trees, the sunken valleys shot through with light here and there, myriads of pencil-thin beams falling on the rust-brown carpet of leaves – and flocks of late bluebells, stirring slightly in a breeze like strange seaweed, thrusting up from the floor of what seemed a cavernous ocean then.
Yet I wasn’t alone. After ten minutes ride deeper into the woods I suddenly seemed surrounded by people. First another cyclist, in shorts and a yellow sprint jersey, his head well down over a racing machine like mine, sped past me – going on down a slope towards a small lake to my right; while coming towards me – just about to cross a little willow-pattern bridge – I saw three other men in the distance on huge horses, the one in the middle seemingly hedged in by his two companions, as though protecting him.
The cyclist ran on fast down the hill. I thought: he’s going to crash, there wasn’t enough room to pass the riders on the small bridge. But he slid to a halt twenty yards or so away from them and I saw him lift out one of the metal water bottles from a cage on his handlebars, as if to drink from it. But then, in a flash, he threw the thing expertly, like a grenade, the canister soaring up over the horsemen before landing in the middle of them.
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It exploded on impact in a fan of light and a great smudge of dirty smoke. Then he threw the second water bottle and an immense cracking sound spread up from the little valley beneath me. When the air cleared I saw that half the bridge had disintegrated. One of the horses was floundering about in the shallow water while the other two, both riderless now, lay across the remaining planks like carcasses in a butcher’s shop. Of the three men only one seemed to have survived the explosion – and I saw him, fighting for his life then, taking cover by the water’s edge from spurts of automatic fire, coming from both sides of the lake. Looking across the valley I saw what had happened: a second cyclist had come down the hill from the far side, joining his companion in the mayhem. The big man in the water, though armed himself I saw now, didn’t have a chance. Caught in a fearful pincer of fire, fore and aft, he heeled over like some aquatic animal, his head tipping back neatly in a reverse dive before he fell into the muddy shallows, just his stomach and part of his face peeking out of the water.
In the end only one of the horses remained alive – wounded and neighing atrociously beneath the bridge. The first cyclist crossed it, carrying his bike – putting the beast out of its misery on the way over – before the two men in their coloured jerseys pedalled away at surprising speed, disappearing up the hill on the other side of the lake.
By the time I got down to the water’s edge nothing moved. There was silence again. The light still fell in magic beams through the high canopy of leaves above and there were calm blue visions in the long distance once more. But the carnage in front of me spoiled the view: some terrible fault had occurred in nature, as if a volcano had erupted from the earth a minute before. Horses and bodies lay half-in, half-out of the water. One man’s head lolled in the mud like a piece of broken statuary, the eyes gazing up appalled; the bleeding hindquarters of an animal dripped over the parapet. And there was a sickly warmth now in the little valley and an acrid smell – of flesh crushed, bleeding in the heat, singed by fire. I couldn’t stomach it. I turned and bicycled furiously up the hill – making for the centre of the forest where the trees soon hid me and the flocks of bluebells waved me on, ever deeper into the bronzed woods.