Chapter 17: An Icelandic Poet
Marcia looked at William in frank disbelief. “What?” she asked. “Could you tell me again what you’ve just told me?”
Marcia, who was William’s old friend, former flatmate – for a very brief time – and general confidante, had called in at Corduroy Mansions the same day he had received the visit from Angelica. Marcia was a caterer, and she owned a small company that specialised in cooking for events. In the days when boardroom lunches were more common she had concentrated on those, but now, with companies being encouraged to be slender in every sense, she had been obliged to diversify. Catering for weddings and funerals was now the staple of her business but she had also developed a profitable line in providing canapés for diplomatic cocktail parties and political receptions.
That day she had been prepared a small finger-lunch for the Icelandic ambassador in honour of a visiting Icelandic poet, Sigurlin Valdis Antonsdóttir. The ambassador’s assistant had asked for several varieties of northern fish to feature on the menu, to mark the fact that the guest of honour was the author of Cold Waves, a highly regarded saga of migrating cod, which had won Iceland’s premier literary prize and had recently been translated into Finnish. Marcia had risen to the challenge and had served herring rolls, cod roe, and a great deal of smoked salmon. Some of it had been left uneaten and was not wanted by the embassy, so Marcia dropped round to deliver it to William. He always welcomed the surplus snacks that Marcia brought him, and indeed had once remarked that he could live almost entirely off the scraps from her table. This pleased Marcia. She had been brought up by her very domesticated mother to believe that of all the satisfactions open to women, feeding men was ultimately the most profound. She knew that this was, quite simply, wrong, but the beliefs instilled in childhood and youth are hard to dislodge, and Marcia had eventually stopped fighting the convictions that lay deep within her.
“I know I’m pathetic,” she once said to a friend. “I know that I should be all independent and self-sufficient and so on, but that’s just not me. I want to feed men. I just love putting large plates of food in front of them. I love it.” She paused. “Does that mean there’s something wrong with me?”
Her friend looked at her pityingly. “Yes,” she said. “It makes you inauthentic, Marcia.”
Marcia winced. “Does it really?”
The friend nodded. “Yes, it does. You have to live for yourself, you know. You have to do things that fulfil you, not others. Women are not there to look after men.”
Marcia thought about this. “But who’ll look after them if we don’t?” she asked.
Her friend rolled her eyes. “Marcia, dear …”
Marcia tried another approach. “But what if you’re fulfilled by doing things for other people? Why can’t I feel fulfilled by making food for other people …” She corrected herself. It was not feeding other people that gave her pleasure, it was the feeding of men. “Making food for men, that is.”
The friend’s frustration showed itself. “That’s really sad,” she said. “It’s sad because you don’t know that you’re being used by a system – the old, deep-rooted system of male domination. Of course men want us to feed them. Who wouldn’t?” She looked at Marcia, as if to challenge her to contradict this. But Marcia just listened, and so the friend continued, “Most men, you see, don’t grow up; they’re fed by their mothers when they’re little boys and they realise how satisfactory that is. And being fed by somebody else is really very comfortable. So they manipulate women into carrying on doing it for the rest of their lives.”
“But if women want …”
“No, Marcia, that’s not going to work. Women think they want to make food for men, but that’s false consciousness. You know what that is? No? Well, I’ll explain it to you some other time. The point is that women are made to think that they like doing things, but they don’t really. They want to do their own things, things for themselves.”
The conversation had ended at that point, and Marcia had gone about her business, which was feeding people. Her friend might have been right but she felt that there was not much that she could do about the state of inauthenticity that her friend had diagnosed. And now that she came to think of it, perhaps it was quite pleasant to be inauthentic, and if one was happy in one’s inauthenticity, why should one try to change it? It was an interesting question, but there were canapés to be prepared and that was a more immediate task than the rectification of false consciousness.
Now, as she removed the cover from a dish of rolled herring, she felt a warm glow of satisfaction at William’s obvious pleasure.
“My absolute favourite!” he exclaimed, picking up one of the strips of herring on its cocktail-stick skewer.
Marcia smiled. “Well, I’m glad. The Icelandic poet turned up her nose at these. And yet her poems are all about cod and herring, apparently.”
“Perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to eat the subject of her poems,” suggested William, reaching for another. “Poor woman. It would be like Wordsworth eating daffodils. One just can’t.”
William went on to tell Marcia about Angelica’s visit and the assignation that he had the next day. Marcia put down the plate of herring and listened intently.
“This is ridiculous,” she said, when he had described the incredible conversation for the second time. “I take it you won’t be going.”
William shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, I am going.”
Marcia stared at him incredulously. “But this is a lot of nonsense, William. You can’t get involved in these ridiculous schoolboy games. Get a grip, for heaven’s sake!’
William looked away. He did not like Marcia telling him what to do, and he felt that this really was none of her business. But she was a difficult person to argue with and he had to admit that it was a rather absurd situation.
“But I told them I’d come,” he said. “They’re expecting me.”
“Then stand them up,” she retorted.
He looked at her reproachfully. Marcia might have been a friend but there were times when he realised that there lay between them a gulf of difference in attitudes to things both large and small. One of these was their attitude to obligation: if William said that he was going to do something, he did it. Marcia, although not unreliable, was more flexible. That was the difference between them.
Marcia stared back at William. She knew what he was thinking, which would be something to do with doing what one said one was going to do; she could read him so very easily.
“Don’t go, William,” she said quietly. “You’re going to regret it if you do.”
Chapter 18: Freddie de la Hay Goes to the Park
Marcia had put it bluntly. “Listen William,” she said, “You haven’t crossed the … the Nile yet.”
“Rubicon, Marcia,” corrected William. “One crosses the Rubicon.” He paused. “And then, if one is really into mixing metaphors, one burns one’s boats.”
“Rubicon, Nile – whatever,” said Marcia breezily. “The point is you’ve crossed nothing yet. So you can still get out of this. Don’t go. Just don’t go.”
But he had ignored her advice, and found himself taking a delicious, almost perverse pleasure in doing so. The problem with Marcia, he thought, is that she thinks she’s my mother. For some men, of course, that would be a positive recommendation, the many men whose deepest ambition is to find their mother in another woman; but for William exactly the opposite was true. His mother had sought to run his life for him, and he had engaged wholeheartedly in both a conscious and subconscious cutting of apron strings. So any suggestions from Marcia were viewed through the very strong anti-maternal filter developed over time. This filter had led William to become a wine merchant precisely because his mother had been a teetotaller; it had prompted him to apply – unsuccessfully – to the University of Cambridge because his mother had set her heart on his going to Oxford; and it had resulted in his living in Pimlico because his mother had once expressed an antipathy for t
hat part of London.
The trip from which Marcia sought to dissuade him was hardly a dangerous one. William was no Mungo Park, setting off into uncharted regions of the upper Senegal Basin; Mungo Parks’s mother, he imagined, was probably dead-set against her son wandering off to Africa like that, as, no doubt, was Mrs Livingstone. But if they had advised their sons not to go, then they had been ignored. And likewise William would take no notice of Marcia’s advice, even though he was only proposing to take a taxi to Birdcage Walk, stroll across the road into St James’s Park, and then along a footpath in the direction of the Mall. At the point where the path skirted the ornamental lake, he was told, he would come across a bench facing a copper beech tree, and that was where he was to sit until he was approached.
He left the flat with Freddie de la Hay half an hour before he was due to be in the park. As always, Freddie was delighted at the prospect of a walk and sniffed the air appreciatively as they set off from Corduroy Mansions.
“They were very insistent that you should come along, Freddie,” William explained. “That’s why you’re here.”
Freddie de la Hay glanced up at his owner. He was aware of the fact that a remark had been addressed to him, but of course he had no idea what it was. He was a well-mannered dog, though, and he wagged his tail in that friendly way dogs have of encouraging their owners. Freddie de la Hay valued William highly, not simply because he was his master, but because he was what the Americans refer to as a pre-owned dog, and as such he had a distant memory of somebody else who had not been as kind as William; who had made him eat carrots and use a seatbelt when he travelled in the car; who had forbidden him to chase cats and squirrels, lecturing him sharply if he set off in the pursuit of either. It had been a world of unfreedom, a world from which all joy and canine exuberance had been excluded, and he did not want to return to that dark and cold place. William was to be valued for that – for rescuing him from bondage, from durance vile.
They caught a taxi in Ebury Street. The traffic was light, and in just a few minutes William and Freddie completed the short journey to Birdcage Walk. As they alighted from the taxi, Freddie sniffed again, raising his muzzle and taking in the air, which to a dog’s sensitive nose was very different from the air in Pimlico. He gave a low growl of anticipation; he could already smell the squirrels and, rich and tantalising, the lingering scent of an urban fox. Deep inside him, the dog’s heart leaped with joy; it was only St James’s Park, but Freddie might have had the whole Serengeti at his feet, or the rolling fields of the Quorn, so great was his sense of anticipation.
William looked about him. It was mid-morning on a Saturday, and such people as were out and about in the street were in casual attire, rather than in the uniform of the civil servants who abounded in those parts during the week. A small group of visitors sporting rucksacks emblazoned with the Australian flag passed him on the pavement. One of them bent down to pat Freddie on the back.
“Nice dog, mate.”
William smiled “Yes, he is. Thank you.”
“What’s his name?”
“Freddie de …” William stopped himself in time. He had been about to give Freddie’s full name, but he realised how odd it would sound, particularly to an Australian. The Australians were always – mistakenly – accusing the English of stuffiness, and he could just imagine the reaction that the name Freddie de la Hay would provoke when the story was told back home.
“Even the dogs in London have got surnames,” the traveller would report. “We met one with an incredibly posh moniker. Freddie de la Hay. Would you believe it? No, I swear we did. We really did.”
“Good on yer, Freddie,” said the visitor, and moved on.
They made their way into the park itself. William was experiencing a curious sense of anticipation – not an unpleasant sensation – but mixed with foreboding. He had not felt like that for a long time, and now he tried to remember what it reminded him of. It was elusive. It had been something like this before he sat examinations at school, but on reflection he decided that it was different. And he had felt like this when, as a boy of sixteen, he had been taken up in a glider by a friend of his father’s; it had seemed such a flimsy machine, spun gossamer in the currents of air, and he had closed his eyes in sheer terror. Now he felt a bit like that, but again the sensation was a bit different; it was more a state of astonishment that he, William French, wine dealer and quinquagenarian (just), should be doing something quite as foolhardy as this.
Chapter 19: Pericolo di Morte
He found the bench without any trouble. It had not occurred to him that anybody might be sitting on it already, and for a few moments he wondered whether she could be his contact, the woman sitting at the far end, dispensing breadcrumbs to a small flock of pigeons on the ground before her. His eye moved from the woman to the pigeons; they had a dishevelled air to them and he began to look at them, and the woman, with disapproval. These pigeons had become dependent; they were the unintended casualties of the kindness of the woman.
William found himself wanting to warn her of the consequences of her misplaced generosity. “They’ll lose the ability to fend for themselves,” he might say. “They could even forget how to fly.” But he stopped himself; it was none of his business, and it made him sound like some curmudgeonly opponent of welfare schemes, which he was not. And yet these birds were obviously lazy – and opportunistic too, in their greedy devouring of this woman’s largesse. What bird, though, would not take advantage of free food? And what bird actually seeks out a life of hard work? The half-remembered line came back to him: Consider the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns . . .
The birds had been settling into an untroubled feast but they were soon rudely dispersed by Freddie de la Hay. Freddie, who had been gazing at tree trunks in the hope of seeing a squirrel, suddenly noticed the pigeons and uttered a challenging bark. The birds took to the wing in a flutter and squawk, surprising their benefactress, who clasped one hand to her hat and the other to the bag of breadcrumbs. She glowered first at Freddie de la Hay and then at William, before rising to her feet and moving off. That at least solves that, thought William, as he took her place on the bench; she is definitely not MI6.
Ensconced on the bench, William spread himself in a way calculated to discourage any other passerby or feeder of pigeons to join him. He had brought with him a copy of a newspaper, and he now opened it and began to read, while Freddie, rapidly reconciled to the conclusion that this would not be an overly energetic walk, sat down at William’s feet to await developments.
Twenty minutes passed, and William began to regret arriving so early. Not only was it rather boring sitting on the bench with nobody to talk to, but he decided that it was also rather embarrassing. As people walked past him – and the park was by no means empty – they glanced at him, sometimes with looks that struck him as being almost pitying. And then there were others whose glances seemed more enquiring, and these disturbed him. Was this bench a meeting point for people who came to the park for … surely not; surely not in St James’s Park, so close to the centre of government and Churchill’s war rooms and all the rest of it. And yet he had read those odd, salacious reports in the newspapers of goings-on in the royal parks. If one wanted to meet a guardsman, for example, to discuss defence policy or whatever, presumably one came and sat about on benches exactly like this. Or did one lurk in bushes and go “psst” when likely-looking persons walked past? William was not naive, but there were certain parts of the city’s life, perhaps, of which he might be innocent.
And then something happened. William was looking at his watch and wondering whether to call the whole thing off when he became aware that a man was approaching the bench. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the man, who was somewhere in his forties, was wearing a lightweight grey suit and had a newspaper tucked under his arm. The man drew near and then, without hesitation, sat down. The newspaper was unfolded and he began to read.
William glanced at the
paper. So that’s what they read, he thought.
“Bad business,” muttered the man.
William half turned to face his companion.
“No,” whispered the man. “Just look straight ahead.”
William stared at the surface of the lake. A duck, sitting on the bank, decided to launch itself with a little plop.
“Yes, it’s a very bad business,” the newcomer continued.
“What is?” asked William, out of the corner of his mouth.
“This business with the politician,” said the man. “Frightful.”
William said nothing. The situation, he thought, was becoming increasingly ridiculous.
“My name’s Sebastian, by the way,” said the man, turning a page of the newspaper. “Sebastian …” He paused, lowering the newspaper and looking out over the lake. “Sebastian Duck.”
“I see,” said William.
“And I take it that this is Freddie de la Hay?”
William nodded.
“Good,” said Sebastian, folding up his paper. “Now, let’s go for a walk. Normal pace. Not too fast. As if we’re enjoying the sunshine. All right?”
They set off, with Freddie trotting contentedly beside William.
“Angelica says that you’ve accepted our offer,” said Sebastian. “C’s very grateful.”
William frowned. “C?”
“Yes, C himself. He had a word with the head of section, and they’ve both very pleased that you’re on board. C hopes to meet you quite soon, and wonders whether you could meet him for lunch in the Garrick some day. But he’s off to Singapore in a day or two and has rather a hectic month ahead of him.”
“He must be pretty busy,” said William.
Sebastian nodded. “We’re understaffed. Everybody thought that the end of the Cold War would mean considerable reductions in our workload. Hah! For a year or two, maybe, and lots of chaps took early retirement. Then lo and behold, the other side merely changes its colours and a lot of extremists of one sort or another pop up under our noses. So it’s business as usual, and when we take a roll call we discover we’re three hundred people short.”
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