by D. J. Taylor
All this, Ramsay knows, needs careful consideration. It is necessary, above all, to let Krastner know with whom he is dealing.
‘There is a great desire for peace in our country,’ he says. ‘The King wants it. Most of the people want it. The army wants it. Our aim is to open a channel by which it may be brought about.’
‘And what would bring it about? After all,’ Krastner deposes, ‘it was you who began this war.’
‘So it was,’ Ramsay defers. He does not quite like the way the conversation is going. ‘As to what might lead to a cessation of hostilities, we suggest a peace conference, in neutral territory, without preconditions.’
It is impossible to tell what Krastner thinks of this. His face is quite impassive. ‘You know as well as I do, Captain Ramsay, that the Führer would not agree to any ceding of territory,’ he says. ‘Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, or anywhere else.’
‘No one is asking anyone to return any territory,’ Ramsay says. ‘What is needed is some evidence of willingness to negotiate. A guarantee of the liberties of non-German speakers in the annexed territories, perhaps.’
‘Do you have Lord Halifax’s authority to make this proposal?’
That word again. Ramsay stares at the sea, which is losing its tints as the light fades and turning as grey as the sky above it. ‘No, but I can convey it to Lord Halifax should it be acceptable.’
‘I could convey it to my father in six hours’ time, I daresay,’ Amery says, who has been trying desperately to intrude himself into the conversation. Krastner ignores him. He is not interested in Amery.
‘What if I was to tell you that such a proposal was made to Lord Halifax—and rejected by him—months ago? What then would you say?’
‘I should say that we had the means of exerting pressure on him, which he would find difficult to resist. That we have at our disposal a sufficient body of opinion to make him realise that he can no longer ignore us.’
‘And what can a body of opinion, as you call it, do, Captain Ramsay? Can it replace a Prime Minister? Can it make an army lay down its arms?’
The great difficulty in life, Ramsay thinks, is understanding what people want, of fathoming their motives. This process is made yet more complicated when those involved do not know themselves. The people who come to his constituency surgeries—small businessmen, municipal officers, the decently downtrodden poor—are quite thoroughly confused, sure that some hurt has been done to them, uncertain as to what redress is due. What does Krastner want? Does he believe—as Captain Ramsay fervently believes—that there are greater dangers to the security of Europe than Nazi troops in Warsaw, that the real enemy lies to the east? Or is all this talk of peace conferences and Lord Halifax simple disingenuousness?
‘The situation in the armed forces is very volatile,’ he says. ‘There is no doubt pressure can be brought to bear.’ Again he wonders what Krastner wants. A detachment of the Household Cavalry marching on Downing Street? A hail of bullets in Whitehall? Neither of these things is in the least likely to happen, for this is England, where politics are done differently. He catches sight of Amery’s eye and notes that he is greener about the gills than ever, gasping for breath like a trout hauled out on the river bank.
The wind has dropped a little now. Krastner’s companions have drawn back a step. They are only stooges, Ramsay sees, bit-part players there to swell a scene. Amery is making little pawing movements with one of his feet against the sand. As for what Amery wants, Ramsay has not the slightest idea. The taxi waits a hundred yards away.
‘The situation is very volatile everywhere,’ Krastner says. He looks bored. Perhaps this posting to Dublin is the graveyard of his career. ‘Very well, then. You may tell Lord Halifax that I shall refer the proposal for a peace conference to …’—there is a pause—‘… the relevant authorities, and that he is at liberty to make suggestions for the …’—again there is a pause—‘… administration of occupied territories.’
It is at this precise moment that Amery starts to make a series of honking noises and is then dramatically sick onto the ochre sand. The vomit is strangely coloured: like the pink juices that run out of a chicken when it is not quite cooked. On the other hand, there is a great deal of it. Krastner dances nimbly back from this detonation, but not before one or two splashes of vomit have flecked his shiny black boots.
‘You had better get him away from here,’ he says, not unamused by this. ‘I should say that he has been drinking.’
‘I assure you, sir,’ Amery says between gulps, ‘that not a drop of alcohol has passed my lips.’ He is practically doubled up on the sand. Dr Clavane dabs ineffectually at him with a handkerchief. He looks more than ever like Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove. ‘These gentlemen will vouch for me.’
There is something horribly unconvincing about this. Ramsay would like to say something about Russia and the Red Menace and the alliances that lie before them, but he knows that he cannot, not while Amery, the Cabinet Minister’s son, is still disgorging the contents of his stomach over the sand at his feet.
There is a round of hand-shaking. Amery, still crouched on the beach with one fist pressed into his midriff, manages to raise the other to the level of his head. This gesture is ignored.
‘If you or anyone else wishes to telephone me at the Embassy,’ Krastner says, ‘the code is Austerlitz.’
Austerlitz. Waterloo. Balaclava. The names of the great battles of Europe resound in Ramsay’s head. He himself fought, and was badly wounded, in Flanders. There will be no more great battles if he can help it, he thinks.
The Embassy car is revving up. Krastner makes a small, faintly supercilious gesture with his hand, like a schoolmaster indicating that the interview is over. Together, Ramsay and Clavane assist Amery to the taxi. The displaced sand runs over the tips of their shoes.
‘A sensible sort of idea,’ Clavane says. He is still lost in some dream of a reconstituted Carolingian Europe.
Ramsay shrugs his shoulders. He has a lurking feeling that he has wasted his time, that German hordes are massing beyond the Maginot Line and no one can stop them.
Amery gives one final, despairing groan, emits what looks like a squirt of seawater, and falls into his seat. There is sand all over the taxi floor.
Outside there are gulls screaming beyond the breakers. The wind lifts.
Chapter 20
A Change of Climate
They were drinking coffee in Hegarty’s room again, down at the end of the B.1 corridor. The patch of grass on which in summer the astonishingly pretty girls sometimes came and ate their lunchtime sandwiches was white with frost, and half a dozen rooks were grimly disputing a sausage roll that someone had dropped out of an upstairs window.
‘I shall never understand women as long as I live,’ Hegarty said bitterly. There was a fervour about his voice that gave even his most hackneyed utterances a desperate conviction. He managed to make it sound as if there was something remarkable and unprecedented about this failure, that questions ought to be asked in the House about it.
‘What has one of them been doing to you now?’
‘It’s that Nancy Oglethorpe,’ Hegarty said. It was one of those afternoons when his nerves were giving him trouble, and his head shook slightly as he spoke. ‘You remember I told you about our little liaison?’ Hegarty had a number of phrases for the sexual act. They included ‘intimate connection’ and ‘horizontal Charleston.’ ‘Well, yesterday morning when I got in I went and left a gardenia that someone had given me the night before at that club Lydia and I go to on her desk. It was perfectly fresh. I’d kept it in water. And then, when I went back half an hour later, there was still no sign of her but the gardenia had been thrown in the waste-paper basket.’
There was something tragic about Hegarty as he said this. The thought of him crouched over the waste-paper basket, perhaps even placing the fragments of the gardenia in the
palm of his hand, was painful to contemplate. Despite this setback he looked better than usual, Johnson thought. The pouches under his eyes were less dark than before. Though weighed down by his usual assortment of paraphernalia—two newspapers, a large buff envelope, a paperback book entitled Aryan Destiny—he seemed poised, intent, ready to spring.
‘Never mind Miss Oglethorpe. How are you getting on with—what’s his name—Rodney?’
‘I’m going down there directly for a good long session,’ Hegarty said. ‘Which reminds me. Shillito asked me to give you this. He thought you ought to see it.’
Shillito was one of the section heads, at the same level of seniority as Davenport, but thought to be more au fait with the actual workings of the department.
Johnson put the buff envelope under his arm and got up from his chair. The rooks had finished off the sausage roll and were skidding over the icy grass. ‘Is there anything I ought to know about it in advance?’
‘It’s all perfectly self-explanatory,’ Hegarty said. He was not interested in the buff envelope. ‘Well, wish me luck with Master Rodney. From what we saw of him when we brought him in, I’d say he looked stroppy but pliable.’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
After he had gone, Johnson went back along the corridor to his own room, disposed of a box of training manuals that someone had left on the carpet outside it, and sat down behind his desk. There was a memorandum on it from Davenport about defective grammar in official documents and a surveillance report listing the names of several people who had attended a meeting of the Handmaidens of Albion two nights ago at an address in Ealing. The topmost name on the list was Miss Alicia Frencham.
Johnson shook his head. Miss Frencham, he knew, was sailing into dark waters. One day soon she would come home to her house in Powis Square, with its brown sherry in cut-glass decanters and her father sitting in his study over a copy of the Naval Intelligence Review, and find a policeman with a search warrant on the doorstep. That was what would happen to Miss Frencham.
He wondered how she would get on in Holloway, or wherever it was they sent them, and decided she would thrive. Upper-class girls usually liked the boarding-school atmosphere of a women’s prison and appreciated the discipline. It was the rectors’ daughters who were made miserable.
The buff envelope contained a carbon copy of a four-page typewritten report on the King’s Party. There was no indication of who had written it, or who might previously have seen it. This anonymity appealed to Johnson. The thought that he was reading something newly minted, without obvious origins, fatherless, wholly detached from the systems of administrative life, was a solace. He had just finished the second read-through when there was a knock at the door and Hegarty stepped into the room. He was grinning broadly.
‘How did you get on with Rodney?’
‘Rodney?’ Hegarty said, as if none of the people he had dealings with could possibly be called by that name. ‘He seems harmless enough. In fact, there was a point where I felt positively sorry for him.’
‘And when was that reached?’
‘Apparently he’s in a mess back home in Skelmersdale or wherever it is he comes from. Got some girl in trouble and the devil to pay. Of course, I was able to advise him about that.’
‘I’m sure you were. What else did he have to say? It can’t all have been about sexual irregularity in Lancashire.’
‘No more it was. Well, he owned up to working for Kent straightaway.’
‘He could hardly have denied it. We’ve got sworn statements from the people who owned that shop he worked in that Kent had called there.’
‘Naturally, his line is that he simply ran errands. Kent would ask him to take a parcel to the House, or from the House to his flat, and he’d oblige. As for what was in the parcel, it could have been last week’s laundry for all Master Rodney cared.’
‘I’m sure it could. But what about the other business? What about Burdett in Jermyn Street?’
‘Actually we didn’t get that far,’ Hegarty said. ‘Things were just getting interesting when I got called out by a message from Shillito. He wants to see the pair of us instanter.’
‘What’s it got to do with Shillito? I thought he was working on illegal aliens. All those nice Italian waiters who’re supposed to be sabotaging the water supply on their evenings off and leaving tin tacks on the tram lines.’
‘Change of climate,’ Hegarty said. ‘Shillito’s our man now. No one’s seen Davenport for a couple of days. In any event, he’s off the case altogether.’
‘What happened?’
‘There was the most corking row. Apparently it went as far as the Home Secretary. But it was thought that Davenport’s enthusiasm for the work before him was not all that it might have been.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Shillito did. When he gave me that dossier, which I have reason to believe he drew up in his own fair hand.’
In the bleak glare of the electric light, Hegarty looked oddly animated, over-stimulated, wound up, like a music-hall comedian, summoned on stage by his quieter accomplice, who might suddenly stand on his head or start doing the splits. There was nothing particularly unusual in the piece of information he had just conveyed. Changes of climate happened all the time: complex games of musical chairs, sometimes involving as many as a dozen people, played at bewildering speed, so that the documents that authenticated them lagged some way in the rear, allowing for the perpetration of quite serious administrative gaffes.
‘We’d better go and see him now,’ Hegarty said. ‘He can be very nasty when he isn’t properly attended to. He hates Davenport like poison, you know. I think he was once overheard calling him a fifth columnist.’
Slowly, and thoroughly alert to the discussions that were going on in the offices that they passed—you could quite often pick up valuable information in this way—they set off along the corridor and up the steps that led to the third floor. Here someone had dropped a banana skin and a photograph of Veronica Lake. Hegarty stared at the photograph crossly. He was in the mood—a comparatively rare one—where women meant nothing to him, might even be considered a snare especially designed to prevent men carrying out their duty.
Shillito’s office was on the left-hand side of the third floor. Passing Davenport’s office en route, they noticed that it had been cleared of everything bar a couple of packing cases. Seeing this, Hegarty’s look of quiet resolve grew even more fixed. ‘You can’t imagine how I loathed that fat slug,’ he said.
They found Shillito in his room, reading a sheaf of telegrams that had just come in. It was impossible to look at Shillito without thinking of the manatees in the Regent’s Park Zoo. He was a fattish, middle-aged man, already gone to seed, with a high, bulbous face and wide, blunt teeth, who could easily have been imagined browsing among the vegetable matter of some tropical ocean. But this appearance was deceptive. In fact, Shillito could be crosser than Davenport. Worse, in any argument that arose he had the advantage of being thoroughly conversant with the work that everyone did. Just now he seemed friendly.
‘You may be wondering what has happened to Colonel Davenport,’ he said. ‘It’s not something I can reasonably discuss. You can draw your own conclusions. But everything you were working on under him has top priority. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly, sir,’ Hegarty said, with no irony at all.
There were one or two files which they recognised as having belonged to Davenport open on Shillito’s desk, much decorated with red ink. Shillito said: ‘I must say from the outset that I’m not at all interested in the philosophy of all this. As far as I’m concerned, we’re at war with a hostile power. Until I’m officially informed that we’re not at war, then anyone operating independently of His Majesty’s Government to bring that war to a close is a subversive and should be treated as such.’
‘Even members of the House of Commons, sir?’
Hegarty asked, with what for him was extreme politeness.
‘Especially them. Although I’ll allow there are problems in that department. As matters stand, we cannot detain Ramsay or that Bannister fellow. Don’t ask me why, but we can’t. On the other hand, we have a duty to accumulate as much evidence as we can in the event of a situation arising when it might be possible to detain them. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘What situation would that be exactly, sir?’
‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm in spelling it out. As far as I can deduce from the things Ramsay says in the House and the reports that come back from meetings, he believes that Germany doesn’t want to fight and has been pushed into a corner by the inflexibility of the Allied powers. If it suddenly turns out that Germany is serious about marching into France, then Ramsay’s case disappears. We won’t be fighting a war to defend the Jews. We’ll be fighting a war to defend the Channel. Now, what have you got on this fellow you picked up in Maida Vale?’
‘We know he’s been running errands for Kent and Ramsay, sir. Sometimes between the House and Kent’s flat. Sometimes to the Embassy. Anthea Carey was keeping him under surveillance. We know the errands involved Ramsay’s membership book, and that it went to the Embassy every so often on grounds of diplomatic immunity. We believe it’s there now.’
Shillito looked more than ever like some great cetacean intent on getting its lunch. He was once supposed to have played rugby for the London Irish, but no trace of this accomplishment survived. He gave a little shake of his hand at the file in front of him.
‘It’s not at the Embassy. If it were, we should have very good grounds for going in there and getting it, diplomatic immunity or no diplomatic immunity. To the best of my knowledge it’s at Bannister’s house in Sussex.’
‘Couldn’t we just go down and get it then, sir?’
‘We should have to get a search warrant. And I very much doubt whether we could. In any case, I don’t think it will be necessary. We’ve another iron in the fire. I know Miss Carey has already been doing sterling work on this project …’